I don't disagree at all. I mean, for me everything is essentially a mystery, science included. It's not as if science makes sense, as I've been saying through-out this thread (we don't understand the world, physics is mathematical, math is...?, etc.) .

I have a conflict with Peirce's quote:

"Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts."

I don't doubt colours exist, objects exist, music (for us) exists, etc. But my reason tells me otherwise. We add all these things to the world and would not exist as postulated by us, absent us. It's maddening because it's a constant conflict between feeling and reasons.

I don't disagree at all. I mean, for me everything is essentially a mystery, science included. It's not as if science makes sense, as I've been saying through-out this thread (we don't understand the world, physics is mathematical, math is...?, etc.) . — Manuel

I think this is a reasonable position. Why should anything 'make sense' - the very idea of something making sense is in itself just a frame driven by humans who are meaning making creatures with a fetish for certainty. I guess science as practiced by many does take a metaphysical position that the world is intrinsically knowable - it this a case of elevating predictability to the status of certainty? I am often haunted by something Richard Rorty said in an interview on Dutch TV - "We don't know anything at all about truth, all we know is how to justify ideas."

:up:

I'm sympathetic to that view and it seems to me to be reasonable, again, given the creatures that we are.

I mean, this whole problem with "Truth", can send people down a rabbit hole. We can say some things about the world, which are subject to revision and refinement.

But there are far more questions than answers.

But there are far more questions than answers. — Manuel

No question. I don't think we can underestimate the emotional hook concepts like 'truth' have on people who so often seem to require such notions in order to feel safe and worthwhile. You often hear the echoes of this in discussions of morality "If there is no God then there is no reason to be moral and life is meaningless." That kind of thing. Truth and foundational guarantees still make the world go around.

I mean, I think we can use the word "truth", with a lower case "t". I'm seeing letters on a screen is true, at one level of description. Photons are hitting my eye, likewise, etc.

But this is different from "Truth", which many seek to know.

Your predicament seems to have this structure: reason tells you that color, objects, music, and so on, are things you or we have added to the world, and, by telling you that, at the same time reason tells you that you or we can take all that away, at least imaginatively. Thus we can say, that's not really a mountain, it's just a bunch of particles or fields or something that we happen to call a "mountain"; <mountain> is not really there, but something we add to the world.

I'd want to look closely at how this argument works. For instance, is this the real argument, or is the real argument the other way around: that is, because we can imaginatively subtract, we conclude that we must have added. Just how strong is this argument, in either direction? How do we imagine this adding and subtracting business to work? What convinces us this is how it works?

I'm sympathetic to that view and it seems to me to be reasonable, again, given the creatures that we are. — Manuel

Ought not to be forgotten that the Greek philosophers thought we were something other than, or more than, other creatures. ('Creatures' means 'created beings', and in traditional philosophy there was a fundamental distinction between Creator and created.) In any case, in Greek philosophy, 'nous' was differentiated from sensory perception, imagination, and memory as being 'that which is able to discern the real.' It was, if you like, 'the residue of the real' in the soul. Of course in our sceptical day this is regarded as archaic, along with the rest of scholastic philosophy, but it might be worth at least remembering that distinction.

I don't doubt colours exist, objects exist, music (for us) exists, etc. But my reason tells me otherwise. We add all these things to the world and would not exist as postulated by us, absent us. It's maddening because it's a constant conflict between feeling and reasons. — Manuel

I think the distinction that modern philosophy has lost is between what exists and what is real. They are after all regarded as synonymous in the modern lexicon - that what exists is what is real. But I say that what is real overflows the bounds of what exists, because it includes such things as numbers and judgements.

You might say that numbers and judgements are the product of the mind, but they're essential to the way we parse experience. The constitute our world, insofar as we're rational beings.

The problem with empiricism is that it has no conceptual space for such realities. As far as empiricism is concerned, such ideas are

not really there, but something we add to the world. — Srap Tasmaner

But what 'world' would we see, without those intellectual operations? It would be altogether unformed and in that sense unintelligible. The problem with empiricism is it's looking for intelligibility in the wrong place viz. in objects and the objective domain. It wishes to derive everything from sensory experience and cannot admit of any form of innate ideas. We've already been through that in this thread and you saw the arguments.

I mean, our vocabulary changes with the times, that makes sense. And we can still use the word "soul", as in, "that moved my soul". If it has religious implications, implying supernatural causes, that is, causes not found in nature at large, then it's not going to be attractive to many people.

