The substantive theories of truth all fail. Pragmatism included. — Banno

But pragmatism claims truth is only relative. How could that view fail?

We are not obligated to refute every single argument that comes along. — Banno

So after a series of evasive one-liner deflections, the confession of the lack of any reasonable counter.

After the prolonged gurgling, the slow disappearance beneath the waves.

You set up a dualism at the base of your doctrine. If I don't accept your doctrine, I do not need to accept your basic dualism. — Banno

It's a dichotomy. So it is anti-dualistic in being fundamentally triadic.

And I presented an argument. So you are just finding excuses to avoid making a counter-argument.

It is you who have claimed a dogmatism in doctrinal fashion. You are telling me you don't need to change your position as no argument is going to change it. You believe what you want to believe.

Seems really philosophical. Or religious. ;)

A trivial split, as opposed to your world-shattering epistemic cut. — Banno

Hmm. What is it that you don't get about the the cut which is the separation that founds the connection? :)

A Peircean epistemology explains how a self is formed via a capacity to be indifferent to the world. As yet, you have made zero counter-argument. You just make these gurgling drowning noises.

You think this a problem because you split the speaker from the world. I don't. — Banno

But you do. You are a representationalist in saying there is "a world". It's right there in your language.

Since meaning is use, sense is found by using a language. A language that was not about the world could not have a use. Consider propositional logic. Like an engine with the clutch in, it would grind away without engaging.

If epistemology is no more than an engine spinning away without making contact with the world, then why bother. — Banno

Again, your response founders on a failure to recognise that language games must create their speakers along with their worlds. So they are always about more than just the world. And also less about the world in that the "speaking self" is defined in terms of a grounding indifference to "the world".

This is the central cognitive trick that your Kantian representationalism just overlooks time and again.

It is telling that you even use a mechanical metaphor to make your point. You just take the driver for granted. There is a driver wanting to mesh with the world in some way. And so all your attention goes to the linguistic device used to make that connection. A clutch that switches a connection off and on.

This is naive realism. You take the fact of the self and the world for granted where really they are emergent from the linguistic mechanism - the epistemic cut - themselves.

As I say, speakers define themselves in terms of the aspects of the world they can afford to deem themselves indifferent towards. I am me - an autonomous being able to do my own thing - to the degree that I don't need to care about the physical details of the world. To the degree that the world fails to act as a constraint on my intentions.

So Wittgenstein was trying to articulate this ecological or embodied or pragmatic understanding of epistemology. The world is what it is. But the world for us is the world defined in terms of the limit of what we need to care about. And it is that very capacity for a practical indifference that is the making of "us". It is the definition of selfhood as interpretance. We arise along with the umwelt we construct. Our understanding of the world is really our understanding of a world with "us" in it.

So as I say, it is both less and more than your naive realism supposes. There is less of the actual thing in itself. But there is more of this us.

I sense your frustration at being pushed towards this critical realisation. But for too long you have simply wanted some simple theory of truth to come out right.

Epistemology's central problem is how to understand the relation between a thinker and a world. You want to just dismiss the problem as something not in need of an explanation. Which is naive. Pragmatism by contrast solves the riddle left by Descartes and Kant by showing how both self and world are co-constructions. Each arises as a reflection of the other. So it is the relation which creates the "reality".

Now again, you will howl - look around. There is a mind-independent reality exactly as physicalism asserts! I kick this stone, I wave this hand, I measure this mountain, I name this bump in the landscape the sacred rock, Uluru.

But that is a realism which leaves the mind undefined and unexplained. How can you claim this "mind-independence" if your epistemology has stepped all around the issue of what is a mind?

And it is a realism that relies on the objectivity of scientific method, when our best theory of scientific method is ... Peirce's pragmatism.

So at every turn, you are finding you run into the same answer.

Sure, commonsense says we are just a mind, and there just is a world. But this is the commonsense of the naive realist. And here we are talking about the foundations of epistemology. You can't just wish all the problems away.

You have to think about things to make definite choices. So rationality is just about exploring the right way to achieve some goal.

