In the actual language-games where we talk about improving inquiry, “improve” is tied to things like learning, avoiding mistakes, tracking error, increasing reliability, making progress, even if the metric shifts from case to case. If someone uses improve while also insisting that nothing could ever count as settling, correcting, or learning anything, then the word is no longer doing the work it normally does — Sam26

Wittgenstein contrasts situations where words are
doing something with those where language goes on holiday, sits idle, like when we look to consult prior criteria to explain the meaning of current word use. You want to contrast situations where words work normally with those where they no longer do the work they ‘normally do’. Wittgenstein would respond that normativity doesn’t function by reference to any prior categories but is re-established creatively in each use.

We can’t appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, and if there were they wouldnt thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. Wittgenstein’s paradoxes about rule following block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances.

Wittgenstein’s contrast between words “doing work” and language “going on holiday” isn’t a contrast between normal uses that conform to prior norms and abnormal uses that violate them. It’s a contrast between use that is embedded in an ongoing practice and use that has been detached from any practical bearings and is now being propped up by abstract criteria. The holiday begins when we stop looking at what people are actually doing with words and start asking what must be in place, in general, for those words to count as meaningful.

That’s why Wittgenstein is so suspicious of appeals to prior criteria. When we try to explain the meaning of a present utterance by consulting a pre-existing standard, like “what ‘improve’ really requires,” “what doubt must presuppose,” “what inquiry needs in order to count as inquiry”, we are no longer describing use; we are trying to ground it. And for Wittgenstein, that grounding move is exactly what causes language to lose its grip.

You want to distinguish situations where words do the work they “normally do” from situations where they no longer do that work. But Wittgenstein would ask: normally by reference to what? If “normal use” is fixed by a prior role that the word must continue to play, such as tracking error, preserving right/wrong, or settling questions, then normativity has already been relocated from practice to an abstract template. The grammar has been reified.

For Wittgenstein, normativity is not preserved by fidelity to an inherited function; it’s re-established in each concrete use. A word works when it finds its place in an activity, when it guides what comes next, when it makes sense of responses, corrections, expectations here. When it stops doing that, we don’t discover that it has violated its essence; we notice that it no longer connects to anything fresh that we are in the midst of enacting.

Language goes on holiday not because it fails to meet the standards it “normally” must meet, but because we are asking it to do something without knowing what would count as success or failure in this fresh, actual case. The holiday consists in treating meaning as something backed by criteria rather than something enacted in use.

Outside of situations where language goes on holiday, we always already find ourselves in situations where our language is characterized by being immersed in normative
usefulness. We don’t have worry about having to do anything special in order to gain purchase of normative meaning. For Wittgenstein, outside of the special, strained cases where language “goes on holiday,” we do not first confront a neutral field of sounds and then somehow add normativity to them. We always already find ourselves inside practices where words are at work, where they guide action, invite correction, elicit agreement or disagreement, and make sense without any special philosophical underwriting. Normative usefulness is not something we have to secure; it is the background against which speaking at all is possible.

Your worry is ‘what if justification, as traditionally understood, leaves out something essential, namely, the practical grasp of standards that makes justification possible at all?’ And your proposed remedy is: make that implicit understanding explicit, so that our epistemology rests on firmer ground. But for Wittgenstein, this is exactly the kind of move that creates philosophical problems rather than resolving them.

The reason is that nothing is missing. There is no gap between justification and the practical grasp of standards that needs to be filled, named, or strengthened. That grasp is not an ingredient inside justification; it is the background condition of our being able to speak of justification at all. Trying to “add” it, even under the banner of explication rather than supplementation, reintroduces the picture that something was absent or unsecured.

I’m not saying, “it never makes sense to ask whether our practices can improve.” I’m saying: improvement talk is meaningful when it still leaves room for correction. But when the improvement proposal is really “nothing can ever settle anything,” then it’s not meaningful, it’s self-defeating. — Sam26

But is this comparable to saying “improvement talk is meaningful when we notice how the word is actually being used in a current context. A word loses its meaning when we move from noticing its use to nailing down its definition as ‘correction’ or ‘self-defeating’”?
From Wittgenstein’s vantage, improvement talk is meaningful when we can see how the word “improve” is actually doing work in a particular practice. That work might involve correction, but it need not be defined in advance as correction. Sometimes “improvement” means greater reliability, sometimes greater elegance, sometimes broader applicability, sometimes simply “this now goes on more smoothly.” What makes it meaningful is not that it satisfies a condition like “leaves room for correction,” but that we can recognize the role it plays in what people are actually doing.