Of course, this depends on how we think about "nature", which can be very varied.

I think one can hold that view that we are quite special creatures, we have the capacity for reflection and explicit knowledge. But we are still part of the world.



That's a supremely difficult question and answers will depend on sensibilities.

Let's take a mountain. Plainly a "mountain", as a word and as a concept, is human specific. There likely is more to concepts than words, but words are necessary at least.

I see a mountain. But now I close my eyes. There's still a mountain there, I can touch it, hear it, and so on. But suppose I lost my sense of touch and smell and proceed so on down the line, there's precious little left to say, as far as our sense go.

But now consider this: deaf-blind people, who acquire the capacity to read braille, show a remarkable capacity for a very rich inner life, based on some small bumps on a page. Likewise by merely putting there hands on your throat, they can understand the words you say.

The stimulus is poor (as Chomsky would say) , the reply is rich. That strongly hints, at least to me, that we overwhelmingly add things to the world, that aren't there absent us.

What would the opposite look like? If the world was rich, and our nature poor, I'd expect all species to have essentially the same cognitive capacities, which doesn't seem to be the case.

If it has religious implications, implying supernatural causes, that is, causes not found in nature at large, then it's not going to be attractive to many people. — Manuel

There's nothing else in nature remotely like h. sapiens, in terms of our cognitive abilities - but this seems a forbidden truth. I think it's one of the pernicious consequences of adopting Darwinism as a philosophy, which it is not.

I see a mountain. — Manuel

There is a Zen koan, 'first, there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is'. It was made into a song by Donovan. Interpretation is like this - in the first stage, mountains are just mountains and rivers are just rivers. This is unreflective realism; there are teachers to learn from and things to be learned—in other words a mountain to climb.

The second stage, when mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers, is starting to see things as they truly are - that everything is made up of other things, that nothing exists on its own right. Those mountains are made up of rocks and trees and grass and other things. Everything is connected to everything else. When we become conscious that this applies to ourselves too. We live in the sense that we are separate from the world around us. This causes us to suffer and has stopped us from understanding.

When we come to realize the oneness of things, we comprehend that we are Enlightened, and we have been the whole time. It’s at the third stage, when mountains are once again mountains and rivers are once again rivers, that we really understand; we reconcile the paradox of being. This is where we learn to dwell in both the transcendent reality and the immanent one.

There's nothing else in nature remotely like h. sapiens, but this seems a forbidden truth. I think it's one of the pernicious consequences of adopting Darwinism as a philosophy, which it is not. — Wayfarer

I agree.

We mostly disagree on terminology: "naturalism", "empiricism", etc.

But the terminological oddities are mine, you use them as they are commonly employed in contemporary philosophy. I think these terms are misused, but it's splitting hairs.

That makes sense to me, in so far as things like this can make sense. That koan proceeds to take apart what we take for granted.

What is curious is to see how far can we push our ordinary commonsense understanding in everyday affairs.

The issue, as Magee put it, is to not confuse an epistemology (what we experience) for an ontology (what there is). This is what happens to certain strands of empiricism, the textual evidence for Locke and Hume is much more subtle though.

As Chomsky puts it in a related essay to this one, we have a "given" in experience. The thing is that the given is already formed by us. So it's not actually given.

It's as Tallis says somewhere, "there is no given without a taken."

What would the opposite look like? If the world was rich, and our nature poor, I'd expect all species to have essentially the same cognitive capacities, which doesn't seem to be the case. — Manuel

So precisely because we are so intellectually gifted, our ideas are not to be trusted. Where does that come from? Is that suspicion of the smooth talker, the over-educated, the city slicker? It’s not without foundation, but it’s an odd peg to hang a worldview on.

I cannot get a fix on what the source of your anxiety is. Each time I think I have it, you veer off into something else. But it’s been an enjoyable exchange all the same.

Richly cognitively endowed, yes. So far as the manifest image goes, it works rather well for ordinary affairs- day to day stuff.

It becomes hard once we begin attributing our manifest image to a mind independent world, that's when our ideas should be suspect.

These are different domains of intellect and cognition, I think. Chomsky calls it a "science forming faculty".

If I have trouble explaining myself, I may well have trouble ironing out these issues. I'm working on that for a project I want to write, but requires much more reading and thinking.

In any case, thanks for the exchange, you always seem to get the main gist of what I'm saying, which is a relief, frankly.

