We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.
Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. — Tom Storm
But you are only able to say this from the perspective you have chosen. For many philosophers there remains a Kantian distinction between appearance and reality as it is in itself. Can we just make this go away simply by using different words or concepts? How is this different to saying that we can solve the problem of the origin of life just by saying God created it? It's only solved if God is 1) real and 2) God created life.
If I say from now on I am a monist, that very act does not do away with the hard question even if it satisfies me, right?
But maybe I've missed something in your response? — Tom Storm
This from "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.
Chalmers;https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf"]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. that unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
" — T Clark
Phenomenology affirms that idealism is accurate? So phenomenology is a monist view which dissolves the dualistic fallacy of mind and body?
How does phenomenology affirm the above? — Tom Storm
How does this differ to idealism? — Tom Storm
Chalmers proposes that things like neutral monism or the extended mind would help us get closer to a theory of consciousness. He's flexible. But strictly speaking, he's part of the analytical tradition, so the physicalism you're speaking of is not essential to analytical philosophy. — frank
If instead the semantics of scientific concepts were perspectival and grounded in the phenomenology and cognition of first-person experience, for example in the way in which each of us informally uses our common natural language, then inter-communication of the structure of scientific discoveries would be impossible, because everyone's concepts would refer only to the Lockean secondary qualities constituting their personal private experiences, which would lead to the appearance of inconsistent communication and the serious problem of inter-translation. In which case, we would have substituted the "hard problem" of consciousness" that is associated with the semantics of realism , for a hard problem of inter-personal communication that can be associated with solipsism and idealism. — sime
I don't want to get into a long discussion about how science has to proceed. I will say that there is no reason the mind would not be among entities amenable for study by science. You and Constance are just waving your arms and promoting a ghost in the machine with no basis except that you can't imagine anything else. — T Clark
"I can't imagine" is a pretty pitiful argument. — T Clark
You're basically describing the hard problem, the point of which is that science needs to grow conceptually in order to have the tools to create a theory of consciousness. — frank
The beginning of a theory of consciousness would just start with guessing at what kind of system could produce the experience of gazing straight ahead, being aware of sights and sounds in a seamless unity. — frank
Exactly that ethics is in the doing. — Banno
Integrated information theory is a stab at creating a theory grounded in direct experience. It's a beginning. — frank
That science has not explained. I see no reason to believe it can't. — T Clark
I can't make sense of that. — Banno
So what is it you can't say, show or do? — Banno
But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno
If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts. — Banno
Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...
It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments! — fdrake
I disagree with this. Scientists don't generally say that biology is nothing but chemistry. In the same way, mental processes, including consciousness, are not nothing but biology. But they are bound by biology in the same way that recorded music is bound by a CD or MP3 reader or radio. Music is not nothing but electronic equipment and electrical processes. — T Clark
Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who studies the biological foundations of mental processes, including consciousness. The book I have is "The Feeling of What Happens." — T Clark
This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness awaits. — Tom Storm
I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics. — Tom Storm
Neuroscience believes it is beginning to make headway, — Joshs
By the way, I question whether religion ever satisfactorily provided solace or explanatory power. Religion was a compulsory, even totalitarian backdrop to human life for centuries and made many people unhappy. It was feared and obeyed, and although it dealt with tragedy and loss and meaning - the ostensibly ineffable - it generally did so in the most brutish of ways (obey God's will; have faith, etc) and seemed to make demands rather than provide consolation or integration. — Tom Storm
This seems to be an important for you. How would it look if it could be done? It's difficult for people to see past Biblical literalism or scientism or naïve realism for the most part, just how would such nuanced philosophical thinking enter people's lives?
