Also you misunderstand phenomenology, since it doesn't deal with the ineffable, but with what can be told about personal experience..The observations, analyses and syntheses of phenomenologists do not purport to be empirically testable (obviously) but offer you something only if they speak to your own experience — Janus
what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. — Joshs
Phenomenology as it was begun by Husserl was about finding our way past preconceptions to the formal conditions of possibility of experience, to what is irreducible, indubitable and universal in experience and thus is communicable and intersubjective . — Joshs
For instance, time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically. — Joshs
This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. — Joshs
The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data. — Joshs
an impression or memory of a phenomenal experience is still similar in kind to that experience. As opposed to when we attempt to translate that experience into words, where its phenomenal character is destroyed. — hypericin
In this respect, reflection is like relating to another through language. — Joshs
I've been meaning to read Wittgenstein for the past 4 bloody years. Can you link me to his books — Agent Smith
Since the end result seems to be some variety of philosophical addlement I personally wouldn't bother. — hypericin
I'd say that narrative is not logical -- or, at least, narrative brings with it its own logic, if we wish to logicize a narrative. Something along the lines of "with each sentence time progresses", or whatever -- but then there's always a storyteller out there who notices that people are logicizing stories, then changes it up to thwart the logic. — Moliere
I can get along well enough with phenomenology-talk that I don't feel the need to clear it with another theory. One starts somewhere, after all. My doubts aren't based in a notion of what philosophy ought to be, as much as based in particular experiences of people claiming to have so-called special knowledge.
And sometimes phenomenology is very grounded and attending to our experience, and sometimes it goes off the deep-end and claims that everything is consciousness correlated to the special ideas the phenomenologist can see.
It's the latter that I think goes off into what Kant called noumenal speculation. Maybe to the speaker, they can see something special. That's what mystical experience is about -- seeing something others cannot, and purportedly attempting to translate what cannot be translated for people who do not have that mystical experience. And, religiously, perhaps that flies -- but I've yet to make sense of such talk in a rational manner, at least -- though I remain interested. — Moliere
I think that's a warning sign, for myself at least, that I've fallen into a transcendental argument -- it's valid, but it's also easy to construct and usually based on an unstated feeling (what, Kant acting on unstated feelings?! He's a being of pure reason! ;) ) — Moliere
When I feel I don't know what the negation of some philosophy is, I'm focusing on some universal idea -- a totality, one might say, that encompasses, explains, relates, feels, connects, guides, and soothes. Something like God, but in a phenomenological world -- so God can be replaced by Man, ala the Enlightenment, or something else, but it's all religion at the end of the day. Magical beliefs, big-M Meaning, the mystical -- these things are more important because they make life worth living. — Moliere
And so the transcendental argument springs forth -- how does anyone really do/experience/say/be anything at all? Phenomenology is the only possible way we live our actual lives, and clearly we do live actual lives, therefore phenomenology is the way. To bolster the first point we must first list all the possible alternative ways, and defeat them until Phenomenology is the one that stands -- then say, abductively, "See if you can come up with a better explanation"
The problem being -- it all relies upon what sounds good to the speaker. It's just as easy to set up the exact same argument with materialism. It follows the same pattern (and is akin to the moral arguments for God's existence): — Moliere
How does anyone really do/experience/say/be anything at all? Materialism is the only possible way to explain our lives, and we clearly do live ("some of us, anyway" scolding the eliminative materialists), therefore materialism is the explanation at least until something better comes along, but all these other explanations are bad for these reasons. — Moliere
What is the ethical dimension to Husserl's thought? — Moliere
Sure, they are not determinate things, else they could be talked about, but they are not nothing. You seem to be developing the nasty habit of picking up the fruit which has already fallen; not a habit conducive to fruitful conversation. — Janus
No, you're still misunderstanding. I am telling you that there are things I cannot tell you, not trying, per impossibile, to tell you what I cannot tell you. And of course the things I cannot tell you cannot be part of the conversation, but the fact that there are things I cannot tell you can be, and should be an important part of the human conversation. — Janus
Yes, we experience only fleeting images, impressions and sensations, and out of that common experience we construct the collective representation which is the world of stable objects and entities. — Janus
Here attempting to lay out more against the case that know-how is ineffable (at least in some absolute sense, though I've granted the relative sense when someone hasn't learned something yet, but could) — Moliere
Still going along my materialist thought line . . . — Moliere