It's studying what the classics - up till Newton - and a bit beyond him, took to be a fact about the world, that we could understand it. We can't. — Manuel

Where "understanding," according to you (I am not sure about Chomsky), means reconciling with our hypothetical innate intuitions. I say "hypothetical" because, other than young children, everyone's innate intuitions are mixed up with learned or constructed "theoretical" understanding, and separating them takes some work. In addition to which, intuitive understandings are, for the most part, unthought and unarticulated, many of them embodied in our physical abilities of seeing, hearing, moving, and so on. Making these implicit beliefs and theories explicit also takes quite a bit of reconstruction.

But, as I keep saying, it is simply implausible to assert that "the classics" were feral savants, operating on pristine God- or Nature-given intuitions. They were not. They were as sophisticated theoreticians as anyone today - it's just that their background was of their age, not ours. If anything, it was Hume and his fellow empiricists who pushed to clear out the "occult" deposits of classical theory and turn to a more direct, phenomenological perception of the world. Which just served as a renewed basis for more theory construction. That innocent age of theory-free understanding of the world? I don't think it ever happened.

What I think the Newtonian revolution in physics exemplifies is a rise of empirical science that was happening at that time, enabled and spurred on by developments in instrumentation and analysis and the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. Prior to this development, natural philosophy could be intuitive or "occult" or somewhere in-between. There were controversies, but as long as contesting theories remained nice and vague and metaphysical, they were all on equal footing, and one was free to believe whatever appealed to one's intuitions, politics or learned doctrine.

The new sciences, when they arrived, had an unfair advantage: they "worked." And it is hard to argue with what works; even the unlearned could eventually appreciate their fruits in the form of useful technologies. And so, like it or not, they had to win out.

I don't mean to frame this as an opposition between benighted tradition and the objective truth that science finally uncovered. I think there is continuity and mutual influence between the old and the new ways of thinking. The shape and direction of scientific theorizing owes much to our nature and to our culture. On the other hand, what today's common man or woman considers commonsense are just the sort of things that were baffling Newton and his contemporaries (with the caveat of the enduring pull of folk science). 300 years of scientific dominance have left their mark on our cultural background.

"10. Every solution of a problem raises new unsolved problems; the more so the deeper the original problem and the bolder its solution. The more we learn about the world, and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific, and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance. For this, indeed, is the main source of our ignorance -- the fact that our knowledge can be only finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.

We may get a glimpse of the vastness of our ignorance when we contemplate the vastness of the heavens: though the mere size of the universe is not the deepest cause of our ignorance, it is one of its causes. "Where I seem to differ from some of my friends', F. P. Ramsey wrote in a charming passage of his Foundations of Mathematics (p. 291), is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel in the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone."

I suspect that Ramsey's friends would have agreed with him about the insignificance of sheer physical size; and I suspect that if they felt humble before the vastness of the heavens, this was because they saw in it a symbol of their ignorance.

I believe that it would be worth trying to learn something about the world even if in trying to do so we should merely learn that we do not know much. This state of learned ignorance might be a help in many of our troubles. It might be well for all of us to remember that, while differing widely in the various little bits we know, in our infinite ignorance we are all equal."

-- Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

SophistiCat, I read a lot of what you post and generally find it both well-informed and level-headed, but as long as I’ve been reading you, you have remained, shall we say, unimpressed by such expressions of wonder and bafflement. For you, if there’s a theory that works, all strangeness of the phenomena accounted for is banished, and no strangeness attaches to a theory that is successful. I’m exaggerating, I suppose, but have I mistaken your attitude? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't know, I don't think I have a consistent attitude towards wonder and bafflement in general. There is one sense in which this is probably true: if we are talking about surprise as an epistemic state, i.e. what happens when we encounter something unexpected, or something for which we have no explanation. This state of surprise is eliminated if we find a satisfactory explanation. Of course, nothing can be totally explained without a residue, so you might say that, upon reflection, we should always be in a state of wonder: Why does the world exist? Why is it the way it is? That sort of thing.

Sure. Nothing's ever innocent in this respect, as long as we're human beings, we are going to have biases for everything, if we didn't we'd likely be dead, that's the way to avoid bias. And by "bias" here, I simply mean having a certain perspective on how things should work or look like.

Today, we are dealing with very sophisticated and strange theoretical posits, such as "Many Worlds" or the multiverse and other strange hypothesis, which could turn out to be correct.