Philosophy giveth, and philosophy taketh away, and you are saying that philosophy is so taxing to understand it could never be the social institution religion has been. I recall reading that Wittgenstein once recommended going to church, participating in the rituals and so on, simply because this dimension of our existence was too important to reduce to utterances and argument. He also drew from Tolstoy's depth of conviction, and note the way his protagonists like Levin from Anna Karenina realize what is profoundly important in life in living a kind of holy life working on the farm, rather than talking about it. And you can hear Kierkegaard behind this in the praise of the Knight of Faith, a simply lived life, but lived so completely in, if you will, the light of God, in everything done. The doing, and not the thinking, theorizing: this thinking and theorizing UNDOES the, call it non-natural (not part of "states of affairs") and mystical bond with divinity. And, of course, to even say this in an explanatory context, is nonsense, because we have left the extraordinary intimations of myth and moved into propositional truths in doing so, and this does harm to the most important part of the Tractatus: that which should be passed over in silence.
The reason Witt's Tractatus is so important, as I see it, is this: when he draws the line between the sayable and the unsayable, THEN calls the whole affair nonsense because such lines are impossible, and this is because a line implies something on both sides to make sense, and this contradicts the matter of something not being sayable as one has essentially just said it in talking about lines drawn. But what does this come down to? Extraordinary, and completely right, I say: lines cannot be drawn not because there is nothing THERE, but because the thereness is IN the world; the world IS metaphysics that comes to us when language is "bracketed", and this is, obviously, a term from Husserl and his reduction.
And so I ignored your direct question, I know. Something like this: how can something--if you are on Witt's side, so deeply important that must remain silently possessed, or as to your thoughts that the saying it can be, in my thinking, spoken about and will one day replace religion-- put institutionalized in a society?
The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.
The way such a difficult philosophy will become the new religion I think is found in the way the 60's attempted a kind of interfaith movement, bringing Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, and so on into the fold. Buddhism, for example, is very close to the kind of alignment I try to conceive between Husserl's epoche and Wittgenstein's Tractatus' insistence on silence. Meditation IS silence; silence that keeps at bay (brackets) interposing thoughts that would steal attention away from the "pure" phenomenal encounter. — Tom Storm
This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts. — Joshs
Wow.. This is probably confronting for those of us who think that some stable meaning can be arrived at using language. I hadn't considered the 'transformative' power held by words like 'is' and 'as'. — Tom Storm
I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.
Are we done? — Banno
Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world. — Joshs
↪Constance, in your first post on this thread you gave us:
The reduction I have in mind is Husserl's. The idea is to consciously dismiss presuppositions that implicitly give us the familiarity of the familiar world in a perceptual event.
— Constance
My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
(it) pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus.
— Banno
Your response was
You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
— Constance
To which I asked
What?
— Banno
eliciting in turn your enigmatic response. If you think that T-sentences do not answer your question, then have a go at explaining what it is you are asking. "(H)ow epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world" is an ambiguous question.
It's not enough just to read a bunch of philosophers and pick the bits you like. We are not doing philosophy until we engage with and critique those views. I think you agree with this.
That is what this thread involves. It sets out various ways of understanding the notion of ineffability, and seeks comment on them. It gives folk enough rope, a place to set out a part of their thinking or the thinking of their betrothed, with the aim of identifying problems and inconsistencies therein.
The problem is that you have still to set out what it is you are asking. — Banno
The cup has one handle" is true IFF the cup has one handle. — Banno
What's difficult here is sorting out what it is you expect me to provide. — Banno
That, of course, is the wrong question.
It's the wrong question because it is based on the presumption of an "in here" and an "out there".
Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain.
— Constance
The cat would have difficulty getting onto your brain because your brain is enclosed in a skull.
Yes, I understand that you want the question to be understood figuratively. But then, what is it that you are asking? How it is that you are aware of the cat? How it is that you divide the world up in such a way that there are cats and non-cats? How it is that your cat-sensations lead you to infer that there is a cat-in-itself? Which of these is supposedly represented by "How is it that anything out there gets in here?"
What is it that you actualy want an answer for? — Banno
“We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” From Mill, On Liberty — Richard B
What? — Banno
The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of Joshs and @Constance, too. — Banno