The problem with defining improvement as correction and “nothing can ever settle anything,” as self-defeating is that nailing down the meaning of a word by offering a general criterion for its legitimate use isnt ‘wrong’ or self-defeating. Rather, it freezes a flexible, practice-bound grammar into an empty phrase drained of connection to actual use . It’s like repeating the same word over and over again. until it loses its original context-based sense.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place — Sam26

I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions — Esse Quam Videri

I'd love to hear from Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice — J

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage.

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside. — Wayfarer

Yes, what is structurally necessary can only be revealed
though acts, because this ground is itself the temporality of action. It is what returns to itself again and again identically through repetition; namely, the horizontal structure of time consciousness.

As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.) — Wayfarer

The specter of platonism isn’t vanquished simply by denying number the status of object. The question is whether mathematical truths are true independently of any constituting act whatsoever. The question isnt whether idealities are “independent of your or my mind”, its whether they are independent of intentionality as such. Husserl’s answer is no. They are an effect of the projective noetic gesture of intentional synthesis.

“The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

For Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory because forms are grounded in esse, ultimately in divine intellect. Participation presupposes a metaphysics of being in which intelligibility is ontologically prior to cognition, even if not objectified as a “thing.” Husserl, by contrast, explicitly suspends any such metaphysical grounding. His idealities are constituted within intentional life without appeal to being-as-such. One cannot simply slide from Husserl to Aquinas by appealing to “anti-reification” without confronting that Husserl rejects exactly the metaphysical realism Aquinas presupposes.

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. Intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality independently of those conditions.

Joshs Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive? — Tom Storm

I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:


Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.

↪Joshs Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism. — Tom Storm

I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.

Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.

So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostolgia). He can be quite a bitch — Tom Storm

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.

There is a post-critical position that preserves what is valuable in the classical tradition—the claim that intelligibility belongs to reality itself—without lapsing into naïve realism or reducing intelligibility to historically contingent sense-making practices.

So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:

What must reality be like for beings like us to be normatively bound by truth, necessity, and correctness at all?

Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments. — Esse Quam Videri

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position?

If Schelling , then the gap between Schelling and Hart should be mentioned. From a post-Kantian perspective, Schelling shows how intelligibility emerges from being’s own inner dynamics, rather than presupposing a fully luminous order guaranteed by divine intellect. He accepts the Kantian critique of dogmatism but tries to move through it, not around it. Hart, by contrast, largely refuses the transcendental demand altogether, treating it as a historical detour rather than a philosophical necessity.
For Hart, intelligibility is grounded theologically and metaphysically in actus purus: being is intelligible because it proceeds from divine intellect and goodness. Participation explains how finite minds can know truth, but the structure of intelligibility itself is already complete and perfect in God. Mediation occurs, but it occurs within a fully determinate metaphysical order.

Hart and Schelling both reject Kant’s subjectivization of intelligibility, but Schelling does so by internalizing critique into ontology, whereas Hart largely bypasses it by appeal to classical metaphysics. Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding.

The post-liberal politics of Victor Orban, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio draw from the classical metaphysical thinking of John Millbank and David Bentley Hart, which completely rejects Kantianism and all of the subsequent developments of philosophy which have flowed from it, including the phenomenological work of Bitbol and the Hegelian-Piagetian ideas of Vervaeke. If Kant was a correction of the limitations of Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes and Spinoza to Hume, the post liberalism of Hart turns its back on this whole era and retreats to pre-Enlightenment theological sources. If phenomenology opens up to the postmodern, Hart’s approach is decidedly pre-modern.

I am confident your thinking does not ally in any substantive way with this radically conservative turn. But I wonder if you have sympathies with the pre-Kantian mathematical neo platonism of figures like Michael Levin, Kastrup or Tegmark. I say this because you write:

science does not explain logical or mathematical necessity; it presupposes it. In securing its proofs and models, science relies on principles that stand to reason: inference, consistency, implication, and mathematical structure. Although science introduces new mathematical formalisms, these are not confirmed or disconfirmed empirically in the same sense as empirical claims. Yet they are among the constituents of scientific discovery. — Wayfarer

For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. On this view, the fact that mathematical principles are not empirically confirmed is not a weakness but a clue to their status: they are discovered, not invented, and they constrain reality precisely because they are reality’s form. Science presupposes logic and mathematics because logic and mathematics are more fundamental than empirical facts. They are part of the furniture of reality, not merely the rules of our engagement with it.

