No, in the bit about the Emperor, you're saying that his motivations "are almost nonsense to people who aren't the person in question". But you just said that we can know the motivations of others. That's the inconsistency I was pointing out. — Noble Dust

They are almost nonsense to the person in question because they don't have access to their first person relationship with reality, not because they cannot imagine being in that situation and having that motive.

None of that was clear until you elaborated your idea further, but fair enough.

None of that was clear until you elaborated your idea further, but fair enough. — Noble Dust

It was clear from my second reply to you. A motive is grounded in something - in the relationship of the person with reality - hence why I said that I know their motive but not how they arrive to it. Without having access to the ground - not through knowledge, which is impossible, but through first person awareness, how can I make sense of their motives? They are almost nonsense to me = I know the motive but not how it is arrived at.

It was clear from my second reply to you. — Agustino

That's why I pointed out the discrepancy in your original reply. :-} Whatever. Anyway, I can tentatively get with the idea of a fundamental motive being grounded in how someone perceives reality, especially since our perception of reality is by definition so steeped in a self-centric way of life, if not overcome through various disciplines. I would even say a fundamental motive is often grounded in how the person views themselves, in relation to the world around them. In other words, our perception of the world around us is fundamentally grounded in a perception of self.

You're saying that proper pragmatism is an ontic inquiry; you can always ask "why," but once you do this past the point of universal invariance, you hit a wall because there's no answer in terms of a more general kind of invariance. — Pneumenon

I mention invariance as Nozick did a good book on that (if you want a more contemporary reference to answer Rorty).

But yes, invariance is the natural limit of skepticism. It defines the point where asking "why" no longer makes a difference. And so you might as well be quiet.

And indeed, Witty was channeling Peirce via the proddings of Ramsey if you check out Cheryl Misak's lastest retelling of the history. So quietism does not simply have to be an epistemic cut-off, it can become the ontic terminus. Invariance is the equilibrium state where further detail cannot disrupt the global whole.

This gets tricky because it is about reaching a metaphysics where both epistemology and ontology are saying the same thing for the same reasons. The grand project is to re-unite what has become philosophically divided.

So Rorty is saying pragmatism means goals are entirely personal. And models of reality are completely socially constructed as a result. The distance between the phenomenal and the noumenal is .... an unbridgeable chasm in the end.

But Peircean pragmatism says, hey look, the universe itself has a "reasoning mind". Our best model of epistemology is thus our best model of ontology. It is the same modelling mechanism (or semiotic sign relation) at work in both cases. It is just that our human or Kantian-level relating is indeed highly specific and personal, while that of the universe is at the other end of the spectrum in being maximally general and "disinterested" in any particulars. That is why the universe can be described in terms of the most generic physical laws, or statements of mathematical symmetry and symmetry breaking.

So sure, this "pansemiosis" of Peirce (he called it objective idealism) sounds pretty mystic ... if you are still a reductionist. But it is a grand unifying project that makes plenty of sense. It accounts for what science has actually found (in itself needing to re-unite observers and observables to achieve any final theory).

Basically, a qualified Principle of Sufficient Reason with a restriction on the kinds of explanations allowed, viz. they must be in terms of more general invariance. — Pneumenon

Well it is more complicated as you have a point of departure - vagueness - as well as one of arrival, in generality. So the genesis of questioning begins with the breaking of one (vague) level of symmetry and ends once continued questioning (or perturbation, or fluctuation) fails to make a general difference.

And Peirce defined that in terms of the Laws of Thought. Vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. Generality is that to which the principle of the excluded middle does not apply. So at the heart of logic, these are well defined terms.

Now I want to talk about something else here: why that particular restriction? I would assume that this is motivated by the success of natural science, but that's a guess because you have not yet said so. Does this methodology bootstrap itself out of scientific pragmatism, from "Let's do this because it works" to a more general method, a sort of conceptual ascent? Or is it some other reason? — Pneumenon

The success of natural science does prove that there is an epistemology (of modelling relations) that can lift humans out of their self-interested rut long enough to discover the disinterested invariance of existence "itself".

And historically, the "Let's do this because it works" version of pragmatism came after - if we are talking about the highly utilitarian kind of pragmatism that James made a big hit of, by tapping right into that Enlightenment point of view which then became the familiar Yankee disconnect between the social and economic spheres of life.

So it is crucial to point out that including the very idea of "doing this for a purpose" in pragmaticism is what makes it possible to think that the everyday desires of biologically-evolved and culturally-situated humans are far from an invariant fact of nature. Instead they are highly particular. But then also, by the same token, pragmatism can then model the notion of purpose in general. And thus it starts to make sense that even the universe is formed by its (thermodynamic) desires.

So yes, the whole argument is immanently bootstrapping in any direction you might care to slice it. That is why it is "naturalism". There can be no transcendent get out clauses. It all has to self organise.

