Thanks for the thoughtful clarification. I think this helps me better locate where we’re really diverging.

I agree with you that the epistemological and ontological dimensions can’t be simply sealed off from one another. My worry, though, is that the antinomy only arises if we assume that intelligibility itself must be grounded in a conscious subject, rather than being intrinsic to being as such.

Following a more Aristotelian line, I would want to say that intelligibility is not something projected onto the world by consciousness, nor is it a mere coincidence. Rather, being itself is intelligible: it is structured, law-governed, and dynamically ordered in ways that can be grasped by intelligence. Consciousness is required for the act of understanding, but not for intelligibility to be operative in reality in the first place.

On this view, the fact that the empirical world is intelligible does make a genuine ontological claim, but it is a claim about the nature of being, not about the presence of a fundamental cognizing consciousness underwriting it. Intelligibility belongs to things insofar as they are, while understanding belongs to subjects insofar as they inquire and grasp.

This is why I’m still inclined to think the force of the antinomy depends on collapsing two distinct explanatory orders. Questions about how consciousness arises in the world concern the order of efficient causality. Questions about knowing concern the structure and operations of consciousness as oriented toward grasping the intelligible order of being in-itself. The latter does not, I'd argue, require that consciousness be ontologically fundamental.

That is a penetrating critique of Nagarjuna's philosophy, and I think it exposes a major instability in his thought. I get the impression that this instability is by design, though, in the sense that Nagajuna's aim is not to produce a philosophical system, but to force the mind out of any such system. As such, his critique causes the mind to cycle endlessly between affirming and denying both conventional and ultimate reality, never finding a stable resting point between the two. On this interpretation, the generation of aporia is intended to work as a therapeutic device, kicking the mind out of it's attachment to representation and into...well, that's the question. Enlightenment?

Like you, though, I think this approach works "too" well, as it undercuts any stable ground from which Nagarjuna can assert the "reality" of emptiness, nirvana, samsara, karma, or anything else. In other words, his (non)-doctrine of emptiness seems to be left teetering precariously on a precipice with nihilism on one side and naive realism on the other. Some might see this as a boon, but I'm not so sure.

Thanks for clarifying.

Since the post I originally responded to specifically referenced Meillasoux I think it is worth noting that Meillasoux would resist framing his argument in terms of modal semantics or (mere) logical conceivability. This deflates his metaphysical/transcendental meta-claim about the nature of modality itself into a question of technical formulation within modal logic. That said, if we’re content to set Meillesoux’s argument aside, then we can move on.

I would say that your claim that modal logic does not, by itself, compel the affirmation of a necessarily existing being is uncontroversial. What would be more controversial is the claim that metaphysical necessity is reducible to logical necessity. While you don’t seem to have explicitly stated this claim anywhere in your argument, I would say that it implicitly relies on that reduction in order to have any metaphysical force.

The hidden premise seems to be something like “all genuine necessities must be expressible as necessities in modal logic”. This collapses a genuine distinction. Logical necessity is about entailment between propositions. Metaphysical necessity is about what reality must be like in order for there to be anything at all. The argument you presented does not address the latter. As such, the argument regarding stipulated constraints doesn’t have any force because metaphysical necessity is not merely stipulated as part of a model-building choice, it is inferred as part of an argument or discovered as the end result of inquiry.

Thoughts?

Thus there is no causal explanation ultimately for why there is existence. It simply is. — Philosophim

Thanks for the additional clarification. Your additional comments do a great job of hammering in the logic behind your argument. It seems like the question comes down to whether or not one thinks there is still an additional unanswered question lingering at the termination of the causal chain. You argue that once all contingent causal explanations have been exhausted, there's nothing left to explain. The residual worry is that this leaves the contingent totality itself unexplained.

Another way of framing the worry is that explaining each individual item within a contingent series by reference to its predecessor does not explain why there is a contingent series at all. The relations within the series can't be used to explain the existence of the series itself. The response "it just is" seems to arbitrarily terminate inquiry rather than satisfy it. I wouldn't argue that this is incoherent, but I might argue that it is unprincipled. To see what I mean, one might ask "why accept brute contingency at the level of the series but not at lower levels? If we accepted "it just is" earlier in the inquiry, explanation would never get off the ground."

What do you think? Is this a legitimate concern?

Yes. In standard modal semantics (e.g. S5), whether an individual exists in all possible worlds depends on how we stipulate the domain of worlds. Modal logic allows expanding domains, shrinking domains, and varying domains. Nothing in S5 forces the existence of a necessary individual.

But the argument is not that modal logic forces us to accept a necessarily existing individual. Nor is It that there must be an individual whose existence is logically necessary in all possible worlds. You keep trying to reframe the issue as only about the modal status of individuals across possible worlds, whereas the argument concerns the conditions under which any such modal reasoning about individuals is intelligible at all.