By contrast, Kantian and post-Kantian thinkers read the same situation in almost the opposite direction. Kant fully agrees that science cannot explain logical or mathematical necessity empirically, but he denies that this licenses Platonism. The reason science presupposes these necessities is that they arise from the conditions under which objects can be experienced at all. Mathematics and logic are not discovered features of a mind-independent realm; they are expressions of the a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding. Their necessity is transcendental, not ontological in the Platonist sense. They bind all possible experience because they are the rules by which experience is constituted.

On Kant’s view, mathematical formalisms are indeed constituents of scientific discovery, but not because nature is secretly mathematical in itself. Rather, nature as an object of possible science is necessarily mathematizable because our cognition imposes spatiotemporal and logical structure on whatever appears to us. Science presupposes mathematics because without those forms, there would be no objects, no laws, no empirical regularities to investigate in the first place.

Post-Kantian thinkers deepen and fracture this picture in different ways, but they retain the basic reversal of Platonism. Hegel internalizes necessity still further: logical and mathematical structures are not static abstract truths but moments in the self-unfolding of rationality itself. Scientific concepts presuppose logical necessity because they are expressions of reason coming to know itself in nature, not because they mirror an external mathematical realm. Neo-Kantians recast mathematics as a regulative framework internal to scientific practice.

For Bitbol, mathematics and logic are indispensable not because they are universally binding in all possible worlds, but because abandoning them would amount to abandoning the very project of sense-making we currently inhabit. Their necessity is pragmatic-transcendental rather than apodictic.

Husserl locates mathematical logic in acts of idealization, abstraction, and meaning-bestowal. Mathematical objects are neither empirical nor merely subjective; they are ideal objects, constituted through conscious acts but valid independently of any particular act once constituted.

Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts.

For Vervaeke, mathematics and formal logic emerge from ongoing processes of sense-making and relevance realization in embodied, situated agents. They are not grounded in pure intuition, transcendental structures, or ideal acts, but in adaptive cognitive dynamics that stabilize over time into normative constraints. Logic and mathematics are late achievements of a self-correcting ecology of practices aimed at reducing error, increasing coherence, and enhancing problem-solving power.

From this vantage, necessity is not metaphysical or transcendental but ecological and functional. Mathematical and logical norms bind us because they have proven indispensable for navigating complex problem spaces, not because they legislate the form of all possible experience. Vervaeke would say that Kant over-intellectualizes the origin of necessity: what really grounds it is the way certain patterns of inference and formalization reliably track affordances and constraints in the agent–world coupling. Mathematics is powerful because it sharpens relevance realization to an extreme degree, not because it reflects a priori forms of intuition.

Hart seems to argue that the problem with naturalism is that even if the universe produces conscious beings, it doesn’t explain why they can understand the world. Physical processes create neurons and behavior, but not meaning, truth, or reference. That our minds can grasp concepts and form true beliefs points, Hart argues, beyond mere material causes.

I was hoping someone could unpack this and elaborate. — Tom Storm

Hart is a metaphysical realist of a classical persuasion. That means that he thinks reality is objectively real, intrinsically intelligible, value-laden, purposive, and metaphysically grounded in God. Human reason isn’t a matter of trial and error representations we place over things, reason is formed by the world’s own intelligible structures acting directly on the mind. In other words, the mind is inclined naturally to grasp the truth of the world. This is a very different from Kant, who argued that categories of human reason are purely subjective in origin, not given to us directly by way by the truths of a divinely ordered purposeful world. Postmodernists
believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world.

Patterner’s approach is pre-Kantian but post-Hart. He allows for a direct apprehension of the real through empirical investigation, which ignores Kant’s argument that empirical causality is not a direct property of the world but is already built into our reasoning about the world as a subjective condition of possibility. But Patterner’s view also requires humans to figure out what is true about the world through total and error, which Hart believes is not necessary because we are naturally inclined to directly see such divine truths.

Plainly, Buddhism, like the Vedic tradition from which it broke away, is embedded in a very different conception of the nature of existence, than is the Judeo-Christian tradition. — Wayfarer

One can be ‘very different’ in a number of respects. One
can be so by arising independently of Western trajectories of thought, such that Westerners must access them by abandoning their own assumptions or evolving towards them. Or one can do so by being more ancient, such that it takes skilled investigation to recognize how forms of thought not unlike Buddhism and Hinduism hide deep within the foundations of judeo-christian traditions.