The good and evil are how we tend to describe people's value systems - their general motivations. The goals they would be generally wanting to achieve.

The two come together because we can rationalise about good and evil. We can discuss a choice of views about the status of values.

Are good and evil moral absolutes or essentially meaningless human constructs? Or somewhere inbetween?

Of course, taking a natural philosophy perspective, I would seek the evolutionary optimality of "good vs evil". I would rationalise it as a natural and complementary opposition between competitive and co-operative social behaviour.

So that seems the most rational view of human intentionality in general.

But anyway, your OP confuses these two levels of questioning. Whatever our intentions or goals, it is thinking that fleshes out the possible courses of action. But then, metaphysically, if we want to ask about what are the "right" goals, then the conversation has to turn to what are the choices there, and what choice best fits the available evidence.

It makes no sense to talk about it being just language and not abut the world-in-itself; they are the very same. — Banno

Why does it make no sense exactly? You keep making the assertion. But the argument is missing.

Pragmatically it might be no use - especially in everyday settings where there is nothing philosophical at stake.

But epistemology is a philosophical language game. It talks of stuff like truth, certainty, belief and doubt. It gets silly to pretend that there is nothing being spoken of in terms of that culturally-foundational inquiry.

So of course, truth-telling games are grounded in a principle of indifference. A ground is found not by reaching the bedrock of "undoubtable hinge propositions" but by actively agreeing that further facts don't make an essential difference.

This is what is key. There is no solid ground. But we can construct a ground based on the agreement that there is a generality - a constraint that defines similarity - and then also a limit on the capacity for the particulars or individual differences to make a difference.

This is why truth-telling is considered "a system". The true facts are sandwiched between our pragmatic notions of essence and indifference. They are what arise via this pincer movement. To refer to "a hand" is to bound a state of conception in terms the idea of a hand's essence - whatever it is that makes hands similar - and the idea of what then doesn't matter, or is inessential, to that ideal. Between those two complementary bounds, we find our particular interpretant of the sign.

There is a way of understanding "This is a hand" that is not explained in yet more propositions - "this is this". Understanding is shown by behaving in a way that agrees that this is a hand. The sceptic has not understood how to use the word "hand". — Banno

Yep. What is ostensively demonstrated is is a customary and pragmatic degree of unconcern. Folks, this is where the doubting stops ... so far as this language game about "reality" goes. This is what looks like a "grounding fact" in the world we are collectively imagining.

So a pragmatic approach to truth accepts that there is this kind of semiotic game, this triadic modelling relation, which is itself basic. It stands against Cartesian dualism and Kantian representationalism by speaking to the Peircean triadicism of a sign relation.

Facts are always facts in terms of some language game, some pragmatic modelling relation. They are the acceptable acts of measurement for some game, not some semiosis-independent truth.

In practice, the line between belief and doubt, similarity and difference, generality and particularity, is always fuzzy. Language over-claims when it comes to the supposed atomism, the supposed counterfactual definiteness, of the world it attempts to describe. But pragmatically, it works. And it works because it is always open-ended and imprecise.

That is why language is inherently creative as well as usefully definite. Every interpretation has suppressed freedoms. Talk about a hand can include or exclude flippers or phalanges, depending on the intentional context. So the leash on meaning can be loosened or tightened. If facts were just facts and not states of interpretation bounded by a notion of differences that don't make a difference, then language use would be as uncreative as a computer programme. It would not be the fluid instrument of thought that it is.

There are many reasons (of doubt) for the audience to reject such a proposal as "this is a hand". Principally, the boundaries of exactly what is and is not part of the hand, are not defined. Moore would hold up an entire arm, saying "this is a hand", not indicating whether things like the wrist and the fingers are part of the hand or not. So even ostensive definitions need to be justified, clarified by further descriptions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Words can only function as constraints on interpretance. They are irreducibly open ended and thus uncertain. Nothing could be defined exactly, as reality is a continuous whole and words are attempts to name its discrete parts.

