all that's needed is a relatively stable background of conventions. For instance, I trust that you understand well enough what I'm getting at here, thanks to extremely complex conventions in stringing words together that have become almost automatic for both of us. — Zugzwang

Hutchinson’s point is that the background conventions do not do this work of understanding by themselves. They don’t exist independently of person-relative, occasion sensitive use. Understanding happens in the bringing to light new aspects of what is presented.

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language — Joshs

I've just read through half of the first article you quoted, Practising pragmatist-Wittgensteinianism. It is almost completely unrelated to this discussion. What's worse is that the article is not even critical of the so-called "Oxford reading", which it turns out, relates only very narrowly to the reading of PI 43 (the meaning-as-use passage). The "Oxford reading" is coined in the article and is cited only in order to criticise a reading by H.O. Mounce. It is not, as you presented, a criticism of the "Oxford reading" or of Baker and Hacker's reading. So I'm afraid I'll have to take your advice with a handful of salt. — Luke

I admit that one would have to read between the lines to extract a clear critique of Hacker and Baker in that article, so I have a couple of large blocks of salt to add to that grain. As far as the Oxford reading of Wittgenstein is concerned, I am not comfortable claiming that no one associated with that group interprets him in the way that I am attributing to both Antony and Hutchinson. I would rather point to specific readings that Hutichinson finds lacking, such as that of Hacker, Malcolm, Ryle and Strawson.

You’ll find an unambiguous critique of Hacker and Baker in another piece by Hutchinson and Read titled ‘Whose Wittgenstein’.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Phil-Hutchinson/publication/279027201_Review_article_Whose_Wittgenstein/links/5878db2508ae9a860fe2a58b/Review-article-Whose-Wittgenstein.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=tH6S94ARp2JGAc2uTUTosTyRrEWJ1o93vrRFYsEAiiZcEdEkSt7lJMKbSzKnXCM_uFDPfG5CyLLc-kImJYNtXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_sg%5B1%5D=xUbobHnMyNV6-TK5P0zRpUf5wZKo0Vl3ny9G28AQpeKNNQ0KKhRa1AN4f_m9GmZF5OCmZ9t03V_Kcv_GPUIxZAjNEvumug81yRA4sgbbaUXw.cIL_CZjrAm2fLfAmjm4Pq7O1YhUB99Gnt7ISbwYveH5sS_YMnVvcmell3-_Ua-HKUvEH80Pfp7cywm2AgcsbUA&_iepl=

Here are some snippets:

“While one may be inclined to lean towards Baker & Hacker (if one must lean, on such matters) regarding Wittgenstein’s rule-following remarks when the target of their criticism is Saul Kripke’s exegesis—given that the latter (notoriously) selectively reads Wittgenstein’s remarks in order to generate ‘Wittgenstein-the-rule-following-sceptic’ or ‘Kripkenstein’—this does not blind one to …a recognition that there is in play therein an understanding of Wittgenstein on following a rule which, while avoiding the pit-falls of Kripke’s ‘reading’, saddles Wittgenstein with a substantive philosophy of questionable value.”

“…Hacker’s summatory Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies… tells one in the end rather less about Wittgenstein than about a narrow ‘Oxford philosophy’ which misses the richness and breadth of Wittgenstein’s work and appeal.”

“Gordon Baker, Hacker’s co-author in these papers, had, from 1991 onwards, not only explicitly distanced himself from the Baker & Hacker reading of Philosophical Investigations but also frequently used ‘Baker & Hacker’ readings as a stalking horse for his own new reading…”

it is a clear misreading by Cavell (followed by Antony) to view PI 217 as pointing to an end to rules or an invitation for further justification. (Cavell reads far too much into the word "inclined".) — Luke

“We find it odd that in HWCC—and in fact in the entire large volume of literature published by Hacker on these matters— he has never sought to seriously engage with Baker’s post ’90 ‘apostasy’.Particularly so since Baker explicitly identifies continuities between his own (post Baker & Hacker) reading of PI and the readings advanced by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond and Burton Dreben. What is significant about Baker’s change of mind is not that he did so: a change of mind does not necessitate progress. What is significant is the extent to which Baker’s later work stands as a powerful critique of the reading propounded by he and Hacker in the 1980s, and by Hacker since.”

“In short, Baker’s post­-1990 ‘position’—expounded throughout BWM—is that Wittgenstein’s method is radically therapeutic: therapeutic in that the aim is to relieve men­tal cramps brought about by being faced with a seemingly intractable philosophical problem; radically so in that how this aim is achieved is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent.”

I don't see evidence yet in your posts that you and Antony are even on the same page. — Luke

Perhaps not. But I suggest we first find out if Antony supports Hutchinson’s ( and Baker’s) assertions about what is lacking in Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.

It is possible that you and Antony have mistaken me for appealing to "grammar-book rules" as per the final paragraph above, but I have been talking about the ""rules" of grammar" as described in the same paragraph. I have referred to this wider sort of grammar - Wittgenstein's concept of grammar - as a corrective to what is indicated by the discussion title: 'Rules' End', and to Antony's explicit statements that some concepts are without rules; the idea that some meaningful language-use is not rule-governed. That's just not the case. — Luke

Regarding your claim that grammar and rules "only function by being changed in actual use", you have given no reason as to why these function only "by being changed", or why they do not function without being changed. — Luke

Maybe you could answer Hutchinson’s
question put to Hacker:

“ The thought that mapping our language might serve a purpose (non-person relative, non-occasion sensitive) relies on the assumption that certain relatively static reference points obtain within that language. What vantage point on language would one need to assume so as to be able to discern that which would serve as (non-person-relative, non­occasion-sensitive) reference points?”