All of which is premised on the assumption that Buddhism cannot be what it describes itself to be, which is, a way to the total ending of suffering. Not amelioration or adjustment.
— Wayfarer
@Joshs What do you have to say to this?
Do you agree with Wayfarer's assessment of your stance? — baker

I am confident Buddhism is exactly what it takes itself to be, a way to end suffering. The issue for me is what framework of understanding it uses to define suffering and its alleviation. There are those who see suffering through a very different lens, such that ending it is not only not desirable but also an incoherent notion.

Yes and this is, as you probably know, one of Nietzsches main issues with a purely utilitarian view on morality. We need some adversity to be able to grow. The quest to reduce all suffering would ultimately also reduce what we can be as human beings — ChatteringMonkey

Not only that, it would eliminate pleasure itself.

“…the satisfaction of the will is not the cause of pleasure: I particularly want to combat this most superficial of theories. The absurd psychological counterfeiting of the nearest things . . . instead, that the will wants to move forwards, and again and again becomes master of what stands in its way: the feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the unsatisfaction of the will, in the way it is not yet satiated unless it has boundaries and resistances . . .

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . . .
(Nietzsche’s Last Notebooks)

So I'm skeptical it's even possible to "understand Buddhism better" without looking into the issue of (kamma and) rebirth, if this is something that one finds particularly stumbling. — baker

I’ve always thought that modern Western readers supplement ancient Eastern wisdom with ideas that are strictly modern, and in so doing are taking what I call a nostalgic position.

The nostalgic position asserts that some individual or culture in our distant past ‘got it right' by arriving at a way of understanding the nature of things that we drifted away from for many centuries and are just now coming back to. So the latest and most advanced philosophical thinking of the West today is just a belated return to what was already discovered long ago. I dont buy the nostalgic position. I think it is only when we interpret ancient thought in a superficial way that it appears their ideas were consonant with modern phenomenology and related approaches. Why are we so prone to misreading the ancients this way? I believe this comes from emphasizing only the aspect of their thought which appears familiar to we postmoderns (recursive becoming) and ignoring the crucial hidden dimension (a pre-Platonic , pre-Christian universalism).

Western philosophy after Hegel shifted its attention away from unchanging foundations and towards a discourse of evolution, revolution and becoming in which foundations become relative, contingent and impermanent. The primacy of the self-knowing ego and the purposefulness of the grasping will were put into question. Some of these philosophers took note of the fact that Buddhist scholars also talked about egolessness and non-willing.

But I want to argue that the most valuable consequence of the modern turn toward becoming was that it represented a further step in the evolution of Western thinking toward ways of understanding the world in terms of intricate relationships, harmonies, interconnections and correlations. This process necessarily had to start out with the belief in fixed objects and universal laws as a ground for seeing consistencies and stabilities in the world, before it could go on to deconstruct thes foundations. My contention is that ancient buddhist thought is not post-Western but pre-Western. The metaphysics behind Indra's web, the Tao Te Ching and related teachings as they were intended two thousand years ago are so profoundly alien to contemporary Western philosophical thinking that they run the risk of being mistaken as profoundly similar and compatible.

Whereas Postmodern views of change and becoming originate from a radically self-subverting groundless ground, Buddhist becoming rests on a cosmology of universalistic , sovereign normative grounds (what it is that unifies the infinite relational changes within Indra's web). Unlike Platonic and Christian metaphysics, this sovereign ground is not made explicit. The ancients were not able to articulate this ground in the universalistic language of a philosophy. But it authorizes and justifies conformist, repressive social ethics and political practices which have persisted for two millennia in Buddhist cultures. Postmodernism emerges from a self-undermining, groundless critique of Western metaphysics, whereas Buddhism often presupposes a cosmic order (e.g., karma, Dharma, Indra's net) that is anything but contingent. Many ancient philosophies, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedic thought, operate within a framework of normative cosmology: an ordered, purposeful universe with implicit or explicit ethical imperatives. This is starkly different from postmodernism's rejection of fixed foundations.

Buddhist metaphysics (e.g., dependent origination, Indra's net) was not a proto-deconstruction but a cosmological model of interdependence, often tied to hierarchical, tradition-bound societies. The ethical and political dimensions of Buddhism (e.g., monastic conformity, merit-based hierarchies) reflect this embedded universalism, which contrasts sharply with postmodernism's anti-foundationalism. The Taoist wu-wei or Buddhist anatta (no-self) are not mere parallels to postmodern fluidity but are situated within teleological or soteriological frameworks that postmodernism explicitly rejects. Buddhist societies, like all traditional cultures, have often enforced conformity, hierarchy, and static social orders, precisely because their metaphysics assumes a normative cosmic blueprint. This is a far cry from the emancipatory aims of much postmodern thought, even if both might critique the "ego" or "fixed identity.