And sure, in 300 years, we are going to develop different intuitions and lack certain others. We can't get rid of some of them, such as seeing the sun rising and falling, even though this does not literally happen in the universe, but we can't deny our eyes, even if we know better.

But other intuitions, we take for granted, like gravity on a day to day basis, for some people anyway.

Maybe we could say something like this:

(a) The goal of science is to understand everything.
(b) The process of science is to separate what you understand (about a given phenomenon) from what you don't, and then of course try, gradually, to enlarge the bits-we-understand part, shrinking the bits-we-don't part.

We corral what we don't understand into a we'll-get-to-you-later holding pen. Insofar as there's anything to the unity of science, we might find the not-yet-understood bits of various domains overlapping, leaving one last (hopefully little, and smaller all the time) pocket of things we don't understand yet.

One concern perhaps relevant to this discussion is to remember that this is what we're doing: it's all too easy to think that by naming what we don't yet understand, we do understand it. Thus we use words like "energy" and "matter" and "force" as if they mean something. We can show how we use those terms in our theories, and thus how they connect up to things we consider explained and understood, but there's some lingering suspicion that we don't really understand our explanations. (If some of our variables are still unbound, the logician might remind us, we don't yet have a proposition -- only something like a proposition generator.)

That's a sort of engineering take. The philosopher in me would like to approach the issue backwards:

Why don't we understand everything?

Seriously, why don't we? Most people are just going to say, well, you know, human finitude and all that, of course we don't. Is that an explanation, or is it just putting a name on what we don't understand?

Why aren't we gods?

Why isn't the way the world works perfectly clear to us, with nothing hidden?

Why should it take effort to understand something?

And here maybe the response will be more specific: something about our senses, information, modeling, all that sort of thing. Which would be fine -- to see ourselves as science does leads to no inconsistency -- except it seems to create an unsolvable problem: what about the stuff in the not-yet-understood box?

In a suitably limited domain, our partitioning procedure worked just fine; you can circumscribe what it means for a tool to work, and what will count as an explanation relative to the stuff you're not dealing with. You can puzzle over the interpretation of statistical data without saying, "Hang on -- what are numbers anyway?"

But this perfectly reasonable and practical process does not generalize: we have no way of establishing that our research tools (our own minds) are in good working order (there's no standard we could possibly reach for) -- and if that's the case, just what do we think we're doing? We don't know. We'll have no way of saying whether what we don't understand belongs to us or to the domain.

So I'm not convinced you can just science your way to an understanding of why we don't understand everything.

Of course the question I'm asking -- why don't we understand everything? -- is almost equivalent to asking why we need science. I'm just going to point out (again) that there is a funny doubling-back of the question: we do science because we don't understand everything -- which is just a presumption here -- and we do science by separating what we understand from what we don't, and we also presume we can do that. Can we? How would we know whether we can do this?

(Does it make sense to say, maybe we do understand everything but think we don't? Why or why not? Is it possible to be mistaken about whether you understand something?)

@Manuel, what do you think? Why don't we understand everything? -- Oh, and maybe I should ask, do we just happen not to? Or is this the same as asking, can we understand everything?

There's no reason to expect a species to need science to survive. Most living organisms are bacteria, they do quite fine without positing any theory at all.

It's very much going to sound like "stoner talk", but, I think the correct take is to ask "how does this even make any sense?" to almost everything.

We all have the intuition that nothing would be "cheaper" than something - maybe that's wrong as a matter of cosmological fact.

But it doesn't make sense, because, clearly nothing is less problematic than something, but then it isn't. And what are numbers anyway, why can't we seem them in the world?

How can I even lift my arm up? And so on. That's how I think.

There are practical limits to understanding: brain size, limits to our senses, etc. In short, there's no reason to expect us to understand anything. That we can understand anything, to any degree, is remarkable.

One day you'll cite someone other than Chomsky, and then you'll be allowed to talk. — StreetlightX

Would it be helpful if I quoted linguists who follow Chomsky’s program? I could do so, but I don’t see any need to yet. My understanding of his thought is enough to recognize Dor’s (and, I assume, your own) characterization is completely wrong. So there’s no need to go into technical detail (where I do not have sufficient knowledge), and thus no reason to cite scholars outside Chomsky.

So the comment about reading outside the few scholars you have cited (all prominent critics of Chomsky, one which you have quoted in the past a borderline fraud), while snarky, also happens to be accurate. Doesn’t matter if they were 100 in number — if they misread Chomsky they misread Chomsky. What can I say?