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker’s thought that what is prob­lematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-V relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words’ belonging to a ‘type of use.’It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture’ which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

Hutchinson addresses the relation between rule and use in his focus on perspicuous representation.

“A key indication of the difference ( between Hacker and the later Baker) can be gleaned from the understand­ings of the place of ‘perspicuous (re)presentation’, of which Wittgenstein writes in PI §122, that it ‘is of fundamental importance for us’. For Baker ‘perspicuous presentation’ does not denote a class of repre­sentations as it is usually thought to do (in the work of Baker & Hacker for instance, though, to be sure, not only there). It rather denotes what works: what achieves the therapeutic aim. And that this form of representation does so here, now, for this person, etc. does not imply that it will do so again, (or) for someone else. Therapy is achieved by facilitating one’s inter­locutor’s ((or) one’s own) arrival at a position where they might freely acknowledge hitherto unnoticed aspects.

Acknowledging new aspects helps free one from the grip of a philosophical picture that initially led to the seeming intractability of the philosophical problem. Any presentation which serves this purpose can therefore be said to have been perspicuous— for that person, at that time, thereabouts. Perspicuity, on this understand­ing, does not denote a property of a class of representations but is rather an achievement term: perspicuity is accorded to the presentation that achieves the bringing to light of new aspects which are freely accepted by one’s philosophical interlocutor.
One consequence of the later Baker’s rendition of ‘perspicuous presen­tation’ is that it allows one to reinterpret what ‘our grammar’ might be when we consider ourselves to be perspicuously presenting it . For (later) Baker ‘grammar’ is best read as ‘“our” grammar’; while for Hacker, ‘grammar’ is to be read as ‘the grammar’.”

“… the word ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein, far from meaning what Hacker (and the early D. Z. Phillips, and possibly, at moments, Dilman) takes it to mean, is intended as our grammar, as indexed to the person or persons employing it, in such a way that an appeal to ‘“the” grammar’ cannot be used to settle philosophical disputes, but only as a way of facilitating a person’s knowing how they are actually using a term and how that relates (or does not) to how they want to use it.”

The actual use can "co-invent the sense of the rule, grammar", but - if I understand you correctly - that is a change in the rules, not an end to the rules. — Luke

If actual contextual use offers a fresh sense of a rule, and we only know rules in actual use , where is an ‘unchanged’ rule stored? Is there some internal or social non-contextual realm where they are kept protected from alteration?

I’ll give Hutchinson the last word:


“We focus here on the claim that there are two complementary strands, clarificatory and therapeutic, in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We can find no evidence for these being discrete though complementary strands. Yet Hacker repeatedly asserts them to be so . However,
leaving the question of textual evidence aside, asserting them to be so certainly has unfortunate implications for Hacker’s ‘Wittgenstein’. The unfortunate implications are: if elucidation and therapy (connective analysis, perspicuous presentation) are distinct endeavours,
though both undertaken in PI, then what motivates the elucidations? It is difficult, without relating, i.e. subsuming, the practice of elucidating to the therapeutic thrust of PI, to understand why Wittgenstein would want to engage in such ‘clarifications of our language’. For if the clarification of our grammar is not occasion-sensitive—not carried out on a case-by-case basis with a particular interlocutor—then Wittgenstein, it seems, is embroiled in something of a performative contradiction.

For if clarification per se is a goal then it presupposes a particular view of how language must be (contra, that is, PI §132). In clarifying language in this way Wittgenstein is taken to dissolve philosophical problems by showing us (clarifying, perspicuously representing) the rules of our grammar (linguistic facts). Again this raises the prospect of Wittgenstein, at a really quite basic level, contradicting his own metaphilosophical remarks in the very text in which he makes those remarks; a text, we should recall, that he laboured over for sixteen years.
Indeed, it turns Wittgenstein into a closet metaphysician. This “problem of motivation” then presents further problems for Hacker; if he insists upon ‘connective analysis’ as separate and distinct from therapy, then this must (at the least) imply that Wittgenstein does have a picture (or a theory) of ‘language’; such that it enables us, as it were, to take up a stance external to that ‘language’ and survey it; and that these elucidations serve some non­person-relative and non-occasion-sensitive elucidatory purpose.

This is important because holding on to the idea that there is more than therapy hereabouts leads Hacker to saddle Wittgenstein with a form of conventionalism. Hacker seems not to realize why others find his form of‘Wittgensteinianism’ easy to dismiss.”

I see free will as a necessary precondition for any human understanding consistent with a Kantian pure intuition — Hanover

I’m not sure than Kantianism avoids its own sort of determinism (fixed categories , ethical universality and an empirically rational universe).