If there are affinities with pragmatism or with later analytic work on normativity and practice, I’m happy to acknowledge them. But I’m not trying to force Wittgenstein into Hegelian inferentialism. I’m using later Wittgenstein to keep JTB anchored in how our practices actually operate, and to keep the discussion aimed at epistemic certainty, not Cartesian absolute certainty. — Sam26

Post-Sellarsianism is defined by where one locates normativity, which seems to be the same site you situate it, in public justificatory standing governed by mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. Like the post-Sellarsians, you treat JTB as a legitimate starting grammar, whereas Wittgenstein aims to dissolve this starting point. Wittgenstein uses hinges to stop explanation, not to underwrite it. Once hinges are recruited to keep JTB “anchored,” they have been absorbed into a normative architecture. That architecture is Sellarsian in spirit even if it is anti-foundational in tone.

In looking at the snippets of the paper you have been slowly unleashing, I’ve been trying to place its core method and approach with respect to the philosophical communities I am familiar with. What is its relation to poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Criitical theory, American pragmatism, and figures like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Dilthey, Dewey and Peirce? It seems to me your perspective aligns most closely with the work of post-Sellarsians like Robert Brandom, John Mcdowell and Donald Davidson, who draw centrally from Kant and Hegel, and all but ignore the post-Hegelian approaches to reason, justification and ground offered by these other communities.

You make frequent mention of the later Wittgenstein, but you force him into the post-Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ box occupied by Brandom, Pippin, MacDowell and other Pittsburgh school Hegelians, and strip away the hermeuneutic and phenomenological elements which make his work so different from the Hegelians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but If you haven’t read Brandon, you might find his approach to be a better fit for what you’re going after than the later Wittgenstein.

Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues. — Wayfarer

If there are convergences, they are not over Levin’s platonism. Deacon is doing almost the opposite. He is trying to show how what looks Platonic; mathematical or mental forms that are ontologically basic and existing prior to, or independently of, physical instantiation, arise only through specific kinds of physical–biological processes. They are not “there anyway,” waiting to be instantiated; they are generated historically.

murder is bad in itself — Fire Ologist

That’s right. Killing isnt bad in itself, murder is. The sentence ‘murder is wrong’ is a truism, since the word already means ‘wrongful killing’. The fact we have a litany of words expressing judgements of blame and immorality doesn’t guarantee we will all agree on what situations justify assessments of wrongfulness, even though we can all agree that the words connote things which are designated ‘bad in themselves’.

Shouldn’t the atheist answer be, they are thinking like a fantasy, fictional novel writer? They make up contexts, make up players in that context, make up actions, throw in biology and psychology to claim some semblance of “science” or actual knowledge, pretend rules and laws and human speech can direct physics and human choices (as if we are not mechanistic followers of biological necessity), and call this “morality” until the next time when all variables may be thrown back up in the air where they belong and never actually left.

To the atheist, like Nietzsche, isn’t having a morality itself maybe the only possible immoral act? Because it’s an utter lie? To the atheist, shouldn’t the one moral choice we make be the choice to resist all moral judgment, particularly of our own impulses and actions? I think so. That is coherent — Fire Ologist

Atheism is a spectrum of philosophical perspectives with a historical lineage in the modern West going back at least 400 years. These perspectives have nothing necessarily in common with each other beside the fact that they remove the name of theos. My particular version of atheism assumes the following:

1) What we call immorality are practices by others which we aren’t able to understand in terms that allow us to justify them according to our own values. As a result, we blame them for our own puzzlement.
2) Cultural history takes the form of a slow development of interpersonal understanding such that we progressively improve our ability to make sense of the motivations of others in ways that don’t require our condemning them, precisely because we see their limitations as having to do with social understanding rather than arbitrary malicious intent. Advances in the social sciences in tandem with philosophy and the arts contribute to this development.

The proof is in the pudding. Either our social bets pay off and our models of behavior are validated by the actions of others, or they are invalidated and we have to start over with a modified scheme. We all try our best to make sense of others without having to condemn them, but for most the task becomes too overwhelming and they find they have no choice but to fall back on something like god-given moral foundations (or the empirical version : socio and neuropathology).