So the language game when it comes to ostensive definition has a second aspect. We must learn the communal practice when it comes to the point where we cease to sweat the detail. There will always be fine grain differences that could be used as the seed of doubt. But language use involves knowing when a difference ceases to make a difference.

A hand may include a bit of wrist or not. Where one leaves off and the other begins is vague. Or in other words, it is not a big enough contradiction to get fussed over. To speak, to be certain of what another is saying, we only need to agree on the gist. And that involves both understanding the general ostensive reference and sharing a close enough degree of unconcern about the differences that don’t make a difference.

So pragmatically, there is always doubt as words want to break the thing in itself into a collection of signs, a collection of named parts. But part of the game is then learning when differences don’t matter.

When we point at a part of the world, there is this double pointing. We are saying x is that thing, and also not all those other things. We are thus in fact pointing at our idea of the thing, not the actual thing - as there is no “actual thing” in a continuous world.

It's only a partial failure, which any erudite audience would recognize as such. Mistaking a hand for a flipper is not so bad; I could think of much worse perceptual failures or visual agnosias ("wife for hat"). — Janus

So what does that say? If failure can be partial - and indeed would always be partial under your view, as what would total look like? - then success would also only be partial.

Or in other words, belief and doubt are relative, never absolute. They are opposed limits on certainty.

Which is what I pragmatically argue. As also does Wittgenstein in making certainty the result of a system - events in contexts, acts of measurement within background theories.

It is only Banno who wants facts to be facts regardless of any system of measurement.

It's not based on perceptual experience per se. It's the participation in the shared language game that is pivotal. It's not an induction. — Banno

LOL. That would be why Moore on an LSD trip, shrieking here is one flipper, now here is another, is simply failing to share in a language game with his audience. It wouldn’t be a failure of a perceptual experience game.

t's not propositions all the way down. "Here is a hand" shows the hand. — Banno

You might need to brush up on your reading skills. Demonstrating that your bedrock is your perceptual experience is demonstrating exactly that. Which becomes the problem for your position in which the world is some totality of propositional facts.

Especially once your transcendent world of truths are talked of as if reality were not temporal but an eternal block of events that have “already been actualised”.

You keep going on about truth being cashed out in meaningful actions. Well Peirce made the point that the act of measurement is the primal definition of a meaningful action.

Moore proposes he has hands? Well look. Flap, flap. There’s your inductive confirmation. We can all agree on that as evidence. That sure looks like a meaningful act of measurement.

Truth is not a type of belief. — Banno

Amusing.

To continue, the difference between a Peircean and Wittgensteinian epistemology - or at least Banno's understanding of one - looks to hinge on two key issues.

First, Banno is concerned to make truth a property of propositions. So this is the philosophy of language view that reality is some totality of statements. For all practical purposes - ie: the pragmatism that eschews mysticism and unwarranted skepticism - existence or experience reduces to a collection of all that is stateable or sayable.

This stance in itself conflates all forms of language, confusing the difference between the strict and explicit grammars that constitute "logical speech" with the much looser and socially-oriented language that we use in ordinary, not explicitly metaphysical, everyday speech.

Peirce then makes truth a property of semiosis. This is a general method of reasoning that goes even beyond language. Animal brains and animal bodies reason semiotically - they are in a pragmatic sign relation with their world. Human language - both social and logical - are then merely the same semiotic game being played out at higher levels of development.

So Banno wants to deal with a reality imagined as some totality of true statements. And this seems to be what hinge propositions is about. For the door to swing, it must be anchored to something background that doesn't. To keep the linguistic turn going, that background also needs to be understood as some collection of propositions. It becomes propositions all the way down - even if we understand the practical impossibility of cashing out all that background supposition as confirmed true fact.

Peirce, on the other hand, takes the evolutionary approach as revealed by biological and psychological science. He sees the continuity of semiosis that underlies the development of the mind. If there is a hinge that gets swung on, it is the way that logical claims get hung on the bedrock certainty of our general perceptual living in a world. It is the animal level of cognition, the modelling of a biological self in pragmatic interaction with an environment, that is the anchor of our epistemology. We start from that as our primal facts.