Let's call it the grammar of our ethical situations.
— Antony Nickles

Let's not. Grammar is of our language. — Luke

I have a suggestion to make which may or may not clarify this debate. Rather than giving the impression that what you are attempting to do is locate THE correct reading of Wittgenstein, maybe you could instead accept that there may be more than one ‘correct’ Wittgenstein, and proceed to learn about the alternatives to your own. You will still end up preferring one version over another, but at least you’ll have opened yourself up to other possibilities.


it may be helpful to recognize use that, like with all great philosophers, interpretations of Wittgenstein fall into distinct camps. As I mentioned in an earlier post , I see this debate as pitting a certain Oxford reading ( Hacker and Baker) against what I would call a phenomenological-enactivist reading.

“The Oxford movement that wanted to follow Wittgenstein actually fell back somewhat. It rightly emphasized that a word means its use in situations — the word marks or changes something in the situation in which it can be said. A word's use-contexts have no single picture or pattern in common. As Wittgenstein said, a word's situations are a "family," not a common pattern. But then the Oxford Analysts tried, after all, to define the use of a word, if not by a concept then at least by a rule, to capture what a word marks or does. That effort failed; rules don't limit what a word can mean, either.”( Eugene Gendlin)


I don’t see evidence yet in your posts that you recognize there is such a camp that backs up Antony’s perspective on Witt. Or it may be that you are struggling to understand the coherence of such an account.

Let’s see if it might help to widen the scope of this discussion a bit. The two camps I mention differ not just in their understanding of Wittgenstein, but in the broader psychological articulation of the relation between perception , cognition and language.

Phenomenologically influenced models of cognition and language break away from older theories by abandoning f the notion of internal representations. In you discussion you have focused on such things as concepts, rules, criteria and the influence of social normativity.

These are all factors which shape how we understand and use words, but the question for the enactivist Wittgensteinian camp is what exactly is the functional relationship between these influences and the actual senses of words that arise in contextual situations. Their argument is that none of these shaping factors can be seen as stored internal representations or as having some other sort of temporary identity to them, such that when we understand a word we are consulting some pre-existing scheme(rule. social norm, concept, etc). It is not that these don’t come into play. It is that when they do come into play it is not a matter of simply piecing together or cobbling a pre-existing structure with a new situation.
Such background internal and culture constraints (grammar , rules) only function by being changed in actual use. The actual use co-invents the sense of the rule, grammar, concept that ‘was’ implicated.

“All structures, concepts, representations, schemes and laws are to be viewed as already involving a concretely ongoing activity, and thus they can never explain or picture it.” (Gendlin)

I know much more explanation needs to be given here , but it might help if you familiarized yourself with the enactivist critique of representationalist models.

Any examples of Greeks using 'meta' that way? I keep hearing that for a long time it only connected to 'physical' with reference to cataloguing of Aristotle's books? — bongo fury

“The term was invented by the 1st-century BCE head of Aristotle‘s Peripatetic school, Andronicus of Rhodes. Andronicus edited and arranged Aristotle’s works, giving the name Metaphysics (τα μετα τα φυσικα βιβλια), literally “the books beyond the physics,” perhaps the books to be read after reading Aristotle’s books on nature, which he called the Physics. The Greek for nature is physis, so metaphysical is also “beyond the natural.”

Aristotle never used the term metaphysics. For Plato, Aristotle’s master, the realm of abstract ideas was more “real” than that of physical. i.e., material or concrete, objects, because ideas can be more permanent (the Being of Parmenides), whereas material objects are constantly changing (the Becoming of Heraclitus).“

The question was how, why or when did 'speculative' enter the lexicon. Interesting though to see it joined to 'dialectics'. Is/was that common? Examples please. If so then perhaps your theory, that 'speculative' meant 'fanciful' in relation to Hegel's historicising, gets some traction. — bongo fury

Hegel regarded his dialectical method or “speculative mode of cognition” (PR §10) as the hallmark of his philosophy.

From Brittanica:

The Hegelian system, in which German idealism reached its fulfillment, claimed to provide a unitary solution to all of the problems of philosophy. It held that the speculative point of view, which transcends all particular and separate perspectives, must grasp the one truth, bringing back to its proper centre all of the problems of logic, of metaphysics (or the nature of Being), and of the philosophies of nature, law, history, and culture (artistic, religious, and philosophical). According to Hegel, this attitude is more than a formal method that remains extraneous to its own content; rather, it represents the actual development of the Absolute—of the all-embracing totality of reality—considered “as Subject and not merely as Substance” (i.e., as a conscious agent or Spirit and not merely as a real being). This Absolute, Hegel held, first puts forth (or posits) itself in the immediacy of its own inner consciousness and then negates this positing—expressing itself now in the particularity and determinateness of the factual elements of life and culture—and finally regains itself, through the negation of the former negation that had constituted the finite world.

Such a dialectical scheme (immediateness–alienation–negation of the negation) accomplished the self-resolution of the aforementioned problem areas—of logic, of metaphysics, and so on. This panoramic system thus had the merit of engaging philosophy in the consideration of all of the problems of history and culture, none of which could any longer be deemed foreign to its competence. At the same time, however, the system deprived all of the implicated elements and problems of their autonomy and particular authenticity, reducing them to symbolic manifestations of the one process, that of the Absolute Spirit’s quest for and conquest of its own self. Moreover, such a speculative mediation between opposites, when directed to the more impending problems of the time, such as those of religion and politics, led ultimately to the evasion of the most urgent and imperious ideological demands and was hardly able to escape the charge of ambiguity and opportunism.”