To put it another way:

1. There is no metaphysical necessity whatsoever; reality is absolutely contingent. (Meillasoux)

simply does not follow from:

2. For any individual object, I can construct a world where it does not exist. (Modal Semantics)

The former is a full-blooded metaphysical claim. As such, an appropriate rebuttal was given in equally metaphysical terms.

Ironically, Meillassoux himself explicitly rejects the application of possible world semantics to the problem of absolute contingency as methodologically suspect. I don't think he'd support your translation of his thesis into a trivial point about modal semantics.

I think we're talking past each other. The point isn’t that incoherence is acceptable; I'm not advocating for inconsistency, I'm doing the opposite. The claim “only contingency is necessary,” when asserted as a true description of reality, already presupposes necessity, intelligibility, and universal scope. The criticism is not “your account is messy,” but “your account relies on what it denies in order to be stated as true at all.” Yes, modal logic can ensure formal coherence, but it doesn’t address that deeper dependence.

That something is necessary for the sake of other things does not automatically mean it is metaphysically necessary in the strict sense.

There's a small notion of necessity as that which must be the case in order for something else to be the case - If you would read this post, it is necessary that you read English. There is a broader notion of necessity as what is true in all possible worlds - that two and two is four. They are not the same.

The advantage of the latter is that it avoids the contentious and irrelevant notion of causation. — Banno

The original argument was not claiming that intelligibility is causally prior, instrumentally required or merely pragmatically unavoidable. It was claiming that the very meaning of contingency presupposes a necessary intelligible order (being, non-contradiction, negation, truth). These are conditions of the possibility of meaningfully asserting anything at all, including claims about contingency.

As such, the appeal to possible worlds semantics doesn't help as it already assumes a stable notion of truth, determinate identity across worlds, modal structure itself and the intelligibility of worlds as such. These cannot themselves be contingent all the way down. Modal logic describes relations between propositions, it doesn't explain why there is an intelligible order in virtue of which modal distinctions are meaningful at all.

The original argument was not about causation, but about explanatory dependence. Contingency implies intelligible dependence relations, intelligible dependence cannot be infinite or self-cancelling, therefore contingency presupposes something non-contingent.

Or so the argument goes...

I see what you are saying, but let me counter that slightly. The scope is not the entire universe, the scope is the totality of explanations for that universe. Meaning this includes all of the sub-causalities inside of it. When we trace backwards through these chains we either get a 'start' to the chain, or we see the whole chain in its totality. Either way, there is no cause at these points of reference. It simply is. It just so happens that these points of reference are the limits of causality for the causal explanations of that universe. And in either case, there can be no prior cause which allowed the causation of the universe to be. — Philosophim

Yes, this makes sense, but I don't think it fully evades the original objection. The original objection wasn't that you hadn't traced the causal chain far enough, it was that even if you trace every causal explanation available within the universe, you have still not explained why there is any contingent reality at all. In other words, the objection is distinguishing between causal explanation and metaphysical explanation. Causal explanation can explain one contingent entity by reference to another, but it can't explain contingent existence itself. Calling something "the limit of causality" does not show that it is self-explanatory, it only shows that a certain kind of explanation has run out. The objection is saying that there is still more to be explained even after taking all causal explanations into account.

What do you think?

Nuh. Sure, all you have said is that if we are to be consistent, then we need to not be inconsistent. Well, yes. If you what to be inconsistent, go ahead, but don't expect to be able to do it consistently. — Banno

The point is not a trivial reminder that consistency is good, it's that the claim "only contingency is necessary" is being advanced as a true account of reality, not as a shrug or a stylistic preference. Once it's put forward as such, it implicitly claims universal scope, necessity and intelligibility. In other words, it depends on the implicit acceptance of what it outwardly denies. Once inconsistency is embraced at the level of first principles, rational discourse no longer functions as inquiry into reality.

And what is a groundless ground? It is performativity itself, becoming before being, difference prior to identity, intra-action before self-presence. — Joshs

I just realized I didn't address this point:

I would say that these (performativity, becoming, difference, intra-action) are descriptions, not grounds. They tell us how discourse or reality behaves, but not why there is such behavior in the first place. For example:

• To say “becoming” is prior to being still presupposes that becoming exists.
  
• To say “difference” is prior to identity still presupposes something that differs.
  
• To say “performativity” grounds intelligibility still presupposes that performativity is intelligible enough to ground anything.

In other words, I would argue that these smuggle intelligibility back in while denying it at the level of principle.

Again, I'd love to get your thoughts on this.