So Banno's Wittgenstein has a problem that there is no proper cut-off. If it is propositions all the way down, then any kind of primal certainty has no starting point. But the Peircean view distinguishes grades of semiosis. So a lower grade can be the bedrock for a higher grade. There is an underlying continuity of course, but also a natural cut-off point. And waving his mitts about, that was what Moore would have been hoping to demonstrate.

Then a second key point of difference is that Peirce introduces a further category of epistemology - the vague.

Banno's Wittgenstein is committed to an epistemology of the statable or sayable. And especially when formulated in the language of logic, this is a presumption that only the crisp or definite - the counterfactual - gains admittance to the party.

Now the demand that statements be crisp is an excellent pragmatic maxim. It is the right goal. It is really useful - if you want to analyse reality into some set of answerable facts - for the laws of thought to apply.

However, it is the ideal. And vagueness is then the more primal or foundational condition. Peircean semiotics recognises and builds on that fact. Banno's Wittgenstein can't admit to it as otherwise the whole pretence of a philosophy of language derived theory of truth falls flat like a house of cards.

So again, with hinge propositions, the actual backdrop of belief to which particular propositions are hinged, is usually unanalysed. It is just a congealed mass of ecologically-valid belief or habit so far as our language use is concerned. It is our biological self - the animal self that knows and believes the ecological truth of its world.

Now we can get stuck into that congealed mass and analyse it propositionally. We can break it down linguistically. But it isn't already a collection of facts just waiting to be found. And being knowledge of a constitutionally vaguer kind, much of what it might have to say is going to elude any saying in being ... essentially vaguer. It will just resist full analysis. Although, again, there is no harm in doing our best.

So we can have truth as a property of logical propositions - certain formulas of words.

We can have truth as the report of commonsense experience - the beliefs that seem rooted in our ecologically-validated perceptions.

Or we can have truth in the Peircean sense as the common limit on a process of rational inquiry. We can have truth as the pragmatic fruit of semiosis - an understanding of epistemic mechanism that spans all the natural levels of "knowing", and also distinguishes these levels in terms of their being rooted in a foundational vagueness, and aspiring to an ideal of generality and counterfactual definiteness.

The basic insight of OC remains valuable: doubt only makes sense agains a background of certainty. — Banno

So what Peirce said over 50 years before. :)

Or to be more precise, we must begin where we first find ourselves - thrust into the middle of rational inquiry with some presumed background of understanding.

Certainty about those background beliefs then achieves the status of truth at the limit of rational inquiry. Truth is about opinion becoming fixed because doubt proves not to make a difference to what we feel most inclined to believe.

This is true anti-foundationalism. Instead of truth being what a mind knows about a world, it is the world as it must, in the limit, become known to the mind by "scientific reason" - a method of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. And not just some individual mind, but a collective or communal mind.

The linguistic mind is defined at a socio-cultural level.

If I flip a coin and cover the result before we see it, it must be either heads or tails, even before I lift my hand. — Banno

So have you sidetracked sufficiently from the original issue which was about the truth or falsity of events either yet to happen or yet to fail to happen?

Whatever.

That's a bit convolute. Again, this does not apply only to statements about the future; there are plenty of other sorts of statements which are true and yet unknown. It's more just pointing out the difference between belief and truth. — Banno

Shy away from the conclusion, but that’s what you are faced with.

Your statement concerns a possibility of which there is as yet no fact of the matter. The PNC fails.

So the statement is a timeless assertion. And yes it is framed in terms of the laws of thought. But it relies on the inductive evidence - some temporal act of measurement - to determine whether it is justifiably believed as either true or false.

As usual, you want to revert to naive realism. Truth doesn’t require a locus of enquiry - the interpretant for whom the answer serves a meaningful reply. It doesn’t require some actual act of measurement as inductive evidence. You want the “true facts” to transcend the whole business of reasoned inquiry.

So you caught yourself out in using a concrete case - claims about the future where it is an impossibility for the necessary act of measurement to have been made. You are trying to backtrack with speed and talk more vaguely about all the truths that must be simply unknown facts - safely either current or in the past.