For your argument to work, God's omniscience must go out the window but if that, you would be arguing against not God but something else entirely, an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, non-omniscient being - that's not God. — TheMadFool

Liberal theology has come along way since the formulation of God as omniscient( see process theology, open theism).

the point was that a certain type of metaphysics underwrite science, which you seem to agree with. — Olivier5

Galilean and Newtonian physics can be argued to be consistent with the rationalist metaphysics of Descartes and Spinoza. The hypothetico-deductive method proposed by Bacon in this period was a philosophy a scientific method that arose out of rationalism.
The idealistic metaphysics ushered in by Kant and Hegel
has been suggested as a grounding for Relativity and quantum physics. The philosophy of science that is embraced by modern physics is typically that of Popper, who was an adherent of Kantian idealism. Postmodern metaphysics ( or anti-metaphysics) has its parallel in the philosophy of science of Kuhn and Feyerabend, which critiques the Kantian and Popperian model.
So you see we have at least three distinct metaphysical eras ( and we could divide them up into many more) that accompanies the history of science from the 1600’s to today.

The ‘meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’ (nature).
— Joshs

If that's an is, and not an ought to be, then... is, since when? — bongo fury

Since the Greeks?

His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence.
— Joshs

Don't understand. — bongo fury

Speculative dialectics deservedly got a bad rep when philosophers decided they no longer needed to bother studying actual contingent circumstances of human life in its sociological, political and anthropological aspects. Instead, they could apply a one- size -fits -all Hegelian scheme of dialectical stages onto whatever aspect of human history they wanted to focus on, revealing its supposed necessity and inevitability. This is why it was important for Marx to ground the dialectic in material circumstances.

That all sounds very liberal and pleasant, but what process goes into "establishing agreement not only about basic definitions... but also about basic beliefs"? And what if such agreement cannot be found? What if the other person's position remains obscure? What if the difference of commonality is exactly what is significant?

Sometimes folk are what we in the trade call wrong — Banno

Lyotard’s distinction between a litigation and a differend. may be relevant here:

“ A differend is a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement. Lyotard distinguishes the victim from the plaintiff. The later is the wronged party in a litigation; the former, the wronged party in a differend. In a litigation, the plaintiff’s wrong can be presented. In a differend, the victim’s wrong cannot be presented. A victim, for Lyotard, is not just someone who has been wronged, but someone who has also lost the power to present this wrong.

This disempowerment can occur in several ways: it may quite literally be a silencing; the victim may be threatened into silence or in some other way disallowed to speak. Alternatively, the victim may be able to speak, but that speech is unable to present the wrong done in the discourse of the rule of judgement. The victim may not be believed, may be thought to be mad, or not be understood. The discourse of the rule of judgement may be such that the victim’s wrong cannot be translated into its terms; the wrong may not be presentable as a wrong.”

Science, as posted by 180 Proof, is metaphysics that works (generally). I agree with that, while of course others may disagree. — Olivier5

Except that science doesn’t have a single definition , it is a historical development with a changing understanding of itself, undergirded by a changing metaphysical outlook.
So the question isn’t whether science works , but how the way it purportedly works changes along with changing metaphysical frameworks. The notion that science simply ‘works’ itself presupposes a particular metaphysics of science, one that is now undergoing transformation.

I'd have thought that metaphysics starts from the assumption that all the physics is settled, so there are no speculations to deal with. — bongo fury

The ‘ meta’ is the formal synthetic framework which organizes the understanding of ‘physis’( nature ).
It need make no claims for a particular content of science being settled or unsettled.
As far as it’s speculative role, this term began fashionable after Hegel. His dialectic was interpreted as explaining the movement of natural
and cultural history without recourse to empirical evidence. Thus it was speculative rather than empirical.

It strikes me that metaphysics, though it may purport to explain (or question) why science or other things "work", doesn't "work" itself. Merely to claim that other things like science or religion "work" provides no support for metaphysics, though. — Ciceronianus

Metaphysics is really no more than one pole of an abstract-concrete continuum that runs through all modes of thought and culture. Within science intself there is more and less applied thinking , more and less
theoretical and meta-theoretical. Metaphysics as it is practiced in particular by continental philosophers is just their attempt to achieve an ‘ultra-meta’ perspective. If you think getting too theoretical muddies the waters you can always climb down from the perch and immerse yourself in the details.

Understanding the person you are trying to get to do what you want doesn't dissolve the conflict or lead to immediate cooperation, but it may prove a useful tool in getting them to do what you want. — Ennui Elucidator

How many of the interpersonal conflicts, large and small, that we all experience on an almost daily basis, have to do with not being able to get others to do what we want , and how many of them have to do with our not being able to fathom why the other person will not do what we want? Put differently , I am suggesting that the depth of our anger, disappointment , anxiety , guilt and other negative affective responses to the behavior of others we are dealing with, is in direct proportion to the breakdown in trust and mutual understanding we perceive with them. A ‘conflict’ with someone who thwarts our preference due to reasons we fully understand and can empathize with is not really a conflict at all. It’s more of a minor strategic challenge: how do we incentivize their actions or negotiate a compromise suitable to us both?