Clearly for Peirce, it did arise out of scientific practice. He was - rare for a philosopher - a top scientist. But his metaphysics arose as a holistic and organicist retort to the overly reductionist and mechanical understanding of reality that Enlightenment science - the classical world of Newton - had produced in popular thought.

So Pragmatism proper is about the unity of things. It steers the middle course by being inclusive.

You can see the way philosophy went after the Enlightenment split things apart. You have the analytics who ran with the reductionism. They went for stories of bottom-up material and efficient cause, rejecting top-down formal and final cause as "spooky".

Then you have the Romantic-counter reaction that particular reduction engenders - such as Post Modernism. Now - reacting directly to the popular success of techno-analytic reductionism - you have the alternative camp that says form (or structure) and finality (or meaning) are the true foundation of things. Analytics are just "weird" because they have no soul, don't get poetry, and are generally just uncool and nerdy. Purpose must again be at the metaphysical centre of existence (even if existentialism says that just means purpose as it is to be understood multfariously by "any individual".)

But Peircean pragmatism unites by telling the Aristotelan systems story where existence is the result of a free interaction between bottom up and top down causality. The Universe is holistic in that it really is formed by all four of Aristotle's causes. They are all real and to be taken seriously.

So I get the feeling you want to read a historical direction to this - from science to metaphysics.

But Peirce was rejecting science as it had become (even for analytics and continentals) in order to return it to the more complete thing it once was (and is now becoming again).

So pragmatism is a foretaste of that future science, and a return to the roots of metaphysical understanding we see across many ancient cultures in fact - not just the Greeks with Anaximander or the Hesiod, but Buddhism, Taoism, even Judaism (as in ein sof).

The problem is weak philosophy - that is, subjective values. This leaves us in a hazy, nebulous, and clueless state, where the best we can do is live 'good but clueless lives' - not even knowing what 'good' is exactly.

I've answered all the Great Questions of Life adequately - my answers being based on current verified knowledge and our best models of reality (since my philosophy addresses broader survival), and I've even identified the REAL Greatest of the Great Questions of Life: "Why Bother?" (admit it - you must answer that question before you even begin to address the now 'lesser' questions - and note that science will never address that question - which means philosophy is still relevant (tell that to Stephen Hawking).

Answering this Greatest of the Great Questions of Life just happened to be the Ultimate Value of Life: Higher consciousness (of which humans are the current sole owners of (on Earth), though in a very primitive state). So to put the Greatest Answer into a sentence, the answer to "Why bother?" is "because consciousness is a good thing" (consider the alternative).

Now we have the Ultimate Value of Life, which has an associated Ultimate Goal - to secure the Ultimate Value (which currently happens to be unsecured). So in our case, the Ultimate Goal would be worded, "to secure higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe".

Now that we have an Ultimate Goal, we have an Ultimate Arbitrator in distinguishing good from evil (their being goal-driven), which gives us a solid foundation for building worthwhile lives (with a clue) and relevant civilizations (finally).

So now, when you are asked, "Why are you doing that?" "What is it you want?" "What are your motives?" You can put on a philosopher's hat and stand tall and say, "To secure higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe" (and you can add "thou fool!" just for impact).

The other "Great Questions of Life"? They have been answered by science in the form of verified knowledge (which is still largely ignored in favor of one's own uninformed imagination and social needs).
"Why are we here?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says there is no purpose. This is the universe that we have just awakened to. It is up to us to do with our awakening what we will."
"How did we come to exist?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence points to pure chance in a chaos system of inanimate matter and energy."
"What is the meaning of life?" Verified Knowledge: "We make our own meaning, and if it is anything less than securing higher consciousness in a harsh and deadly universe, than you are a fool, a knave, or both, and your philosophy is death."
"Is there a God?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says 'no, and that all religions have been exposed as make-believe."
"Is there life after death?" Verified Knowledge: "All evidence says 'no', and further, it would be prudent to assume 'no' - that we have to work for it. Consider if we 'believed' that it existed and it did not, and we did not work for it, then we would be signing our death warrant.
"In the beginning, how did matter and energy come out of nothingness, i.e. how did 'something' come from 'nothing'?" This is a question for science, and it has not been answered yet. Philosophically I've answered it as follows: Infinity and eternity do not exist in the physical world, for anything that 'exists' needs 'bounds', and they are both 'boundless' - hence they are only words for 'nothingness'. Infinity is the nothingness in which everything exists, and eternity is the changelessness in which everything changes. The best we can do is define and broaden our time and space bounds in nothingness and changelessness (infinity and eternity), and hope that one day it intersects with other enlightened beings. Also, given infinity, 'everything' cannot exist (there being ever-more space for ever-more 'things' to exist in); and given eternity, 'eternal life' is rendered impossible (there being no end to stop and look back and say, 'Finally, I've lived forever!").
To finally address how 'something' came from 'nothing' - it can't, so the issue must be that there is something fundamentally wrong with our concepts of 'nothing' and 'something'... (and I suspect that infinity and eternity have something to do with it, but I of course can't be certain - it is a mere possibility to be further investigated).