If that be the case, then statements, all unto themselves, are never knowledge. — Moliere
In the toy model of knowledge they roughly correspond to "beliefs" — Moliere
...but given that we don't need to believe the statements to know-how that's not quite right (because knowledge is in the body, rather than a set of true statements/propositions... — Moliere
So why doesn't this count as ineffable, if we aren't even tied to the words really, but just use them to enable? — Moliere
I think it's because these things can be taught to others. I can refer to my knowledge, and show it to someone, and they can learn. So, at least, there's a connection of some kind between us in the transfer of knowledge. — Moliere
And while transferring knowledge to others, at least, I cannot do it without words. — Moliere
Even in teaching someone to ride a bike, which is primarily a know-how with scant words, I'd still use words to transfer that knowledge to someone else. I could, as an exercise, attempt to teach without any words whatsoever, but it'd be much harder than if I'd just communicate while showing. — Moliere
Now, if riding a bike were ineffable, I couldn't teach it to someone... — Moliere
And, given that knowledge is in the body it's also relative to the body, so for some it is ineffable. — Moliere
...for most creatures like myself it's only ineffable prior to the doing. — Moliere
Is riding a bike really the same as mystical or metaphysical claims? — Moliere
It's unclear to me what you are granting "in the relative sense" here. If someone hasn't learned something yet, then they don't have the knowledge (or know how) yet. Are you granting that their lack of knowledge is ineffable? They can't say what they don't know?? That's a bit trivial... — Luke
What is effable (or what is effed) is that which is said or written down in a public language - in the world - among a community of language speakers. What could be more materialist than that? I have no qualms with that. — Luke
My criticism has been wholly in response to Banno's claim that an exhaustive list of instructions will not give one knowledge of how to ride a bike. — Luke
"Statements, all unto themselves" is a strawman that you have attributed to those opposing your view. — Luke
That's why I have tried to restrict the preceding discussion to knowledge. It's mainly because Banno's original claim was about knowledge, viz. that a list of instructions cannot give one know-how. But it's also because knowledge has a close relation to beliefs, statements and therefore to effability; to what can be stated. For some reason, you and Banno tend to shy away from talking about knowledge when it comes to effability. — Luke
As you appear to recognise, you are making a case for the opposition, for ineffability, instead of making a case that all knowledge is effable. — Luke
You appear to imply that some knowledge can only be shown and can't be said. The part of the instruction which needs to be shown is unspoken; uneffed. I believe this was Wittgenstein's distinction between showing and saying in the Tractatus. If it is necessary to show it to someone, because it can't be said, then it is ineffable. — Luke
Until this point, I realise that I have not addressed the issue of actually riding the bike. The exhaustive list of instructions purportedly contains all the knowledge of how to ride the bike but does not provide one with the knowledge of how to ride. That extra piece of knowledge can only come from the actual riding of the bike. But wait. Does that mean that the list of instructions does not contain all the knowledge of how to ride? Is there some knowledge missing from the instructions that one gains from riding the bike? That can't be right because Banno said that riding the bike neither adds nor is knowledge. I wish one of you could tell me what knowledge is missing from the list of instructions or why one cannot learn how to ride from the list of instructions alone. Perhaps the part that you are unable to tell me is ineffable? — Luke
I mean something much more basic: there is nothing that is free of logic, simply because to have an idea at all, fact or fiction, is to have this within the framework of logic. For example, "Oh, my offense is rank" is, among other things, an affirmation, a logical category. — Constance
This takes philosophy beyond its proper category. I say, philosophy's proper category IS the onto-theo-philosophical examination of our "thrownness" into a world, and the center of this inquiry is ethics/value, in an metaethical and metavalue exposition. — Constance
Why value? Because all propositional pursuits of philosophy reduce to this, I argue. Truth is indeterminate, and to the extent talk about value is "language" talk, it, too is indeterminate. But value talk possesses the, what I will call, direct (a risky term) "indexical" pursuit of value, so called.
Tough to talk about, but then, religion has never understood itself, so mired in bad metaphysics. — Constance
But put Kant's dividing line aside. The transcendental issue is embedded in phenomena. Put bluntly, one does not "divide" eternity. The reason we have to talk this way is because we face it in everything we can conceive. The question really goes to why we have warrant to give any priority to this, and this is a value issue. — Constance
Analytics (like Davidson) assume truth is not value (he says this), but Dewey is closer to being right: everything that transpires before us IS value; the separation of cognitive functions occurs in analysis only. The philosophical problem has never been about rightly determined propositions, but rightly determined propositions in the disclosure higher affectivity.
Only Buddhists, Hindus and various mystics talk like this.