The transpersonal subject is not solipsistic - it is not 'the individual consciousness creating reality'. Rather, it's the shared structures of rationality, perception, and measurement that together constitute the conditions for any subject. Accordingly, the 'veiled subject' is transcendental/transpersonal, not psychological — Wayfarer

In writers like Ken Wilber transpersonal psychology has specific connotations pointing to mystical experiences and expanded consciousness. Do you subscribe to this vein of thought, and are you imputing it to Bitbol’s work?

I because an atheist because post-theistic philosophical and psychological models appeared to me to offer more powerful insights into how to understand and get along with others. It wasn't a matter of whether God exists, but of whether that hypothesis was as useful in becoming an empathetic and caring person in comparison to the secular alternatives I discovered. I don’t see my atheism as a reaction of the noble ethical goals of theism, but as a better way of achieving those goals. The key challenge for theists and atheists is to answer the following question :
What are people thinking when they do things we consider wrong, and why are they doing them? I’ll go with whichever approach answers this question more effectively.

I think the more likely explanation is that we evolved something called biological altruism. — Questioner

You think altruism is a brain mechanism? You dont feel that it is in your best ‘selfish’ interest to help people you care about and need in your life? In that case altruism wouldn’t be a matter of choosing others over the self but being motivated to expand and enrich the boundaries of the self. We would also need to clarify that the self isn’t a static thing but a system of integration assimilating the world into itself while accommodating itself to the novel aspects of the world. Altruism can be seen in this light as belonging to this enrichment of the self’s capabilities.

It seems very odd to need a proof that god exists in order to do the right thing. — Banno

It would be a shame to waste a good sin.

This is because any degree of restriction whatsoever on abortion -- even a careful one on completely secular grounds -- carries with it the cultural implication that somebody, somewhere should be able to pass moral judgements on sexual activity, which is something they just will not countenance. It undoes the whole reason they wanted to get rid of God. It's a core dogma and it's not just immoral but blatantly anti-moral. (opposed to morality as a category) — BenMcLean

This reminds me of the kind of angry manifesto someone writes before they burn down an abortion clinic.

The division between a psyche and its world is the capacity to be mistaken, to read the world incorrectly. — frank

For Heidegger, it’s not just invalidation which comes from the world, it’s also the perspective being invalidated.

Europe fundamentally does not pay for its own military defense. It isn't completely devoid of military spending and is improving in this area but Europe is still heavily dependent on the United States for security its taxes do not pay for and ours do. — BenMcLean

You can thank the U.S. for coming up with the idea of that arrangement. After World War II, the United States did not reluctantly assume responsibility for European security because Europeans refused to pay for it. The arrangement emerged because Washington actively wanted to control the terms of European rearmament and, initially, to prevent it altogether. Demilitarization, especially of Germany, was a central American objective.

Furthermore, the claim that European welfare states would have been unaffordable or impossible without U.S. military spending is not supported by historical evidence and collapses once you look at cases like Britain, France, or Sweden. Europe built welfare because it prioritized social insurance, labor protection, and decommodification in ways the U.S. did not, not because it was freed from defense obligations.

The 'main reason' why I think that Kant's 'transcendental idealism' and those 'transcendental approaches' advanced by some phenomenologists are mistaken because they are positing that the 'framework' in which it makes sense to speak of an intelligible world is contingent.
Am I wrong about this?

Is the transcendental subject (or an analogous concept in those views that are similar to Kant's but not exactly the same) contingent? Do you think that asking if it is contingent doesn't make sense? If so, why? — boundless

Kant argued that the transcendental conditions for the possibility of the intelligiblity of time, space and empirical causality are not contingent but a priori. Hegel argued instead that these conditions are contingent, and the phenomenologists followed his lead. But according to Hegel and phenomenology , subjective consciousness is not contingent. This may sound confusing, but it’s a matter of of the difference between thinking about subjectivity in terms of a fixed set of conditions of possibility (Kant) vs as a site of interaction with the world in which schemes of intelligibility undergo historical change (Hegel) .

↪Joshs please look at the gemini link I posted in the original post, and tell me whether there is a confusion of meaning. — bizso09

I looked at the gemini link, copied the discussion to Chatgpt, and asked it to critique the discussion from the vantage of the later Wittgenstein.

It responded that there is an underlying philosophical mistake in your reasoning, and that the discussion exemplifies exactly the kind of philosophical confusion Wittgenstein sought to dissolve. It treats indexicality (“I am Alice”) as if it points to an object in the world.It treats subjectivity as a metaphysical entity with location and causal power, and it tries to solve problems of consciousness using logical constructions instead of examining the grammar of mental language.

