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.

Even if it be allowed to consciousness that it uses, say, understanding, it cannot do so in the approximation of itself as an understander, for it is the understander which stands in consciousness of its thinking, from which follows consciousness, in approximating itself as a thinker, is conscious of itself being conscious of its thoughts, which is absurd. — Mww

Experiencing, understanding and reasoning are acts of subjectivity. They are not something over and above the subject but constitutive of the subject itself. So when I engage in these activities I am intrinsically conscious of them as constitutive of me. Or so I would argue...

I acknowledge that there is no definitive interpretation on these matters and that commentators have disagreed substantially over the last two millennia over the meanings of terms such as substance (ousia), substratum/subject (hypokeimenon), matter (hyle) and form (morphe/eidos).

In the Categories, Aristotle distinguished between "primary" and "secondary" substance, the former denoting concrete individuals such as Socrates, the latter denoting abstractions such as "man". In the Metaphysics and De Anima the account of substance is not as straightforward, but I think a reasonable case can be made for interpreting substance as denoting the concrete individual. Aristotle seems consistent in defining substance as a composite of matter and form (as in your quotation from De Anima 412.a6). As you suggest, the word "matter" is not to be understood as denoting any particular physical "stuff", but rather a principal of potentiality operative within every substance. While this principal is always realized in some concrete substratum, it's not equivalent to any given substratum. Substratum refers to that which persists under change, whereas matter seems to refer to something more like a constraint on what forms can or can't be "received" by any given substratum as determined by the nature of the substratum itself.

Form seems to variably refer to the principles of unity, actuality and "what-ness" of a substance. Basically, it accounts for everything that makes something what it is, aside from the substratum.

One way of interpreting these terms "form", "matter" and "substratum" is to understand them as "roles" that things can play with respect to each other. The bronze plays the role of both substratum and matter with respect to the bronze statue, whereas the shape of the statue plays the role of form with respect to the bronze.

On this interpretation a form (such as a shape) is constitutive of the substance (bronze statue). It is immanent to the substance in the sense that it is not something over-and-above the substance, yet it's not equivalent to the substance which also includes some additional constituent(s) playing the roles of matter and/or substratum. This approach potentially enables a "hierarchical" ontology. For example, atoms have form with respect to subatomic particles and are matter with respect to basic chemical compounds. Basic chemical compounds have form with respect to atoms and are matter with respect to complex chemical compounds, etc., etc.

Now whether this is the correct interpretation of Aristotle, I can't claim to know for sure as I'm not an expert in the interpretation of ancient Greek manuscripts. That said, scholars like Anscombe, Gill, Jaworski and Kosman seem to lean in this direction, as did (arguably) Thomas Aquinas and some of his followers.

I think you’re rather over-dramatising my view. My argument isn’t against realism as such, nor against inquiry into it. It’s against the presumption that reality is exhausted by the objective domain. — Wayfarer

I apologize if I've read too much into your critique. Hopefully the discussion has proved interesting nonetheless.

Not an impasse but a misunderstanding. — Wayfarer

Perhaps.

The point is categorical, not psychological. There is a difference between reflexive awareness and object-awareness. By way of analogy: just as the eye is present in every act of seeing without ever appearing as a seen thing, subjective consciousness is present in every experience without itself appearing as an object of experience. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. I acknowledge that there is a difference between reflexive awareness and object awareness. You are right that the subject is not an object in the sense of being something standing “over-against” the subject.

But I don’t think that this is enough to establish your conclusion that realism is incoherent. After all, you don’t deny that the subject can be experienced, understood or known. Your claim that there is a categorical distinction between the subject qua object and the subject qua subject doesn’t strictly follow from the fact that the subject is not an empirical object. All that follows is that the subject can epistemically appropriate itself in different ways - as experienced, as understood, as known.

You could argue that understanding and judgement cannot fully appropriate the subject. There’s always “something more” that hasn’t yet been appropriated. This has already been granted in the transcendental distinction between the in-itself and the for-consciousness as outlined in previous posts. This only implies the unknown, not the unknowable.

So the realist deals with the “noumenal ground” of subjectivity by understanding it as unknown, not unknowable; indeterminate, not indeterminable; intelligible in potentia, not unintelligible in actu. Inquiry is the process of excavating this intelligibility, not manufacturing it.

I have argued that this attitude is a normative precondition of inquiry itself. Inquiry would be incoherent if consciousness presupposed that Being was unknowable, indeterminable and unintelligible. To deny this, I would argue, is not mystical profundity, but a retreat from the task and responsibilities of honest inquiry.