What if the ground of intelligibility is itself groundless, as Wittgenstein and Heidegger maintain? — Joshs

I consider this is a position worth taking seriously and part of why my "yes" is tentative, but ultimately I find it unsatisfying for the following reasons:

1. It's more of a refusal to ask certain questions than a rebuttal, casting intelligibility as an optional philosophical preference. This strikes me as untrue to the authentic spirit of the human desire to know, which continues to ask "why" until an answer is reached or inquiry is abandoned. Abandonment is a performative choice, rather than an explanatory achievement.

2. Groundless ground is, ultimately, a contradiction in terms. I don't think of this is a mere rhetorical point. A ground is, by definition, that in virtue of which something is intelligible. Terminating explanation in a groundless ground is another way of saying "that which makes everything else intelligible is itself unintelligible", thereby affirming intelligibility everywhere except at the decisive point and exempting the most fundamental reality from the very standard it Is supposed to support.

3. If intelligibility is ultimately groundless, then the claim itself has no intelligible ground and cannot be rationally affirmed as true, only enacted as a stance. Perhaps this is what drove Heidegger into poetics and Wittgenstein into silence, but the moment it is offered as a philosophical claim - especially one meant to correct others - it implicitly submits to normative standards like coherence, explanatory adequacy and rational assent, thereby re-engaging the very operations it tries to overcome.

I'm curious to get your thoughts on this.

I would tentatively answer "yes", and argue that contingency means dependency on conditions. Dependency implies ordered explanatory relations. A structure of ordered explanatory relations ultimately requires an unconditioned (ungrounded) ground.

Contra Meillassoux ( ): the claim "only contingency is necessary" is put forth as a universal and necessary truth about the structure of reality. Thus, the assertion of this claim implies its own denial and reveals an equivocation between logical conceivability and real intelligibility. That X can be conceived as not-X without formal contradiction implies absence of logical necessity not absence of metaphysical necessity. The very act of conceiving ~X presupposes a stable intelligible order (non-contradiction, being, negation, truth) none of which can be coherently negated without self-undermining. Universal contingency therefore parasitically depends on an unacknowledged necessity; the unconditioned ground of intelligibility. In other words, contingency only makes sense against the background of intelligibility and, therefore, cannot be absolutized.

Contra : the argument correctly shows that the universe cannot have a temporal cause (something earlier in time) or a compositional cause (something spatially outside the totality of things) , but it does not address the question of existential contingency per se. Scientific and descriptive causes explain how states of affairs arise within the universe, but they do not explain existence as such. The argument purports to address the question of existence as-such, but treats existence as if it were the last member of an explanatory chain (category error). Explaining existence does not mean finding an external producer in time or composition, but an unconditioned ground. Expanding explanatory “scope” to include the entire universe merely aggregates all contingent entities into a contingent totality, but does not address the question of why there is something (I.e. contingent totality) rather than nothing. Even an eternal or infinite universe remains a collection of contingent beings whose existence is not self-explanatory. This is a question of metaphysical grounding rather than causality and (in my opinion) is left unaddressed.

So, as a way to solve the antinomy, I propose that we need to accept both stories and reconcile them. Yes, our consciousness is contingent, is ontologically dependent etc and it can't be the ground of 'intelligibility' of ourselves and the 'external world' (and also the 'empirical world', at the end of the day). But at the same time, I take seriously the other 'side' of the antinomy and I also affirm that intelligibility seems to be grounded in consciousness. However, in order to get a 'coherent story' that includes both insights, I acknowledge that I have to posit a consciousness of some sort that can truly be regarded as the ground of intelligibility. Panentheism is a way, I believe, to overcome and at the same time accept the 'main message' of the antinomy you are referencing. — boundless

This is an insightful reply to antinomy framing. I wonder, though, if there's another way forward that renders the antinomy only apparent. An alternative framing is to see it as two separate questions that are being run together:

1. A question about the genesis of human consciousness in time
2. A question about the conditions of possibility of knowing anything at all

To my mind, these are not strictly contradictory. In order to see this, we need to distinguish between two different orders:

1. Order of being / efficient causality: how X comes to be
2. Order of knowing / intelligibility: how X can be known, affirmed, understood

I would argue that this only feels contradictory when questions about the "conditions of knowing" are collapsed into questions about the "conditions of being". But asking after the conditions of our knowing X is not the same as asking after the conditions for there being X. These two sets of conditions are not identical, and the fulfillment of the former is generally neither necessary nor sufficient for the fulfillment of the latter. To put it more bluntly, transcendental conditions are not efficient causes, though they are the conditions for the knowledge of efficient causes.

Thoughts?

Agreed. I am familiar with these thinkers, and would say that my own thought on these matters is indebted (at least in part) to all three of them.