Maybe some of them really do destroy Chomsky’s theories. Fine. I’d have to look at the details and responses, etc— all that I mentioned before. But when you cite Dor, and apparently endorse a comment like

all that is left is the original assumption of infinite generativity—the idea that everything we ever do and experience, which is finite by definition, is always an arbitrary obstacle on our way toward the fulfillment and understanding of our infinite linguistic potential.

then a technical analysis isn’t required. All that’s required is knowing what Chomsky actually says.

And it’s not this. Why?

Because what we “do and experience” does matter, just as what we see matters. And just as there are biological and physical principles involved in vision, there are also principles involved in language.

Chomsky believes there is such a thing as human nature. Perhaps this is wrong. But if it isn’t wrong, then it’s hard to argue (in my view) that language isn’t part of that nature— and an important part. Maybe thinking and awareness are also important parts (I tend to think so). But if we’re approaching these phenomena scientifically, we’re approaching them physically (chemically, biologically), in terms of theory. That’s what Chomsky is doing, and that’s why Chomsky is a scientist.

The best criticism I see is that of unfalsifiability, to be honest. What he’s really doing is applying logic/ mathematics to language. If we reduce language to a simple operation (merge), that may make sense — but only if we first agree with the mathematicalization. Perhaps that’s the wrong emphasis.

But that’s a larger discussion to be had.

[@Manuel I tagged you here to get your thoughts as well, if interested.]

I can only speak of the larger significance of Chomsky's linguistic theory as it pertains to philosophy. I know a little about the linguistics aspects, though nowhere near enough to speak about the specific details with the authority I would like.

His program tends to be a minority one in linguistics, though obviously this doesn't speak to the truth or falsity of his theory. A glance at some of the literature reveals that a good deal of the criticism is based on empirical assumptions that are just wrong, as a matter of fact. This is shown most strongly in the dogma of externalism in relation to language use.

Connected to this is a view which seems to me to restrict what "empirical" evidence means, to that which is publicly observable. This happens to leave out that which allows us to observe and make theories in the first place: experience. That's not publicly observable, but it is empirical. You can deny it if you wish, just as one can deny how old the Earth is, but it doesn't touch the fact.

Since we can see that people use words to refer to things, and the things referred to are observable, it's assumed this is what language does, refer to external things.

What's also left out, is this extremely rich, sophisticated and extremely sublime aspect of innatism. It's never denied for any other animal, so far as I'm aware (perhaps with the exception of radical behaviorism in the 50's). There's a lot to say about this topic, much of it fascinating - particularly in the philosophical tradition, in which some history has been obscured and important figures, like Cudworth or More are not even known.

But's that would be the topic for another thread.

Beyond this, I can't really say much.

Why don't we understand everything? — Srap Tasmaner

Understanding is always understanding something in terms of something else; reducing one thing to another; fitting the explanandum within an explanatory framework - explanans, which is, for the present purposes, taken for granted. Therefore, understanding literally everything is an oxymoron. A narrative that purports to explain everything would not even be recognizable to us as an explanation. Any explanation must be grounded in some givens.

One concern perhaps relevant to this discussion is to remember that this is what we're doing: it's all too easy to think that by naming what we don't yet understand, we do understand it. Thus we use words like "energy" and "matter" and "force" as if they mean something. We can show how we use those terms in our theories, and thus how they connect up to things we consider explained and understood, but there's some lingering suspicion that we don't really understand our explanations. (If some of our variables are still unbound, the logician might remind us, we don't yet have a proposition -- only something like a proposition generator.) — Srap Tasmaner

This, as they say, is a feature, not a bug. Feynman has a nice discussion of force in his lectures apropo of exactly this.

Science doesn't attempt to understand everything: scientific explanations are reductive, rather than totalizing. You study some phenomena from a certain perspective, identify an underlying structure, then try to fit the phenomena of interest within that structure. The structure - the scientific theory - is your given in this context. Science has many constantly evolving theories, but theories are only succeeded by more theories. There can never be a point where everything is explained away into nothing.

Of course, understanding, sense-making is a much more general activity than just doing science. We engage in it constantly, in every act of cognition. Vision, for example, is a low-level, largely unconscious process of sense-making, where we reconcile visual signals with a predictive model, adjusting the model as needed.