But this sort of situation plays only the most minor role in the daily drama of living. What keeps us awake at night is the loved one, friend or acquaintance who inexplicably disappointed us , angered us , rejected us , severed our bond of trust with them , caused us to doubt our own worth.

These are the conflicts caused by a breakdown in understanding. And these are what account for the kinds of conflicts that take place among larger social
groups, and that lead to wars and persecutions. The problem with axioms of discourse is that they have already been implicitly violated by the time the conflict is perceived. Ethically meaningful interpersonal conflicts are only possible in the first place as the breakdown of tacit pre-existing axioms of shared understandings.

if poetry contains an authentic metaphysics, how can it be evidenced?" — Gus Lamarch

If poetry contains a metaphysics , then do prose literature, visual art, music ,scientific and political
discourse also contain their own authentic metaphysics? If not, then what is it about poetry that distinguishes it from all other modes of creative expression?

Isnt it the case that it is the particular CONTENT conveyed by any of the innumerable modes of cultural expression within an era ( including poetry) that manifests a mataphysics? For instance , if one were to delimit a cultural history of poetry in the West, would one not be able to correlate the changes in the way poets considered their craft over the centuries with changes in metaphysical outlook? Doesn’t classical Greek poetry reflect a different metaphysical thinking than the poetry of the Renaissance or the Modern or postmodern eras?

I think the the tools you describe are useful and can work if people come together in good faith. — Tom Storm

Hermeneuticists like John Caputo and Richard Rorty call this working together in good faith toward a fusion of horizons of understanding the ‘conversation of mankind’. It has been critiqued by postmodernists like Derrida and Lyotard , who point out that in many cases the two parties are not operating with the same senses of meaning , and there is no meta-understanding that can arrived at, no perfect agreement, through an effort of ‘good faith’ What is needed in these cases is respect for the disagreement rather than pursuit of fusion.

Often in a negotiation (shuttle diplomacy style), you can get two parties to agree on what to do for profoundly different reasons. — Ennui Elucidator

It sounds like perhaps you have a background in the law.
If money is at the center of a dispute, or things money can buy, then this kind of negotiation can work. But in most emotionally fraught conflicts, it is contrasting worldviews that are at the center, in which case separation-violence and insight constitute the opposing poles of action.

Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.
— Joshs
How so...how is that thought to work? I am unfamiliar with such a theory. — Michael Zwingli

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1059712318772778

What I have in mind is the truly hard question of philosophy, which is not consciousness (though indirectly, one can claim this) but presence. — Constance

One might call this the ‘metaphysics of presence’, after Heidegger and Derrida. Indeed, if one begins with presence , then one finds oneself ‘before’ language , becuase presence, as self-presence, auto-affection, self-identity, must be before language since it precedes relation. The trick is to think before presence Then language reappears , not as that which takes place between presences , but as prior to presence.

The human brain stores information in quite a similar way as a computer does, only with a strong biochemical element to the mechanism. — Michael Zwingli

Your references are a bit out of date. The most sophisticated current models of memory dont make use of a computer storage metaphor anymore. Those were all the rage 40 years ago. Instead, memory is a reconstructive process.

But the world is brimful with relations that don't require us to be noticing them, or even involve us at all, in order to exist.

The codes and patterns that are intrinsic to nature that you assert in the second passage quoted above are the intrinsic relational properties of the world, which nonetheless do not need us to create, or even mediate, their existence it would seem. — Joshs

Yea, this is the realist conclusion of semiologists. And their patron saint, Charles Peirce, found it necessary to ground all this subject-independence in a Divine origin.

At any rate, realist semiology asks why it should be necessary to attach all phenomena to the subject in order to arrive at a perfectly satisfactory account of the way things are. Postmodern philosophers respond that if we examine closely what it is we are doing when we posit a world independent of us , and a history that can be extracted independently of our present , we will find that the idea of subject-independent phenomena is no longer useful, interesting or even coherent.

Specifically , they claim that when we imagine or theorize about the oldest and simplest forms of existence , those most distant in time from the appearance of human beings, we are not only making use of the latest cultural
understanding to model this subject-independence, but there isn’t a single aspect of our natural history model that isn’t completely beholden to the current framework that defines its terms. The reason for this is that the basis of any inquiry into what ‘is’ or what ‘was’ is a pragmatic affair. What ‘is’ only has sense for us in relation to our aims, goals and purposes. When we ask what exists we are always asking what we can do with a thing. Being and use are not separate issues, they are the same issue.

Now, what if one acknowledges this and still wants to maintain that there is and was a subject independent world? It becomes a powerless notion, because unlike the Kantian thing in itself , the postmodernist ‘outside world’ doesn’t unidirectionally shape our representations of it. They argue that history must be distinguished from historicism. Historicism assumes we can retrieve intact previous eras of human or natural history in order to study them. But the actual historical nature of our experiencing of the world precludes such a duplication of what was. Instead , historical study is always revision and reinterpretation. To return to the most archaic past is always to move into a new future.

Is there more to the word than phenomena? I say yes. You? — Banno

For Husserl, the phenomenon is a complex entity composed of my intention projecting forward into the world and the world pushing back on my intention by acting both as a constraint and an affordance. But how the world does this is dependent on what I project forward. The world responses precisely, but in different ways, to different formulations.