Nāgārjuna’s analysis is subtler: it is the rejection of the inherent existence (svabhāva) of particulars, not of their existence tout courte. Phenomena are real, but relationally and dependently — not as self-grounding entities possessing inherent reality. In that sense, Madhyamaka doesn’t abolish metaphysics so much as reframe it, replacing substance-based ontology with an analysis of conditions, relations, and modes of appearing. A key point is that there is nothing to grasp or posit as a first principle or ultimate cause. The causality Buddhism is concerned with is the cause of dukkha — the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of existence. And Buddhism refrains from positing views of what is ultimately real, as it has to be seen and understood, rather than posited, which leads to 'dogmatic views'. Nāgārjuna is well known for saying that he has no doctrine of his own. — Wayfarer

Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I have encountered Nāgārjuna before through the secondary literature in the philosophy of religion, but I didn't realize that Bitbol was influenced by him so specifically. This actually helps me to better understand Bitbol's reticence toward metaphysics and also helps to clarify more precisely where I think Bitbol's position is unstable.

The more I reflect upon it, the more it seems to me that Bitbol's aim is really to set boundaries on what can and cannot be said. This is not the quietism of the early Wittgenstein ("what we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence") but something more like the therapeutic stance of the later Wittgenstein ("philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday"). Bitbol isn't saying "stop talking about metaphysics", he's saying "take a critical look at what makes you talk this way and then you will stop talking about metaphysics".

I don't think this is incoherent per se, but there is definitely a major tension implicit here. Basically, Bitbol relies on the authority of rational critique, but refuses the ontological consequences of that very authority. As part of his critique Bitbol makes claims such as:

1. Some ways of framing questions really are mistaken
2. Some metaphysical claims really are illegitimate
3. Some explanations really do invert the explanatory order

It invites the question: are these claims about the way things really are? I think this is a tender point for Bitbol. He wants to gatekeep the bounds of reason, but in order to do this he needs to grant reason a level of authority that he also seemingly wants to deny to it. If reason has the power to say what is unconditionally the case when engaging in critique, then how can we deny it that same power when it comes to ontology?

Nāgārjuna, by contrast, seems to take the bull by the horns in a way that Bitbol doesn't. While Bitbol and Nāgārjuna seem share some of the same methodological interests, Nāgārjuna seems much more willing to simply jettison any ultimate commitment to grounding, normativity or truth as final arbiters of anything at all. In response to the charge of inconsistency or self-contradiction Nāgārjuna's response would simply be "yes". As such, Nāgārjuna isn't really proposing a philosophy in the modern sense of the word, but rather something more like a path of liberation from philosophy (in the modern sense of the word).

Before I say anything further I want to get your thoughts. Does my critique of Bitbol hit the mark? Is my characterization of Nāgārjuna's intent accurate?

This is a surprisingly interesting question. I think I would throw my hat in the ring with those who say that the question is poorly framed because "things that do not exist" are not "things" at all, but are merely intelligible contents that lack existence apart from the acts of understanding and meaning through which they are constituted.

Consider an impossible "object" such a square-circle. I understand what "square" means. I understand what "circle" means. I understand that their definitions are incompatible. I judge that square-circles can't exist - they are not a "thing" over-and-above my understanding of the definitions and their incompatibility.

Thoughts?

Welcome back! And many thanks for the well written summary of Bitbol's essay. I've been aware of Bitbol for some time but have never had the chance to directly engage with his work until now.

I've been reading through Is Consciousness Primary and am enjoying it very much. I think your summary is generally very faithful to Bitbol’s thesis, but I do feel that you sometimes slide into an ontological register that Bitbol himself would resist. Here are some examples:

This asymmetry leads to Bitbol’s central claim: the attempt to derive consciousness from material processes reverses the real order of priority. Whatever is presumed to exist in the physical world already presupposes consciousness as the field in which such ascriptions occur. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

As such, consciousness is not something over and above the world, nor something inside it. It is the condition for there being a world at all. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

Bitbol makes it fairly clear that it’s not his intention to make any positive pronouncements regarding the ontological relationship between mind and world, whereas I feel that your interpretive comments are a bit more ambiguous on this point:

It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused... (emphasis mine) — Bitbol (Is Consciousness Primary? (2008))

So, asserting that consciousness is “existentially primary” was no metaphysical doctrine. Asserting the existential primacy of consciousness was no idealist, property dualist (Chalmers, 1996), or panpsychist (Strawson, 2007) doctrine of the ontological primacy of consciousness to be contrasted with a doctrine of the ontological primacy of matter…we refrain from any such doctrine. (emphasis mine) — Bitbol and Luisi (Science and the Self-Referentiality of Consciousness (2011))

So while Bitbol’s answer to the question “Is Consciousness Primary” is “yes”, he’s not thereby positing an ontological dependence between mind and world, only a methodological dependence (as others on the thread have also noticed). He’s willing to say what he thinks the ontological relationship between mind and world is not, but he entirely refrains from proposing any positive account of that relationship.