Forms are real in Aristotle’s sense, but their reality is not the reality of an object of perception. Their mode of being is inseparable from intelligibility itself. And if that is the case, how could they 'exist in the world in a mind-independent way'? — Wayfarer

For Aristotle forms exist in substances. Their existence is, in some sense, constitutive of substance. This is what I meant when I said he considered form to be immanent to material substances. For him form is literally inseparable from matter. When form enters the mind it is still bound to the matter of the organism, but in a different mode of existence. In that case the form exists in a way that determines “what” the organism is thinking about or perceiving, rather than in a way that determines “what” the organism is.

I didn't say that. I said, the subject is not an object, except to another subject. When i look at you, I see another subject as object, although the fact that we use personal pronouns acknowledges the fact that you are another subject, and not an object. First-person subjectivity is real, but it is not something that can appear to itself as an object. That’s a categorical point, not a skeptical one.

We can obviously think about our own thinking, but it remains the fact that although we can see our eye in the mirror, we cannot see our own act of seeing. Also a categorical distinction — Wayfarer

It sounds like we may be at an impasse here. It seems fairly self-evident to me that the subject can become its own object, otherwise self-knowledge would be impossible. However, you seem particularly concerned here, not with self-knowledge, but with self-experience. From my perspective it seems equally self-evident that I am aware of my acts of seeing. This isn’t because I can “see my own seeing”, but because conscious awareness is intrinsic to the act of seeing something. I am intrinsically conscious of my conscious acts - otherwise they wouldn’t be conscious acts.

But, do forms exist in the world? If they are only grasped by intellect, in what sense do they exist? — Wayfarer

Recall that in the Aristotelian tradition material substance is a compound of matter, form and existence. Form is what actualizes matter and doesn’t exist independently of matter. So yes, in that tradition, forms exist in the world in a mind-independent way as immanent to material substance - not in the mind of God, nor in a Platonic “third-realm”. Whether this account (or something like it) is correct is another question, but this is my understanding of how Aristotle would have answered your question, and I would tend to agree with the general approach, if not with all of the fine details.

I’d agree Kant’s account is epistemic, but not sure about “prior to the empirical”. And I don’t know in what sense any of Kant’s account is ontological, re: “… The proud name of ontology, which presumes to offer synthetic a priori cognition of things in general in a systematic doctrine must give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of pure understanding…” (A247/B303). — Mww

What I mean by “epistemically prior to the empirical” is that a proper understanding of the empirical depends on a proper understanding of the transcendental. By “ontologically prior” I mean that the existence of the empirical world depends on the existence of the operations of the transcendental subject. I would argue Kant’s system entails both, though I recognize there are other interpretations.

Actually, I was going for the opposite. The system in operation is just that; the talk of the system is over and above, or in addition to, the operation itself. I mean…the system never talks to itself, isn’t trying to understand itself; it is just that which understands, and is necessarily presupposed by the talk of it. — Mww

I would disagree with this. As mentioned in my reply to Wayfarer, I see consciousness as inherently reflexive. It can (and manifestly does) use experience, understanding and reason to appropriate itself as experiencer, understander and reasoner.

But surely this construction is made from a perspective outside all three of them! Look, you say, on the one side, the proverbial chair, on the other, the subject, and between them, the act of cognition. But that observation can only be made from third person perspective. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it is, again, an abstraction. The subject whom you are here designating an object, is only object from a third-person or external perspective. So the entire construction still remains 'vorstellung', representation, in Schopenhauer's terms. — Wayfarer

I don’t agree with the idea that the subject is forever hidden behind a veil of representation, firstly because I don’t believe that knowledge is essentially representational in nature. Furthermore, I would argue that consciousness is intrinsically reflexive such that we can experience our experiencing, understand our understanding, reason about our reasoning, etc. This doesn’t require an impossible “exit” from subjectivity, but is built into how consciousness works. The subject isn’t something hiding behind its acts, but is constituted by those acts and is accessible through them. This isn’t just theoretical artifice - it’s a part of how I plainly experience, understand and know myself on a day-to-day basis.

Furthermore, to claim that “the subject is unknowable” amounts to a performative contradiction since it is itself a claim made by the subject about the subject. If true, how do you know it’s true? Either the claim is known to be true, in which case knowledge of the subject is possible, or else it is false, in which case knowledge of the subject is possible.

I will happily concede that some readings of Kant seem to leave us completely separated from an unknowable reality. But on the other hand, a sense of the 'unknowability of existence' is a fundamental philosophical virtue in my book. — Wayfarer

I think this sounds more romantic than it really is. If Being is unknowable then inquiry is pointless. I’d rather say that the intelligibility of Being is inexhaustible. No matter how much we already know, there’s always more to be known.