But you already exposed the basic flaw in your position. No getting out of it I’m afraid.

That we do not know the truth of some statement does not render it neither true nor false. That's the case for a wide range of statements, including statements about the future. — Banno

Mmm, yeah. You mean that statements are essentially timeless, while the world itself has temporal structure.

That is what your critics have been telling you for some time, Banno.

I rather like the block universe — Banno

People like to believe all kinds of weird stuff. So your preferences are irrelevant.

If both are still possibilities, then neither is yet an actuality.

Of course in a block SR, modally realistic, quantum multiverse, the timeless realm of propositions becomes one with a timeless world. Time falls out of your metaphysics. The frozeness of a statement matches a frozen view of reality.

But still, that feels a little extravagant as your metaphysics, no? Do you really want to have that as your position?

But either way, that we don't know if some statement about the future is true or false does not make it neither true nor false. — Banno

Correct. It makes it vague. The PNC fails to apply. At this particular point in time and space.

Again, you are simply trying to talk around the difficulty that others can so plainly see with your position.

To talk timelessly of the world and it states does not make the world itself a timeless place.

Meh. Not unless we need to. — Banno

If you accept the metaphysical extravagance of an SR block universe, then you have no grounds for rejecting those further metaphysical extravagances.

So you have to show what could place a realistic constraint on the models you choose to treat realistically.

Oh, the irony.

So let's go with a block universe. — Banno

Next stop, the quantum multiverse and modal realism.

The dualist solution to this apparent regress is very simple. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. Bring on the soul-stuff. That'll work.

The information recorded in a memory is not a temporal event? — Janus

It was an event when it happened. But even then, there was the displacement - the transduction step - which was its recording. The physical event became an informational event - a sign of the thing. And yes of course, that requires a whole physics of information recording.

Minds need a body to be embodied models. Let's not pretend it is confusing. The whole point of semiotics or the epistemic cut is that signs are physical acts - acts of measurement. But, Janus-like, symbols have two faces. They are both physical marks (essentially meaningless, like a scratch on a rock) and they are informational (essentially meaningful to a system of interpretance).

I can get the notion of temporal displacement, how it enables freedom from the constraints of particular times, but I can't see how that translates into timelessness or eternity. — Janus

Maybe that is just the reification. There might be a difference - a big one - between timeless and eternal for all practical purposes, and timeless and eternal in some dualistically absolute and non-pragmatic sense.

Again, this is where physics itself has got to. The Comos is organised by its own informational limits - the famous holographic principle that accounts for blackhole entropy and the possibility of an actually future-eternal heat death geometry for the Universe.

I recall reading in Russell the assertion that once something has happened it remains forever true that it has happened, and even that it is true now and forever that whatever will happen in the future will happen in the future. — Janus

The past may be certain, but the future is full of possibilities.

So if Russell said this, he was surely just giving voice to the widespread confusion over how deterministic physics is in fact .... the map and not the territory.

Our models of physics generally have the property of being time reversible. The equations encode a symmetrical relation with no preferred direction. They have to so as to fit a cause/effect model of reality. The past state that maps to the future state must commute. That future state must map back to the past for the simplistic maths to work and preserve the efficient causal relation being claimed.

So this is what mechanics is about. Reducing reality to models of causal entailment. Mapping a prior state onto a future state in a timeless fashion. Going forwards in time has to look the same as if we were instead travelling back.

It's not a problem as we know how to break the symmetry of these symmetric equations. We know that the variable we plug into them are the initial conditions. They are the information that comes from the past.

But to the degree the world is mechanical and deterministic, we can also do the reverse. We can start with the final state and work back to predict what must have - retrocausally - been the initial conditions.

Of course, we also know that such physical situations are rare rather than generic. After all, there is an even more fundamental law in the laws of thermodynamics where time now has a preferred direction due to entropification. Every actual physical process is frictional or heat wasting. That is information lost irrecoverably to an environment (Maxwell's demon argument).