Personally, I find this dissatisfying. While I think Bitbol is right to reject reductive materialism, right to expose the limits of objectification, and right to insist on the primacy of lived experience, I don’t think Bitbol is successful in dissolving the ontological question and, therefore, simply ends up leaving it unanswered. In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree with my interpretation of Bitbol, or am I getting him wrong, and how does this criticism relate to your own view?

No problem! Thank you for your question. It helped me to clarify my own thoughts on these matters.

Prepared to be wrong? — Tom Storm

Of course!

But isn't this antithetical to antifoundationalism as it seems to presuppose a foundational standard of correctness — Tom Storm

As mentioned in my comment, it depends on how strictly we are defining "anti-foundationalism".

Foundationalism in ethics typically refers to the view that all moral truths are grounded in self-evident moral axioms, divine commands, natural law propositions, fixed metaphysical moral facts, a-priori moral rules, etc.. These are typically understood to stand outside of moral deliberation, provide bottom-up justification for all other moral truths, and terminate the need for further inquiry. I reject these and, in that sense, consider myself an anti-foundationalist.

However, I do affirm the existence of universal norms implicit within rational subjectivity. While these can't be used as justification for any particular set of moral truths, I believe they do express the internal conditions of possibility for moral error, objectivity and progress.

I think this qualifies as weak anti-foundationalism, but it's reasonable to disagree.

I think you’re saying that we may assess other communities from a position of our intersubjective values. One potential problem with this is that there are conservative and religious intersubjective communities that would see the present era (and perhaps our community) as a failure of moral progress. How do you determine which intersubjective community has the better case? — Tom Storm

I'm not proposing an algorithmic decision procedure or a moral high-ground that can be used to definitively decide all disputes. There's no substitute for honest inquiry in these matters, despite its manifest limitations. I'm simply proposing that our meta-ethical theory at least try to make sense of cross-cultural critique in a way that legitimizes it rather than deflates it, while also respecting the reality of the limitations that make it so deeply problematic in practice.

Not a view from nowhere, just an adherence to the norms that are implicit in the act of judging anything to be correct or incorrect.

Anti-foundationalism doesnt deny such normative foundations for our preferences, values and claims, it denies that there some meta-foundation for fallibilism beyond contingent normative communities. Fallibilism functions within particular normative communities, not between or beyond them. — Joshs

I don't think anti-foundationalism has to deny trans-community fallibilism. Personally, I'd argue that such denial fails to account for the fact that we do judge communities to be morally mistaken and traditions to be ethically distorted, and we do speak meaningfully of moral progress against communal consensus. Fallibilism is socially mediated, but not socially grounded.

Not sure why we’re talking about relativism or what it can or cannot say. We’ve already discussed the well-established relativist fallacy in this thread and dealt with it, I do not disagree with it. — Tom Storm

A few people on the forum still seem to be defending various forms of relativism, which is why this response keeps resurfacing.

I’ve been trying to explore anti-foundationalism. — Tom Storm

To answer the question you raised in the OP, yes, I would say it is possible to make moral claims from an anti-foundationalist position provided that "anti-foundationalist" means rejecting metaphysical or axiomatic starting points, rather than rejecting normativity or objectivity itself. I would argue that a moral claim is simply an affirmation or denial of value that one is prepared to be wrong about, in contrast to other moral utterances that merely express feelings, preferences, loyalties, power moves, identity markers, etc. Given this definition, the making of moral claims does not seem to be incompatible with the rejection of axiomatic moral foundations, and implies fallibilism rather than nihilism with regard to moral truth.

So the conclusion is not “religion bad, secular good.” — Truth Seeker

I'm skeptical. After all, your thread is entitled "Comparing Religious and Scientific Worldviews". You literally spend the entirety of the OP showing how religions contradict each other and how secularism offers a way out. In contrast, you spent no time at all reviewing the ways in which secular ideologies contradict each other. In your reply to you even have a section entitled "Why not religion?" in which you list out the characteristics that are supposedly unique to all religions that make them unsuitable for adoption as worldviews, again, without any analysis of how similar dynamics play out in secular ideologies. I'm sorry, but despite what you now claim, it's very hard to take you seriously when you say that you never intended for the conclusion to be "religion bad, secular good."

That said, if you claim this was not your intention, then so be it. Thanks for the lively discussion.