I think the is very important nail's head hit very hard by this. But God is not God, nor are daseins, daseins in the context of this thinking. Not is the sun the sun, and so on. Such things fall away. I see concepts not as labels tagged on to objects, but as powerful dynamic world makers, Heidegger's temporal dynamic is an extraordinary exposition. I think of it like this: what is left after past-present-future is divested of its existence making process? the argument is, this cannot be done, hence the complaint against Husserl, who thought "pure" phenomena could "appear" in the epoche. For pure phenomena to make sense at all, one would have to "turn off" the world itself.
I disagree, of course. One can turn off the world and be in the world at once. Not unlike what Kierkegaard has in mind with his Knight of Faith. At heart, K was an irrationalist, which is why he fought so against Hegel. One did not have to read Kant or Hegel or even Kierkegaard to make this extraordinary movement toward affirmation, a yielding to God, in theological terms. Where I disagree is in the irrationality, where terrible mistakes allow for distortion, dogma, and moronic authoritative thinking to undermine the whole enterprise. Philosophy's "job" is to steer through such things. — Constance
The answer to this lies in the epoche, I claim. It is a method, first, not a thesis, first. The most radical form of this is found in meditation, when seriously undertaken, which really amounts to expunging the contents of the world. — Constance
When you talk about living our actual lives, you suggest phenomenology has practical wisdom. I don't see how philosophy has this dimension apart from the way it can be applied, and what comes to mind is Heidegger, who was briefly a Nazi, and this does seem to follow from his ideas of history, freedom and self realization. — Constance
On materialism: it is not as if this concept has no meaning, even though it has no properties, as all vacuous metaphysics goes. It carries, however, an unmistakable connotative meaning, which is due to its being lifted from contexts found in natural science, and thus, when this term is used, it implicitly endorses scientific settings for philosophical thinking. What I mean is, when we think of material substance, we think the underlying substratum of all physical objects, and so we are directed toward objects, their physical analyses, their localities in space and time, their causal relations with other objects, etc. Phenomenology takes a term like material substance and registers its significance in "predicatively defined regions" of the naturalistic attitude. It is a term, like all other terms, and its meaning is context dependent, and so it is NOT a foundational term for ontology. Husserl thought philosophy had its true calling in the foundational intuitions of the world. Heidegger did not share this. I am in between. — Constance
Next, one must see, by making reference to our sense-perceptions and feelings (for these will provide the most secure conviction), that the soul is a body made up of fine parts distributed throughout the entire aggregate, and most closely resembling breath with a certain admixture of heat, in one way resembling breath and in another resembling heat. There is also the third part which is much finer than even these components because of this is more closely in harmony with the rest of the aggregate too. All of this is revealed by the abilities of the soul, its feelings, its ease of motion, its thought processes, and the things whose removal leads to our death
Well, phenomenology has come along. Materialism is not a philosophical concept, as I see it, because philosophical questions go deeper than science can conceive. One must make subjectivity the center of inquiry. Ask, what is it one is confronting in the world, in actuality? It is the what appears before us. To take materialism as a philosophical idea is pure empty metaphysics based on an extension of what science thinks about regarding what is NOT material at all. — Constance
I should say, I am don't defend Husserl, Heidegger or anyone else in full. Husserl and empathetic relations is interesting, but it is not a metaethical account (though I would have to read more on it). My take on the discoveries of ethics via the epoche issues from reading of Michel Henri and others, but I was first struck by G E Moore's non natural property of ethical matters. He was talking about the Good and the Bad. I won't go into this unless you want to, but it is a big issue, basic to my thinking: Suffering stands as its own presupposition, that is, the badness of suffering is not bad because there is a discursive exposition of it being so. AS SUCH, suffering is a stand alone feature of our world. It is an absolute. Nothing more axiomatic than this. Arguable, granted; but in the end, not really to be gainsaid. — Constance
Science eventually solved this speculative impossibility by proving any change in the form of energy means some will be lost — Mww
What this whole discussion misses is the interplay between the words and the world; — Banno
So why doesn't this count as ineffable, if we aren't even tied to the words really, but just use them to enable? I think it's because these things can be taught to others. I can refer to my knowledge, and show it to someone, and they can learn. So, at least, there's a connection of some kind between us in the transfer of knowledge. And while transferring knowledge to others, at least, I cannot do it without words. — Moliere
↪Moliere Again, well said. That is in agreement with my extended argument to hypericin and @Luke — Banno
There is a contradiction in Janus claiming both that what "cannot be taught" yet one can "make the acquisition of such know-how more likely", but perhaps it's much the same point as I just attributed to Wittgenstein. Janus would then be saying much the same thing, just less clearly. — Banno
dualism and conservation of energy thread — Metaphysician Undercover
it is a misrepresentation to say that there is a "transfer of knowledge" between people. — Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that the key to understanding the nature of knowledge is in understanding the process of learning. There is much misunderstanding here, and the reading group of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" which we held a few years back, seems to have permanently stalled out when we approached the critical part of this book, where he analyzed this process of learning.