From a later Wittgensteinian view, the “contradiction” you feel is grammatical, not metaphysical. There is no need for selectors, lights, or Windows, just a clarification that “I am Alice” is not a proposition about a metaphysical entity, but a rule-governed expression within human practices. The AI’s discussion builds an elaborate metaphysical edifice to solve a problem that, according to the later Wittgenstein, never existed once we examine the grammar of “I,” “world,” and “experience.

Because of 1, which shows the existence of You, and 2., which shows that this You is single, and 3., which shows that this You is absolute global, anyone else claiming to be You leads to a contradiction. If we apply this to our world at large, since I OP is already claiming to be You, and I have proof of this, the Reader cannot claim a You. In case the Reader has also proof of them being a You, it leads to a necessary contradiction of facts. — bizso09

Thank god we have proofs to tell us what our language means. On the other hand, the OP puzzle could be an example of what Wittgenstein called a confusion of grammar. As pointed out, a scenario like this only leads to apparent contradictions when we fail to recognize that the same works can have different senses of meaning in different contexts. Under everyday circumstances of use we have no trouble separating out these different senses. It is only when we try to force the words into the reductive abstractions of logical predicates that we conceal from ourselves the fact that the conceptual work they are doing has changed from one point in the account to another.

You have requested a distinction between a "transcendental" understanding, and a "causal" understanding. Can you explain this difference better, for me? "Nature herself" you say, is not the source of empirical things. So nature is not causal in this respect. And, you describe "the conditions" for empirical appearance, as the a priori intuitions. What could be the cause of those empirical appearances then? As empirical appearances they ought to be understandable, and this implies that we ought to be able to speak of causation. If the human mind itself is not taken to be the cause, then they end up as causeless eternal objects, like Platonic objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is Kant’s conditions of possibility that run the risk of looking like ‘causeless eternal Platonic objects”, but not empirical Nature. The forms of intuition are not empirical objects, events, or states; they are conditions of possibility for there being empirical objects and events at all. Appearances are neither caused by the mind nor independent entities floating free of all conditions. They are constituted through the joint operation of receptivity and spontaneity: sensibility provides intuition under the forms of space and time, and the understanding supplies the rules under which what is given can count as an object of experience.

Constitution here is not a causal relation. Appearances are not freely invented by us, there is something independent of our spontaneity involved in experience. But Kant denies us any right to describe that involvement in causal terms. Within experience, every appearance stands under causal laws. What Kant denies is that we can step outside that framework and demand a further causal story about why the framework itself exists.

Notice that I do agree with Kant that the 'empirical world' arises also from the cognitive faculties of the subject.
— boundless

Only if the empirical world is a general conception representing all possible real things does it arise from the cognitive faculties of the subject. For any particular thing in the collection of all possible things, given to the senses in perception and by which experience is possible, that thing does not arise from the cognitive faculties of the subject, but, insofar as it is given, arises from Nature herself — Mww

From a Kantian perspective, this rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what Kant means by arising from the cognitive faculties of the subject. It treats Kant’s claim as if it were about where individual empirical items come from, rather than about the conditions under which anything can count as an empirical object at all.

Kant’s thesis is not that particular empirical objects are fabricated by the mind, nor that the empirical world exists only as a general conception. Rather, his claim is transcendental: the form of objectivity, being an object of possible experience, is contributed by the subject’s cognitive faculties. Space and time are forms of sensibility; the categories are rules of synthesis. Without these, there would be no “collection of possible things” and no “particular thing” that could be said to be given as a thing. Your distinction between a general conception that arises from the subject and particular things that “arise from Nature herself” reintroduces the naïve realism Kant is trying to overcome.

From Kant’s standpoint, the phrase “given to the senses” already presupposes the subject’s contribution. Sensibility is not a passive window onto a ready-made Nature; it is structured receptivity. What is given is given in space and time, and these are not features of Nature as it exists in itself but forms of intuition. Likewise, for something to count as a particular thing rather than a mere manifold of sensation, it must be synthesized under the categories. So even at the level of particular empirical objects, their objecthood does not “arise from Nature herself” in isolation from the subject.

This also misconstrues Kant’s use of “empirical realism.” Kant is an empirical realist because he insists that objects of experience are not illusions or mere ideas; they are objectively valid for all subjects with the same cognitive faculties. But this realism is inseparable from transcendental idealism. To say that a particular empirical object is “given by Nature herself” as opposed to arising from cognitive faculties suggests a standpoint outside the conditions of possible experience, a standpoint Kant denies us. Nature, for Kant, is not a thing in itself that hands over ready-made objects; it is the lawful unity of appearances constituted through the categories.