It is possible to explain everything within the context of an explanatory framework - that is, explain everything other than the framework itself. It doesn't usually happen in science, but a broader gestalt, a religious or spiritual system, or even just a state of mind, however fleeting, can make such a claim. (Perhaps this is what people mean by being at peace with the world.) But even such all-encompassing sense-making frameworks depend on something being taken for granted, left unexplained: they cannot explain away themselves. As you say,

we have no way of establishing that our research tools (our own minds) are in good working order (there's no standard we could possibly reach for) — Srap Tasmaner

Even where we can reach for some other standard (than a given explanatory framework), that only moves the question one step further.

Understanding is always understanding something in terms of something else — SophistiCat

I like this answer enough that I have given it myself on this forum several times, and even referred to Feynman in doing so.

But I still have some questions.

It's as if we're describing explanation as solving for an unknown in algebra: there is some leveraging of known information, using it, referring to it, describing the unknown in terms of the known, the known determining the unknown, and so on. How far does this analogy generalize?

For instance, how does one bootstrap such a system? If we are born with no information, then we can acquire none. If we are born understanding nothing, then we have nothing "in terms of which" to understand or explain anything. Do we then conclude, as Chomsky urges us to, that there must be something "wired in", as they say? The only explanation anyone will offer for such wiring is Darwin, and it's not obvious that even is an explanation.

Another issue: to say we understand something new (to us) "in terms of" something old (to us) makes sense, and everyone has had such experiences, but it also gives people the willies: everyone nurses doubts that they are doing justice to the novelty, to the strangeness, of the new, and we are all also familiar with cases where this enveloping of the new by the old is to some degree a sham. Ordinary people worry about this sort of thing with relationships -- that is, projecting past experiences, memories of previous relationships and so on, onto new relationships. That phrase "in terms of" is a little scary, and with good reason. (It's why the arguments about relativism and incommensurability don't go away: it's cold comfort that you wouldn't recognize a genuinely alien perspective as either alien or a perspective, as you choose.)

What about circularity? Is that an option? Might we explain X given framework A, and an element Y of framework A in terms of framework B, eventually -- the longer the chain, the safer -- working our way back around to X? Within each framework, you're fine, but only by artificially defining the boundary of the "framework" so that circularity lies outside it...

Is there no rock bottom? It begins to look like the institution of science is embedded in an already given, "taken for granted", as you say, system of cognition. This sense of a science being embedded in something else can be disconcerting. One area I know a little about arises in philosophical logic: look at a dozen introductory textbooks and compare how they introduce the "schemas" or "templates" that will make up the bulk of the book; there's no agreed upon way to introduce these things, no agreement on what they are, what their logical status is, and so on. Each author seems to go his own way with this because if you want to use logic for problems expressed in a natural language, you have to cross that divide somehow. (There's something similar in getting mathematics going, teaching kids what sets and numbers are, and so on.) There is no obvious way to do that, so textbook authors take a variety of approaches with varying amounts of hand-waving. It's hard not to wonder exactly what you're ending up with if this messiness is apparently required around the edges, and particularly required somewhere uncomfortably near the foundations of your science. (And again, mathematics and sets.)

Your reference to vision suggests that some of what's going on here just isn't what we think it is, that we are consciously building systems to try to understand how we are unconsciously managing so well, and so, in that sense at least, it is just ourselves we are always trying to understand. As you note -- much to your credit! -- there is more to cognition than science, and more to us than cognition. There's religion and spirituality, gestalten and feelings.

And now we come all the way back around, because if cognition, and, in particular, scientific cognition, are embedded in us, then we have to face up to our uncertainty about what is being understood "in terms of" what. To what degree are we alien to ourselves, or at least to ourselves qua scientists? The newborn of the empiricists is always presented as a small, admittedly inexperienced but astonishingly capable scientist, observing patterns and theorizing about them. Put so baldly, we can't take that image seriously, but I wonder if we don't secretly believe something very close to it. But what if we are not scientists in human clothing? Can we understand our own strangeness if we only have frameworks that will filter out that strangeness?

Eh. Thanks for a lovely response I don't think I've done justice to. I'm just rattling cages again...

@Mods

If you think this goes against the rules, in terms of reviving an old thread, please delete. If not, I'd like to share something here.

Here's a very good discussion w/ Chomsky on philosophy, were he explain very clearly all the confusions which arose here, in my opinion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNXqAaF_cxU

That's a great interview. Thanks.

My pleasure.