So you can't actually measure the full final state needed to run your deterministic equations in reverse. The critical details are almost sure to have escaped. And the more complex the system - the more realistic it actually is - the faster the information gets dispersed as statistical entropy.

All this seems logical enough; but the troubling question is as to what such timeless truths really consist in beyond our thinking of them. If they consist in nothing beyond our thinking of them then they are not really timeless at all, because our thinking is a temporal event. If they consist in something beyond our thinking of them, then what could that be but some eternal logical 'substance', universal mind, or God? — Janus

It's not the truths that are timeless. It is the information recorded in a memory.

So a model exists "outside" of the time of the physical process it models. It is displaced. There is an epistemic cut.

And a model is only "the truth" in a semiotic sense. It is a model of the world with us in it. So it is the world as it is the most convenient and purpose-serving for us to imagine it.

The model thus constructs "the interpreter" along with "the interpreted". The self becomes this timeless set of "truths" - or semiotic habits - that stands apart from the world it is in the habit of regulating according to its desires.

The "truths" captured by this interpretive relation are not really truths at all. They are not the mind-independent facts of the world. But nor are they just idealist mental constructs. They are what is "true" about some self-interested system of interpretance - like an organism with an interest in autonomy.

So an interpretive relation is true to itself! It is capturing the facts of how to be in a pragmatic or functional relation with the world ... as an organism.

Now if you then extend semiosis to the Cosmos or Existence in general - make the leap to pan-semiosis - then you would be getting at the truly timeless and mathematical-strength habits of nature. You would be treating reality as a mind-full organism, or at least a purpose-driven dissipative structure.

However I always agree that pan-semiosis is speculative metaphysics. Science hasn't quite got there, even if it is knocking on the door with its information theoretic turn, its new ontic structuralism.

In order to use a map one must understand the little crosses and lines as being buildings and roads and stuff. — Banno

Banno gets this, but refuses to address the issue of what is a principle. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure many maps are crosses and lines. Was Banno thinking of pirate maps? Normally those also have a palm tree and an instruction of how many paces to the west. :)

But seriously, to get the point of Korzybski, he was saying that the map you find so useful as a model of the world is not the world. In fact, it functions by abstracting away as much of the physics of the real world as it possibly can.

So the argument is against representationalism - the idea that the mind puts reality on display in some direct naive realist fashion.

This is the essential problem with Banno's thinking. He wants to have a direct and veridical relation with the world. He wants nothing to intervene between his beliefs and the real facts. He is a good old fashioned Cartesian, but wants to deal with that by refusing to acknowledge his dualism of self and world. He pretends that because the relation feels direct and unmediated, that warrants an epistemology that just takes the relation to be direct and unmediated.

However Korzybski got the fact that the modelling relation is not about veridical representation. The interpreter doesn't want to have to think about the whole of reality. S/he just wants simple signs telling him/her exactly how to react on any given occasion. The interpreter wants to function as a set of habits triggered by repeatable acts of measurement. The world - as represented in the interpreter's world model - should be reduced to a simple set of stop/go signs.

This is anti-representational. The signs that constitute the map - or state of perceptual awareness - should be whatever can serve to get rid of the most unnecessary detail possible.

It flips our usual intuitions on their head. But psychological science is perfectly familiar with the story. How else could the complex energy of the world get turned into some neural traffic of digitised spikes?

So yes, a map might be just the barest thing of lines and crosses. Or a few named landmarks and named roads.

In recursive fashion, this is even simpler than the world as we model it neurobiologically. Our eyes see buildings, roads and stuff. That is the level of modelling at which we navigate using the biology of perception. And it is impressively direct and veridical - if you don't know the first thing about the actual psychophysics of our neural-level models.

But then, at a cultural and linguistic level, we can construct paper maps that abstract the essentials of our experiential maps. We can operate as interpreters seeking useful habits at this secondary level of semiosis. We can transcend our animal state by becoming creatures of even greater symbolic abstraction.

The map and the territory story was meant to draw attention to this - the way that cognition is anti-representational. Modelling works by reducing a complex reality to the sparsest acts of measurements that can reliably do the job of getting us about the world.