Your passage here is rife with error. First, it is a misrepresentation to say that there is a "transfer of knowledge" between people. We have two possible representations of "knowledge", one as a communal entity, and the other as the property of individuals. The former, knowledge as a communal entity, rules out the possibility of a 'knowledge transfer', knowledge is a communal property which we share in. Therefore there would be no 'transfer'. However, "knowledge" as 'know-how' is inconsistent with "knowledge" as a shared entity, because know-how is unique and proper to the individual. — Metaphysician Undercover
time consciousness, the fact that every moment of experience is a synthesis of retention, presentation and protention. This means that the now is a blend of expectation and memory. Phenomenology can’t capture any content that is immediately present. To retain a momentary content is to reflect back on it, thereby changing what it was. No particular content repeats its sense identically.
This means that what we experience in its uniqueness is ineffable to us as well as to others, in the sense that it doesnt hold still long enough for us to repeat its essence, duplicate it, record it , reflect on it, tell ourselves about it. This does’t mean that we can’t communicate our experiences to ourselves , only that in doing so what we are communicating is something similar rather than identical to what we experience in it’s never-to-be repeated immediacy. So self-reflection is as imperfect as communication with others. The phenomenological method reveals to us the structural patterns that intentional synthesis consists in, such as the constitution of higher level phenomena like persisting spatial objects out of the changing flow of perceptual data.
In short, the content-in-itself of the contingent , relative, ineffable ‘now’ is not useful or meaningful via its role in the formal , communicable aspects of experience . — Joshs
In our social and cognitive environment, we instantaneously take part in various intensive apparatuses whose principles of organization and processes evade our control and recognition. Varela defines a machine as "the set of inter-relations of its components independent of the components themselves." 'A higher level of phenomena' is constituted by a relational machinic complex, effectuated before and alongside intentionality, discursive, and subject-object relations. — Number2018
What about the not-ideas?
Facts and fictions are composed of words, I'd say -- language, rather than logic. Rather than focus the copula and the categories I'd say that language is more powerful than these logics, that language is what makes logic comprehensible in the first place rather than the other way around. — Moliere
I look at philosophy anarchically. Each philosopher defines for themself what is important, and ranks things in accord with their philosophy. Philosophy is one of the most unlimited disciplines. Only institutions, I'd say, have notions of what is proper to philosophy. And that is important, because philosophy is actually difficult, and it's difficult to teach, and to learn we need standards put before us. But eventually, we are simply free.
So, from that vantage, I see onto-theo-philosophical examination of our "thrownness" into a world as very interesting. Each philosopher defines their own project, really, and that's the whole point. It's why it's mind-expanding.
But I don't see it as being any more proper than any other way of doing philosophy. — Moliere
I agree that religion has never understood itself, and I find that pursuit to understanding religion very interesting. It's pretty clearly connected to how human beings function in the world, given how it's literally part of every culture ever and secular thoughts are relatively new, in the scheme of all written history.
I'm not sure I'd say value-talk is less determinate than truth-talk, though. I'd say that value-talk ends in convictions, rather than in values. And convictions, given that people have different ones, lead to conflict, but for all that, we still cling to them. — Moliere
I don't think that there's really a question of deeper than science or shallower than philosophy. What is "depth", other than the desire for meaning in life? — Moliere
When I ask, what is it I am confronting in the world, in actuality, I see a natural world. And meaning in it is had by living happy lives with others for the time you get. There's not a grand answer to it all -- we simply are born without purpose, and die without reason. Everything we care about is just that -- what we care about. In actuality, I think there are no deep mysteries. — Moliere
Moore's concept of ethics is super interesting to me. I'd say he's right, and that there are no non-natural properties, and therefore, there are no true moral statements. Goodness is what we care about, and it is our human responsibilty to act on it, or to not -- we get to choose. If we care about it, we can pursue it. But if we stop caring about it, then we can choose not to. Hence, the natural world, especially as we gain more power over it, is our responsibility exactly as it is. But it's still natural for all that. And it's a collective responsibility, not an individual one. — Moliere
but the problem here is that such a method becomes a beetle in a box. — Banno
I mean something much more basic: there is nothing that is free of logic, simply because to have an idea at all, fact or fiction, is to have this within the framework of logic. For example, "Oh, my offense is rank" is, among other things, an affirmation, a logical category. — Constance
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