So If i were to for instance attempt to stop someone harming my child, it's not because I think its right, its because I, personally, don't want that to happen because it'll make me feel bad. — AmadeusD

That strikes me as a mischaracterization of the situation. If I saw someone about to harm my child, my implicit response would not be "this will make me feel bad, and I prefer not to feel bad, therefore I'll intervene". Rather, feeling bad would be a response to the perceived worth of my child and the destructiveness of the harm. If my only motivation were only to avoid bad feelings then I would have to regard sedating myself as morally equivalent to protecting my child. But I don't because I judge the child's well-being to be objectively worthwhile and the harm to be truly wrong. That's why I might be willing to risk immense suffering or even death in order to protect them. You're taking a complex cognitive assessment and trying to reduce it to pure emotion.

Emotivism can't adjudicate between competing moral positions. No morality rightly can, because it cannot appeal to anything but itself (the theory, that is - and here, ignoring revelation-type morality as there's no mystery there). The only positions, as I see it, that can adjudicate between conflicting moral positions on a given case is are 'from without' positions such as the Law attempts to take. I still don't think there's a better backing than 'most will agree' for a moral proclamation. — AmadeusD

This proposal seems self-defeating. When you claim that no moral adjudication Is possible you are making a judgement, claiming it is more reasonable than alternatives, and implicitly inviting others to accept it. This already presupposes a commitment to the bindingness of certain norms of rationality, such as that we should consider all positions, understand them accurately and weigh the arguments for and against them. If you truly thought that normativity is reducible to emotion there'd be no point in coming to a philosophy forum to engage in complex arguments in support of anything at all.

Maybe you didn't add a category to the thread when you originally posted it? I'm not sure, I've never started a new thread on this site before. It is strange that it's not showing up on the forum's home page, though. At least, it isn't for me.

My claim is: orthodoxies grounded in authority and sacralization are systematically riskier than orthodoxies grounded in public reasons, fallibilism, and accountability to sentient welfare. — Truth Seeker

You've conceded quite a bit here. Notice that your claim has shifted significantly to being one about the comparative risks of orthodoxies grounded in authority, etc. vs. those grounded in public reasons, etc., whereas your original axis cut across the religious/secular divide. It should now be fairly straight-forward for you recognize that there are plenty of secular orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the former criteria (e.g. Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), and there are plenty religious orthodoxies that can (and do) meet the latter criteria (Quakerism, Universalist Unitarianism, etc.). Now you could respond by saying that former "are actually just religions" and the latter "are not real religions", but then you're just defining religion in a way that makes your critique true by definition.

If you think that’s wrong, the strongest move isn’t “secular groups do it too.” The strongest move is to show that revelation-anchored, sacralized authority is not more prone to harmful insulation than reason-anchored, publicly contestable frameworks. — Truth Seeker

Again, this wasn't really your original claim, which you seem to have now more-or-less abandoned.

Let's go ahead and put the nail in the coffin with regard to your original claim. While it's always difficult to quantify harm, I think you'll be hard pressed to say that religious institutions have caused more harm than dysfunctional secular orthodoxies such as Stalinism, Maoism or Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime.

The bottom line is that the true fault-line here is not between secular and religious orthodoxies, but between functional and dysfunctional orthodoxies, of which we have religious and secular examples of both.

By the way, what happened to your OP? Why doesn't it show up on the forum's main page?

Thank you for the thoughtful reply, but I feel like there are a few things that you're still not properly reckoning with.

First, I feel that you haven't come to terms with the fact that all institutions, both secular and religious, develop orthodoxies, protect core doctrines, and treat certain challenges as illegitimate. Universities have foundational commitments they don't put up for debate and scientific institutions operate within paradigms that resist revision until crisis forces its hand (per Kuhn). Secular political movements and societies have sacred values that function identically to religious dogma in terms of how heresy is treated (I.e. as moral failure). This is a rather obvious sociological/historical point that I think you'll find difficult to dispute.

Furthermore, I think you're under-appreciating the degree to which religious institutions evolve and revise their fundamental commitments over time. Even the Catholic Church, which is often held up as a paragon of rigid adherence to doctrine, has changed so much that it's ultra-conservative members feel that it has all but abandoned some of its fundamental commitments. You might argue that this evolution often results in the splintering of the community, but this is true of all institutions, not just religious. Inevitably there will always be some who are unwilling to compromise and move in a new direction. Again, this is not unique to religious communities.

Second, I'm guessing that if push-came-to-shove many of your own foundational commitments would prove themselves to be less open to revision and falsification than you pretend them to be. Consider your commitment to "openness to revision" itself - are you open to revising this principle? What kind of evidence could someone offer to change your mind on this point? What about the claim that all ethics should be "answerable to the lived welfare of sentient beings", or that "reduction of suffering" is a foundational good? These are not empirical claims that are subject to falsification. Furthermore, I highly suspect that if you were to found an institution rooted in these values that you'd not have much tolerance for those who substantially question or deviate from them. Most probably you would eject such people from the group rather quickly, or leave to start another group.