Reciprocal dependence between self as world is not the same thing as a noumenal reality. The latter seems to imply a relation of one-way correspondence between representing subject and subject-independent world.

if a philosophical argument reaches the conclusion that "there is no reality", that alone is sufficient to reject the argument. — Banno

I prefer to word it this way: reality is the set of constraints that are co-defined by, and respond intimately to, a constantly changing experiencing of the world.

But it's more like we can't refute solipsism, rather than its being the case (if there are no noumena). — Amalac

Phenomenology is not a solipsism , it is a radical
interactionism. You don’t solve the issue by positing a noumenal reality , you reify a form of solipsist idealism.

If all that is, is your perceptions, then other people are just your perceptions. — Banno

I dont know if this will help. It lays out the anti-noumenal phenomenological argument, claiming that it gives us a more robust realism than the Kantian or neo-Kantian alternatives.


‘As Husserl points out in the lecture course Ausgewählte phänomenologische Probleme from 1915, nothing might seem more natural than to say that the objects I am aware of are outside my consciousness. When my experiences – be they perceptions or other kinds of intentional acts – present me with objects, one must ask how this could happen, and the answer seems straightforward: By means of some representational mediation. The objects of which I am conscious are outside my consciousness, but inside my consciousness, I find representations (pictures and signs) of these objects, and it is these internal objects that enable me to be conscious of the external ones. However, as Husserl then continues, such a theory is completely nonsensical. It conceives of consciousness as a box containing representations that resemble external objects, but it forgets to ask how we are supposed to know that the (mis)representations are in fact (mis)representations of external objects:

The ego is not a tiny man in a box that looks at the pictures and then occasionally leaves his box in order to compare the external objects with the internal ones etc. For such a picture observing ego, the picture would itself be something external; it would require its own matching internal picture, and so on ad infinitum (Husserl 2003: 106

Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl’s anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn’t merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to’ or ‘connected with’ one another” (Husserl 1982: 111).

This claim is one that resounds throughout Husserl’s oeuvre. As he, years later, would write in Cartesianische Meditationen, it is absurd to conceive of consciousness
and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially
interdependent and united (Husserl 1960: 84). Husserl’s idealism is not a reductive idealism. Husserl is not a phenomenalist that seeks to reduce the world to a complex of sensations. His opponent is not the dualist, but the objectivist, who claims that reality is absolute in the sense of being radically mind­independent. To deny the latter, to deny that the “universe of true being” lies “outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence” (Husserl 1960: 84), is not to say that reality literally exists in the mind, or that it is an intramental construction, but that reality is essentially manifestable, and therefore in principle available and accessible to consciousness.”

https://www.academia.edu/34265366/Brain_Mind_World_Predictive_coding_neo_Kantianism_and_transcendental_idealism

And that something else is given by the subject, who, immersed in space and time, apprehends the phenomena, but never the things in themselves (the so-called "noumena").

From this perspective, the so-called "problem of knowledge", which has preoccupied philosophers for thousands of years, disappears in one fell swoop. And not only does it disappear, it is revealed as nonsense.

Indeed, it is impossible for a human being to think in non-human terms, from a pre- or super-human perspective, thus valuing the “primal objectivity” of a world: value-neutral, ahistorical, timeless, and also, making a judgment on how that ontological condition prior to one's own existence is.

There is still a problem for the Kantian view. And that’s the gulf between the roel of the subject and the thing in itself. How can we be in the world if there is an uncrossable chasm between our representations of the world ( the phenomena ) and the noumenal aspect of reality?
Phenomenological philosophy proposed to solve this dualist problem by arguing that there is no noumenal reality. The world as it appears to a subject is all there is, there is nothing hidden behind phenomena. Because it is no longer necessary to assume internal representations or models of a separate outside , it is also not necessary to assume a formal logic as our primary means of access to a world. This removes the issue of whether human ‘logic’ is idiosyncratic to us and not shared by other animals. All living, self-organizing systems function according to the same general normatively oriented principles.

If I grab one of those ducks that are in a row and squeeze, I shall likely discover that ducks aren't always gentle and cute. It will bite and kick and quack up a storm. On the other hand, if I try to grab the row that they're putatively in, well, do you see a problem there? — tim wood

I think we have a problem with more than ‘rowness’ if we’re trying to determine the contribution of the subject to the experience of what we want to call the object. For instance, you said we discover features of the duck by bodily interacting with it. We reach out and squeeze. We then receive all kinds of feedback from the duck, such as tactile( we feel it bite and kick) , kinesthetic( we feel it’s resistance against our grasp), auditory ( we hear it quack), and we see all these behaviors. Perceptual psychologists will tell you that the data we actually receive from the world is very minimal. We fill in the rest based on expectations gained from prior experiences. In fact, our expectations and the data from the outside are so inextricably intertwined that it becomes impossible to separate out what is the subjective contribution and what is the objective contribution to our experience of the duck.