It is nevertheless the case that the form can only be grasped by nous. That is what rationality enables, it is the faculty that makes us 'the rational animal'. The philosophical question is, in what sense do forms exist? Again, they're not phenomenal existents (unless you accept the D M Armstrong definition which equates forms with attributes of particulars, which I don't.) They are, as per the classical tradition, intelligibles - not dependent on the mind, but only perceptible to the intellect. — Wayfarer

Yes, form can only be grasped by nous - the very same forms that also exist in the world independently of nous. This is just how mind and world connect. I would argue that the reason that this is hard for you to see is that you’ve chosen an epistemology (based on an ontology) that makes it impossible for mind and world to connect in this manner.

The structure of subjectivity goes beyond the purview of Kantian transcendental philosophy, in that the structure of subjectivity must include pure practical reason, re: moral philosophy, which transcendental philosophy does not address. Ref: A15/B29

Transcendental philosophy has for its object the structure and bounds of pure speculative reason, all its content already having been abstracted, and the critique of it is that by which understanding obtains the rules for its proper concerns, re: the possibility for and validity of pure a priori synthetic cognitions in relation to empirical conditions. — Mww

Yes, this is Kant’s definition of transcendental philosophy, but I am approaching it differently. Kant excludes the analysis of practical reason because it deals with desire, which is an empirical matter. For Kant the transcendental is not only epistemically “prior” to the empirical, but also “ontologically” prior (in some sense) as well, whereas the account I’ve been elaborating sees it as only epistemically prior.

Might this be separating the system in the talk of it, from the system in the operation of it? The system in and of itself, regardless of the talk about it, is both participatory and knowing. The system doesn’t have subjects and objects; the talk of it merely reifies some speculative content into comprehensible expressions, of which the modus operandi doesn’t have and therefore of which it makes no use. — Mww

I think what you are describing here is the idea that the system in operation is, in some sense, “overabundant” with respect to the system in the talk of it which, if you think about it, is already implied within the idea that the object in-itself is in excess of the object for-consciousness as laid out previously. The system in operation is trying to understand itself. This just means that the system itself plays the role of “object” in its conceptualization of itself. This implies that the system as it is in-itself is always epistemically in excess of the system as it is for-consciousness. There is always more to know about the system than is already known.The system knows it doesn’t know everything about itself. This is the known-unknown. Unknown, but not unknowable, otherwise inquiry would cease (or, more accurately, never get started in the first place).

Otherwise you'd have the absurd situation of differentiating objects from 'things which aren't objects' independently of any act of identification or synthesis. The whole point of the argument is to protest the notion that we're passive recipients of an already-existing world. In reality we are cognitive agents who's mind is always actively constructing our experienced world - the lebenswelt, the world of lived meanings. — Wayfarer

I don’t deny that the mind has an active role to play in the construction of the lebenswelt, what I am skeptical of is the notion that the entirety of the contents of the lebenswelt exists only in the mind. This was the whole reason for introducing the notion of form, because forms can exist simultaneously both in a mind-dependent way and in a mind-independent way.

I agree that for Aristotle the intellect grasps form, not representations. But for Aristotle, that is precisely why the form is not mind-independent in the empiricist sense. In knowing, the intellect becomes the form; the form exists as intelligible only in being apprehended. So while the thing may exist independently as a composite of matter and form, objecthood and intelligibility are not properties it has apart from cognition. That is why Aristotle does not treat knowledge as the passive reception of a ready-made object, but as the actualisation of form in νοῦς. — Wayfarer

I don’t think this is quite right. A form existing in a mind-independent way (esse naturale) is always potentially intelligible. When the intellect grasps the form it becomes actually intelligible (esse intentionale). However, it is still one-and-the-same form now instantiated in two different ways.

Of course, not every form that comes to be instantiated in the intellect is also instantiated in nature. In that case the form is said to be purely a being of reason (ens rationis). The existential duality of form is what accounts for the fact that some of the contents of the lebenswelt are purely constructs of the mind. Some, but not all.

The point of the 'idealism in context' argument, is that idealism arose because of the loss of the sense of 'participatory knowing' that is found in Aristotelian Thomism, which preserved the sense of the 'union of knower and known' that later empiricism replaces with a spectator theory of knowledge, the sense of being apart from or outside of reality. And that is more than just an epistemological difference, it's a profound existential re-orientation. — Wayfarer

I totally agree, which is why I find it somewhat surprising that you look to Kant in order to re-establish the sense of participatory knowing given that his approach renders the world as it is in-itself (noumenal world) unknowable. Kant gives you the “participatory” part, but it’s at the expense of the “knowing” part.