Overall it seems that you are just turning a blind-eye to the fact that much of what you criticize within religion is not, in fact, unique to religion but seems to be inherent to the human condition.

Very nice! I hadn't seen that paper, though I think I've run across parts of that quote before.

And don't worry, your secret is safe! :wink:

Your critique of religion seems a bit superficial. First, you seem to be treating religion as a monolith, but contemplative traditions within each religion and various process theologies don't seem to fit the characterization of "demanding assent before evidence" or "exempting themselves from scrutiny." Plenty of religious thinkers have engaged rigorously with exactly the challenges raised here.

Your claim that religion "grounds ethics in authority rather than consequences" simply assumes consequentialism is the correct metaethical framework—which is itself contested. Virtue ethics, deontology, and care ethics all have secular and religious variants.

You also seem be implying that secular worldviews don't involve unexamined assumptions or provide "mythological insulation." Not only does that seem to be contrary to fact, but also seems to overlook the reality that any moral/metaphysical framework, including secular ones, rests on foundational commitments that can't be justified from outside the system. The claim that "meaning does not need religion" is probably true, but the claim that "meaning doesn't require some unjustified foundational assumptions" is much harder to defend.

I think you're hitting on something important here. Aristotle's analysis of the soul can be confusing because it is multi-dimensional, and he's not always consistent in how he utilizes his terminology. My understanding is that his analysis is basically three-tiered, meaning that there are three ways in which the soul can be said to "actualize" the body, and they build on each other.

First we have the soul as a set of capacities or latent abilities (dunamis). An example might be that of a human child's capacity to learn a language. Next we have the soul as first-actuality (entelecheia). An example might be that of an adult who has actually learned a language, but is not currently using it. Finally we have the soul as second-actuality (energeia). An example might be that of an adult actually using the language that they have learned.

The connection you made between potentiality and the modern concept of energy is interesting and highlights a key difference between the Aristotelian definitions of matter and energy and the modern definitions. They are practically the inverse of each other. Whereas in modern physics matter (or mass) can be loosely understood as a localized "actualization" of energy in spacetime, for Aristotle energeia was understood to be actualization with respect to a material substrate. In fact, one could argue that the modern concept of energy maps fairly well onto the classical concept of prime matter (pure potentiality) insofar as energy is that which persists under any and all possible change. I don't know how far the analogy can be taken, but it is an interesting parallel to ponder.

I agree with you that there are modes of knowing that operate without explicit intellectual articulation and that nonetheless shape us, guide us and constitute genuine cognitive achievements. The infant knows its mother before any proposition could be formed; the person of practical wisdom knows how to act in complex situations without being able to articulate the principles guiding them; perhaps even the mystic knows God in a way that exceeds any theological formulation.

However, at some point we usually require something stronger than this. The issue isn’t so much whether implicit forms of knowing are real, but whether these are endeavoring to make a claim. Consider that people often have conflicting intuitions about the same matter. Their participatory knowing, their acquaintance with the situation yields contradictory orientations. At some point the question arises: who is correct? This is where insight and understanding must be tested by judgment - and not just one’s own judgment, but often the judgment of an entire community.

It seems to me that in the process of making our implicit knowledge more explicit we often learn more than we thought we knew before. That’s because making it explicit forces us to take responsibility for what we are claiming to know. It forces us to think through the strengths and weaknesses of our understanding, to find the gaps and try to fill them. This process doesn’t replace or eliminate implicit understanding. If done right, it iteratively perfects it.

As for Sellars, he was responding to something very specific - namely, the various foundationalist sense-datum theories of his day. He felt that there were several prominent philosophers who were failing to properly disambiguate between the act of sensation and the act of knowing. His use of the word “knowing” aligns with what we have called “judgment” above, the point where you have moved beyond the implicit to the explicit to making a claim, thereby electing to be held responsible by others for justifying that claim.

Awareness can be counted as a kind of knowledge―knowledge by acquaintance or participation, but it is not, on it's own "knowledge that", or propositional knowledge. — Janus

You are right to distinguish between awareness and propositional knowledge, and you're right that conscious awareness need not rise to level of self-reflection; consciousness is intrinsically self-present.

That said, I personally would not regard the body's response to an itch as "knowing". If we simply feel the itch and scratch it without advertence, then we haven't really risen above the level of stimulus-response. Intelligently adaptive, sure, but not cognitively engaged.

If the itch becomes focal in the sense that we attend to it and understand it as this kind of sensation in this location, and if we implicitly affirm yes, I have an itch, then I'd be willing to say we've achieved knowledge.