To say that the empirical world “arises also from the cognitive faculties of the subject” is correct if it is understood transcendentally rather than causally. The subject does not produce empirical objects, but it provides the necessary conditions under which anything can appear as an object in a unified world.

Kant is not dividing labor between the subject (general concepts) and Nature (particular things). Instead, he is saying that Nature itself is Nature as appearance, which exists only in relation to the subject’s forms of intuition and categories. To invoke “Nature herself” as the source of particular empirical things is to speak as if we had access to Nature as it is in itself. From Kant’s point of view, that is precisely the illusion his critical philosophy is meant to dispel.

Like in dreams, we know there is a world beyond the immediate. Consciousness seems like a flashlight in a dark room. We move the flashlight around and come to know what was already there. — frank

This is a good example of the metaphysics of presence, where awareness is treated as our discovery of what was already there. A flashlight model assumes that the relation to the world is something added to a prior existing subject. But Heidegger rejects the idea that there is a self-contained subject who merely “lights up” pre-existing objects that are already there in themselves.

The world is not something present-at-hand which we merely observe; it is that within which Dasein already finds itself.(Being and Time)

Heidegger considers the encounter with objects in the world in an act of attention to be a creative process altering self and world in the same gesture.

"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all , and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "

Beings (essences) are produced by Dasein in the act of taking something as something because the ground ( the totality of relevance) of their being is created anew in our encounter with them.

“Every “foundation” in the sense we discussed comes too late with regard to the positing of the essence, because the productive seeing of the essence is itself a productive seeing of that in which the essence has its ground—a productive seeing of what its ground is. Knowledge of the essence is in itself a ground-laying. It is the positing of what lies under as ground... It is not the subsequent adding of a ground for something already represented.“

Thanks. Just wanted to add this from conservative Peter Wehner, who Ben calls ‘despicable’:

Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation. This period of our history will eventually be judged, and the verdict will be unforgiving—because Thrasymachus was wrong. Justice matters more than injustice. And I have a strong intuition and a settled hope that the moral arc of the universe will eventually bend that way.

↪Joshs Fair enough. My instinct is that separation of powers only work by agreement. They are not magic spells and in the end where the military go will probably be the decisive factor. — Tom Storm

You’re right. Thus far, we have been successful in keeping them out of Chicago.

↪Joshs Do you think America has become an autocracy (with more to come) and that Trump and/or his cronies are here to stay? Either ignoring future elections or suspending them? Or do you think much of the US has a desire for autocracy and will happily vote for it? Or something else — Tom Storm

Tbh, I’ve been almost completely ignoring the political news the past 6 months to preserve my sanity. My guess, though, is that the separation between federal, state and local judicial and governmental institutions, not to mention robust civic institutions and a very diverse media landscape, will be enough to restrain Trump from seizing complete control. I think only a minority of the population truly supports autocracy. I don’t think our friend Ben does, but like many, he isn’t able to recognize those instincts in Trump. He thinks he’s just “a rich New York real estate mogul and reality TV star.”

I’m not sure Trump has a direction — Mikie

It’s the autocrat’s direction. Everything points back to the king. Total one-man control of power.

Trump — for however different he is in many ways — hasn’t really strayed from the very policies that have been championed for decades: tax cuts, deregulation, small government, privatization. Same old, same old. — Mikie

Careful what you wish for. Be thankful we have a federalist system with many local checks and balances. Without those deep constraints, the direction Trump would take the country would be unrecognizable relative to the standards of a constitutional democracy.

But the American Left is very, very far from center on social issues -- and that's what I care about. It gets its leftism not direct from Marx, but from the Frankfurt School & critical theory. Which is, despite not being economic, still very far from anything any reasonable human on Earth could consider centrist. — BenMcLean

Yes, Frankfurt school Critical Theory has been trickling down from academia over the past few decades to shape the political views of politicians on the left. Is it centrist? Not if we take a poll of country as a whole. But if we poll residents of the 20 most populous American cities, as happened when the mayors of Chicago and New York were elected, it may be argued that some of its broadest concepts are being integrated into centrist perspectives in urban America. My advice to you is to stay away from the cities, especially the northern and west coast ones. You won’t like it there. Their centrism is not your centrism. I recommend suburban Dallas. Oklahoma City is good, too.