And yet Banno can't help himself. He has to jump to the representational veracity that he believes warrants his naive realism. Look everyone, there is the buried treasure, right where the map said it was!

Take the map/territory example. These two are both objects, so there is no epistemic cut between these two. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. I've said many times now that a dualistic ontology can't cut it. It has to be a triadic relation. So someone has to interpret the map to navigate the territory.

Thus the further thing of the interpreter must either be addressed by the metaphysics, or else it sets up the familiar homuncular regress.

A further obvious problem with a map is that it is representational. It is passive. It can't physically do anything to constrain the physics of the world.

Well it does if you are reading it and saving your legs by not getting lost. But the epistemic cut is about the need for some actual hinge point, or transduction step, where information and physics truly make contact.

Hence we have Pattee's focus on how a molecule can function as a message - how DNA can code for a protein that is then an enzymatic signal to switch on or off a metabolic process.

So Peirce gives us the general triadic need to include the notion of interpretance in any modelling relation with the world. And Pattee focuses on the practicality of the machinery that connects the interpretance and the world.

The usual dualistic bind that plagues representationalism is resolved by this modelling relation where the informational aspect of nature is tied in an interactive feedback loop with the material aspect of nature.

To model the world, we must turn it into a set of measurements. A set of measurements is not the world. It is as simple as that.

Like Banno, whatever makes you happy I guess. I couldn’t even begin to untangle the misconceptions in all that.

The creative process consists of taking matter and forming it. — Cavacava

I don't think so. It is primarily about making ideas manifest. Matter doesn't actually need to be involved.

What matter does poetry depend on?

I don't agree that this is only about social purpose to art, which is important in that it negatively drives artists to explore the unusual, the new. — Cavacava

How is that not a social purpose? Whenever has a great artist not been judged as such within a social context?

He thought that what is beautiful is pleasurable, but what I think what the art world is finding is that reality can rendered beautiful, regardless of whether or not it is pleasurable, that the aesthetic effect can also be painful. — Cavacava

So modern art has discovered the pleasures of masochism? :)

As I say, neurobiologically we can see the connection between our reward system and the discovery of a satisfying match.

Our brain goes aha! It secretes a little squirt of dopamine. It says the connections we have just made are valuable and worth remembering, worth turning into a habit.

As I said, my response was targeted at an objective reason for such an "aesthetic" response. What are we recognising when we recognise beauty in the world?

When it comes to masochism, what is being recognised there? Is it the deserved rightness of the humiliation? Does that fit the masochist's rather particular model of the world?

Whatever, a challenging work of art is not really aiming to be a beautiful work of art in the terms of being a beautiful material form of some kind - a physical image, or shape, or sound. It is aiming at being - challenging. And that too can elicit neurobiological reward, especially when the challenge is mastered and used as evidence of our being part of some valued social clique. It is a sign we have joined the club.

But also, as I argued, challenge just is rewarding in its own right. The brain is evolved to master challenge in a general fashion. And feel good when it does.

It's complicated, but not impossible to understand.

And you are such a rude bugger. — Banno

Rather than trolling, just deal with the arguments for a change.

Hint. Telling me "you have a feeling" is not an argument. It is a confession you just lost the argument.

These are properties of form, not matter. — Cavacava

So there is matter without form?

And do we go to galleries to look at the wonderful pigments, go to concerts to hear the splendid notes? That sounds wrong, doesn't it.

I agree that surprise has a lot to do with it, but we still have a very Platonic/Greek, the classical conception of beauty. — Cavacava

Yeah. There was a reason why the celebration of the ideal was a Greek thing. It was a huge surprise.

It was only with the Romantic movement that "wild nature" - the thunderous sky, the treacherous sea, the dangerous mountains - became celebrated for its fractal vigour.

So what part of nature a culture celebrates does change as it becomes accustomed to its past surprises.