That said, Sellars's critique of the Myth of Given is specifically directed toward those who would conflate sensation with propositional knowledge. Sellars might argue that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by participation are merely latent or implicit forms of propositional knowledge that have simply not yet been made explicit by being appropriated into understanding and judgement. In that sense they would be more appropriately classified as a type of experience or presence that, while real and important, does not rise to the level of what would normally be admissible as knowledge in a philosophical context.

Personally, I would tend to agree with Sellars, while also acknowledging that the word "knowledge" is used in many ways in both colloquial and philosophical speech. What are your thoughts?

Yes, perhaps I got lost somewhere along the way. I was originally responding to this:

Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things. — Mww

This seems to stating that awareness is knowledge. Depending on what "awareness" means here would, I think, determine whether the critique applies.

But I am happy to let it go. It sounds like we may be talking past one another.

Have a wonderful holiday!

I don’t need to know there is a sensation beyond having one. The given sensation makes the knowing of it superfluous. — Mww

This doesn't sound right to me. A sensation isn't a claim. It can't be true or false. It can't be a premise in an argument, or the result of an inference. A sensation just is.

One has no need of conceptual context for mere appearances to sensibility. One can have (the sensation of) a tickle on the back of his neck without the slightest clue as to its cause, antecedent experience not necessarily any help except to inform of what the cause is not, but not what it is.To know that there is a thing, some as yet undetermined something, is merely the impossibility of its denial that isn’t self-contradictory. — Mww

Sure, you can have a tickle without knowing its cause, but having a tickle and knowing that you're having a tickle are two different things. The occurrence of the tickle requires no concepts. Your knowing that you're having a tickle does.

The fact that the claim "I'm having a tickle sensation" is, perhaps, impossible to deny does not imply that the claim is not conceptually mediated. The recognition that it can't be denied is itself a reasoned judgment, not an immediate content of sensory experience.

Your points are well-articulated and the parallels you draw between modern cognitive science and Kant are certainly apt (as they were in your original essay). Of course, you could have probably guessed that I would resist taking on too strong a notion of "construction". In my opinion, there is a real difference between saying (1) that cognitive content is underdetermined by sensory input and structured by unconscious operations and (2) saying that the mind-independent world is itself a construct in its entirety.

To put a finer point on it, when you say things like "there's an unconscious synthesis occurring" and "there is no agreed neural mechanism" you are presumably making a claim about the way things really are - not just about the way that they appear to you - and that you've actually grasped and confirmed something true about how the mind actually works. Would you agree with this, or do you see things differently?

Kant made an effort to address this in the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason. Perhaps you could set your thesis against that since his view is sharply different from yours. — Paine

I don't think I can do this justice in a single post, so I am going to start with some general observations and we can dive deeper if needed.

At a high level, I would say that I don’t necessarily disagree with Kant’s critique of the paralogisms, but rather with the underlying epistemology that he uses to justify his critique. In my opinion, Kant basically reduces knowledge to something like “direct empirical access”. I think we can reasonably argue that, in doing this, Kant is running afoul of the Myth of the Given and concluding from it that genuine knowledge is impossible. The general shape of his reasoning goes something like this: “genuine knowledge is immediate; all human knowledge is mediated; therefore no human knowledge is genuine knowledge”. I would say that this is precisely why he is more-or-less forced to posit the noumena and the transcendental subject (among other things) as strictly unknowable. However, if we reject the claim that all genuine knowledge is immediate (and I would), then we don’t have to follow him down that path.

As for the paralogisms themselves, the common assumption undergirding all of them is that the soul can be known a priori. My general strategy for approaching Kant’s analysis of each paralogism would be to more-or-less accept that these a priori arguments fail while also rejecting the reasons Kant provides for why they fail, which are rooted in his errant epistemological commitments as detailed in the paragraph above. The upshot is that I can accept that the paralogisms are faulty without accepting Kant’s conclusion that genuine knowledge of the self is impossible.

Some would argue that awareness of things is knowledge that there are things. Plato, Russell, that I am familiar with. In juxtaposition to knowledge of things. — Mww

I would say that this probably runs afoul of the Myth of the Given. In order to know that there are things one must have grasped concepts such as "thing" and "existence" and made a judgment on the basis of those concepts. Wilfrid Sellars provides a pretty thorough critique of the notion of immediate knowledge.

Doesn’t Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (if indeed a discovery it was, as it had been anticipated previously) have some bearing on the question of self-knowledge? — Wayfarer

Yeah, I'd say so, but I personally don't think it undermines the possibility of self-knowledge. Unconscious mental processes are not present in experience the way empirical objects are, but their effects are. Thus, I'd say that they can be investigated, understood and known. What are your thoughts?

The word I used was "appropriating" not "approximating". In order to know myself I must first be aware of myself. This self-awareness is intrinsic to every conscious act. But awareness is not knowledge. In order to know, I must understand. In order to understand I must inquire.