Once we remove from from the picture all of the background knowledge we bring to our experience of the ‘duck’ , all that is left is a constantly changing flow
of meaningless data. If I draw a Chinese linguistic form , someone who reads Chinese will
recognize it as a particular word concept. I would see it as an abstract series of shapes. A snake might see it as separated lines and curves. Which is the ‘real’ object? It depends on who is interacting with it. When we expereince a thing , whether it’s a neutrino or a duck, we are interacting with it in complex ways.

But what if we try and imagine the object independently of our interaction with it? Can’t we just disassemble the patterned complexity that we see ( construct) as the object into its components? But if the object for us , as a result of our constructive activity imposed on it , is nothing but this complex of relations, do the components exist in themselves pure and unrelaronal? Physics seems to be coming to the realization that there are no intrinsic and non-relational properties in the world. To be an entity is to be changing in some way i. relation to something else. This would seem to place the basis of pattern , in the form of irreducible relationality and transformation, at the heart of the so-called outside world. It may turn out to be the case that relational pattern , rather than intrinsic content , IS the basis of objective reality.

When you compare the hardware and the software of a computer, I’m sure you note
that the hardware is the ‘physical’ basis of it and the software is the ‘patterned’ implementation of the hardware. Would you want to argue that the software is somehow less real or secondary with respect to the hardware? But you wouldnt deny that the software allows us to make real changes in our brains and in the world. Furthermore , there is no way to reduce
e software language to a hardware language of physical causality without losing what is essential to the software description. But if software language is only secondary and derivative , there should be a way to convey all of the meaning of the software language via a hardware description.

This has led semiologists to conclude that codes and patterns are intrinsic to nature ( genetic code) , not just to minds.

the idea is projected onto and then supposed to originate in the thing or things. — tim wood

Define ‘thing’ without using a notion of pattern or relation.

You have been working on a thoroughgoing and comprehensive philosophy, with your concept of information as its centerpiece. The most important and relevant implications of a metaphilosophy have to do with the most complex phenomena in the world. And those most complex phenomena are none other than human interactions , our passions, drives and intellectual processes and goals, how the individual contributes to their culture and how that culture
shapes the individual politically , morally , creatively, and how language is to be understood. Of course, you want to locate the irreducible basis for your model in order to give it precision and clarity. You’ve attempted to accomplish this by embracing a kind of quasi-physics vocabulary. The problem with this is that it may run the risk of being dismissed by physicists who don’t see it as either empirically valid or philosophically coherent.
They may be wrong , but I think what you’re aiming for will be much between comprehended by others of you put more emphasis on the human behavioral implications of your theory ( emotion, intersubjective relations , cognition and perception , psychopathology, language , ethics).

What is a row? Answer: nothing in itself, but that you make it so. — tim wood

What I’m wondering, specifically, is how you are defining what takes place at the ‘mental’ end of the subject-world encounter and how you would talk about what takes place outside of the mental. You mentioned row and pattern. What exactly is it about these entities that make makes them mental , and what does that imply about what constitutes the substance or content of the non-mental? For instance , is what a row and a pattern have in common the fact they they are abstract relational concepts? Are all causal relations also purely mental? What about temporal sequences? Is time a mental construct not existing in the world , as many physicists believe?

Out there, nothing repeats. — tim wood

What does the ‘out there’ do? Are you following the Kantian line which argues that pattern, logic, time and space are all mental processes? Is your argument metaphysical or empirical?!

Information is not representation but the interaction of one representation with that of another representation. — Pop

I do like your emphasis on interaction as being primary. But if the interaction that constitutes information is between two representations, what are the original presentations being re-presented?

...Davidson’s suggestion of locating a shared background of beliefs would fail miserably in dealing with anything but the most superficial level of thought.
— Joshs

His interest is in statements of what is the case, and in that regard he limits his discourse, but we can have some fun extending it. One way to proceed while keeping some of his conniving relevant would be to look at direction fo fit, as discussed in Anscombe and Searle and elsewhere. One might characterised Davidson's interest as word-to-world rather than world-to-word. — Banno

I haven’t read Anscombe and Searle on this, but the phenomenologically informed enactivist work I follow wouldn’t accept that the one direction ever proceeds independently of the other. Here perceptual processes may be instructive. When I perceive a visual pattern as something , I recognize it. Re-cognition implies two
dynamics at once. From subject to world, there is expectation derived from previous experience of what I am likely looking at. This expectation is as much intersubjectively shaped as it is subjective. The other side of the coin is the direction from world to anticipating subject. My expectations concerning what I am seeing do not univocally determine the sense for me of the phenomenon. The world contributes a novel factor that makes recognition and representation always a contextually new sense of what is being recognized.

But in politics we change the world to fit the word. — Banno

Or one could say we interpret the world according to our subjectively and intersubjectively formed expectations. But that is not limited to ‘politics’ unless you want to expand olp rica to include perception and cognition generally.

Davidson might be understood as pointing out that we agree on the presence of a board and the pieces; on the squares, and perhaps even on the initial arrangement of the pieces on the board. But suppose someone does not recognise castling. The disagreement here is not as to how the world is, but how the world might be changed. — Banno

If we agree on the things you mention, it is likely because we abstract these particulars from our understanding of their role in the playing of the game called chess by based what matters to us about it. The game is a temporal unfolding guided by rules of procedure, an agreed upon way of going on, with an agreed upon goal. When one recognizes the pieces and board as belonging to chess , one is implicitly drawing upon this background knowledge of the unfolding activity called chess. In other words , the details get their relevant sense from their relation to the larger purpose of the game as one interprets it. If I do not recognize castling, that belief forms part of the superordinate scheme that frames my sense of the details. When we begin the game, having tacitly ‘agreed’ on the pieces, board , etc, my background belief about castling is already operative in my recognition of the pieces and other subordinate details. But since this belief retains only an implicit role in our activity until the point where it becomes explcit, when I say ‘hey, you can’t do that!’, it doesn’t initially affect our agreement.