The surprising works of Du Champ, Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollock and others have begun to change that conception. The problem with the classical conception of beauty (I think) lies is its connection to a conception of the divine which became prevalent during the Renaissance and has remained so. — Cavacava

I agree. Art became about the human individual. It started as mythic, then it became symbolic of social hierarchy - the church, the Medici, the upper class - and finally it becomes the celebration of essential humanity. The most modern of our mythologies.

But this is to talk about the social purpose of art. The question was about there being some objective basis to our aesthetic reactions. Why is DuChamp's urinal beautiful? Is that because of its social commentary or because it expresses some deep mathematical form of nature?

I don't think that one is an example of the latter.

So I'm not saying the issue is not more complex.

Look at Lucian Freud's works. Many of his works are hyper-realistic. It was not unusual for him to spend 1500 hours on a portrait. They are not beautiful in any classical sense, but they are beautiful. He managed to use hyper-realism to transcend what is simply realistic. The beauty and the truth of his work startles you, its aesthetic affect as it transcends our normal sense of what is real.

Or look a Pollock's splatter paintings...matter is here overtly presented with the artist allowing form to arise from the juncture of the pigments on the surface of the canvas, and not by any thought of fractals or symmetry. Kandinsky takes subjective feelings and presents them corporeally. Even Picasso's who changed styles multiple times, can hardly be said to have followed a classical notion of beauty for many of his works.

I think similar notions hold true in music, such as the a-tonality of Schoenberg, the sounds & lack of sounds of John Cage and others. — Cavacava

Again, I was talking about the objective basis of an aesthetic response. There are reasons why brains would be sensitised to symmetry, economy of effort and balance. It feels rewarding to spot that as it is a useful thing to be able to see.

Now you could argue that Pollock is an example of fractal complexity and dynamism. If it has an actual visual appeal, that is it. What else could there be?

But the aesthetic response is really something else - that delightful feeling of social transgression which affirms the essential genius of the individual. So as I say, it is social iconography. The aesthetics of cultural snobbery if we are honest. We can feel the pleasure of being part of the club that gets the attitude.

So there is an aesthetic response - a buzz of dopamine in some secret compartment of the brain. :)

But that now reflects the extent to which we have evolved to be social creatures. We are evolved to seek intelligibility in a social world as well as a physical one.

So the same system of rewards for decoding the natural structure of our worlds. But not now aimed at the simple mathematical forms that underly the material world. Instead, aimed at the subtle geography of our social hierarchies, and our supposed place within them.

In another sense, "the map is not the territory" is quite problematic. — Banno

Of course. Hence why you are already wandering off down a familiar and reassuring seeming path - semiotics as Sausserean dualism. Displacement as what Derrida meant.

You are going to find semiotics "problematic" while you continue to attempt to assimilate it to good old Kantian representationalism.

If you don't get the irreducibly triadic structure of a sign relation, you haven't yet got it at all.

As I said, our model of the world is really the model of us in that world. The displacement is not dyadic but another rung up from that. The world becomes the place we also discover ourselves. And you need an epistemology that has that structural recursion.

Again, google some real writers on the issue - Pattee's epistemic cut, Rosen's modelling relation, Von Neumann's self-reproducing automata.

So displacement is where one talks about something in a different place to where it is happening? — Banno

Nope. ;)

Well it is the central thing to a semiotic metaphysics. So yeah.

A modelling relation with the world is based on the displacement that is the separation of the model from the world it seeks to regulate.

The idea is terribly simple and familiar. The map is not the territory, etc. I get tired of all the pretence that this is something esoteric and not merely a precision description of the ontology involved.

If you want a more technical framing, Pattee's slogan is that life is based on the dichotomy of rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics.

But let's cut out all the feigned shock and horror. The epistemic cut is perfectly straight-forward.

You appear to have introduced a technical term - displacement - without telling us how you are using it. — Banno

Err. Pattee's epistemic cut. Rosen's MR systems. Von Neumann's self-reproducing automata. :)

If you want the technicalities, look them up.

I'm sure you were making this point. It started back here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/145216

But yes, I see Cavacava is too. That's encouraging.

I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify? — Banno

It is not a flaw but the reason why it works.