This is what I mean about agreements at a superficial level masking deeper discrepancies in outlook.

One might describe the situation as incommensurable; one player wishes to castle; the other does not recognise this as a legitimate move. This is not a disagreement as to what is the case, but as to what is to be done. — Banno

I think the issue comes down to how integrated the pieces of our knowledge are in relation to overarching pragmatic purposes and goals. Davidson seems to allow for a compartmentalization and independence in components of cognitive and language schematics that the enactivists reject.

If our interpretations and understandings are all of equal worth then there is no reason to move from our prejudices and preconceptions. — Banno

Would you apply this same ‘radical relativism’ critique to postmodernists like Nietzsche , Focucault and Derrida?

If
It's a recipe for arch-conservatism. Watch how the rejection of rationality is appropriated by Trumpists and other right extremes. — Banno

I think Trumpists and other right wing extremists are arch-rationalists. That is , they embrace late medieval and early enlightenment forms of rationality.

If Science has a grain; moving in one direction is easier than the other. That might be a result of the expression of science being explicit. — Banno

Dialectical logic? God , the good , and other transcendent ends depend on the stability of the preferred choice. (better and better, more and more , closer and closer , richer and richer). But if preference and desire , in science as in other endeavors, is not directed toward anything but alterity , then the ‘good’ progress loses its stable sense.

And yet we can discuss Newtonian physics, despite having some grasp of modern physics.

If incommensurable means that we use different standards of judgement, then you may have a point; but if it means something like untranslatable, there will be odd consequences. — Banno

We can discuss and write about any period in cultural history, or our personal biographies, for that matter. And those who come after us can do the same. In each case , a reinterpreting of history occurs. There is no historical memory without revision. So useful translation happens, but it does not bring back a preserved past. It would be like trying to authentically recreate period music.

Are you taking about deductive sense or a different kind of sense?

Kuhn is talking about change from one historical
movement to the next in the arts.

“We might argue all day whether or not the particular artist or poet or philosopher would feel the present state of art or poetry or philosophy to be an advance or a
retrogression from the days when he himself was a creative spirit. There would be no unanimity among us; and more significant still, no agreement between the majority view which might prevail and that which would have prevailed fifty years ago. (Conant 1957, p. 34)

But, to Kuhn’s point, do you see the enterprise of natural science as a cumulative development ?

How do you react to Rorty’ observation?

“Most of Kuhn’s readers were prepared to admit that there were areas of culture—e.g., art and politics—in which vocabularies, discourses, Foucaultian epistémés replaced one another, and to grant that, in these areas, there was no overarching metavocabulary into which every such vocabulary might be translated. But the suggestion that this was true of the natural sciences as well was found offensive. Critics of Kuhn such as Scheffler and Newton-Smith thought of Kuhn as casting doubt on “the rationality of science.” They sympathized with Lakatos’ description of Kuhn as having reduced science to “mob psychology.”
(Rorty 1991, p. 47)

Certain experiments could be said to be an artform, such as using sophisticated devices to see detect the wave function collapse. — Manuel

I don’t think that’s what Feyerabend intended with his linkage of science and science. I think it was closer to Kuhn’s purpose in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , which was to change the image of science by bringing it closer to the image of art.

“The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development –
neither could have reached its present state without its past – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct.
Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso.
In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them.

The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn disagrees with this cumulate e model of science:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (Kuhn M2, p. 7)19

Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

I’m hoping that Antony will weigh in at some point. I’m reluctant to get myself any deeper into it in the meantime.

But what if the supposed objective ‘fact’ of ability on which the effect is based is nothing but an abstracted average derived from the real individual variability in self-assessment?
— Joshs

This is baloney. I was an engineer for 30 years. Before that, I was a cabinetmaker for 10. I knew who was good at what they did and who was not. It's not hard to tell. — T Clark

Yes, but I thought the point of Dunning Kruger was eaxh person’s assessment of their own capabilities, not your assenssmanr of their capabilities. And for that matter , how has your assessment of others skills been shaped by your own skill development? Before you learnt engineering or cabinetry , how might your judgement of others talents in those arenas differed? Would you disagree with the idea that how much you know influences your opinion on others’ abilities?
And it gets more complicated than that, doesn’t it. There are different facets to any skill set. Some emphasize some facets more than others( efficiency, style, speed,thoroughness). There is also the question of determining WHY someone’s product doesn’t measure up? Are they lacking the skill set or are there other factors involved? If one is trying to avoid firing an employee it is useful to recognize these. factors.

And what about ability in theoretical realms like philosophy and basic science?

Every writer imagining themselves to be an original
thinker considers their work groundbreaking and ahead of its time. Is there an ‘ objective ‘ way to determine the validity of their claims?