Cool. :up: :up:

I think you may well enjoy Anthropocentric Purposivism conceptually. — AmadeusD

Interesting. There's a theory for everything and everyone, isn't there? Perhaps this is a kind of soft-Aristotelian, telos affair.

On Talbott’s view, this marks the core limitation of naturalism as it is usually conceived: it attempts to reduce context-driven, interpretive behaviour to physical causation alone. That is the conflict in a nutshell. — Wayfarer

This doesn't seem right. A naturalist isn't restricted to casual explanations only. So long as any contextual, interpretive explanation can ultimately resolve to a casual explanation.

Looking at the behavior of playing chess. A naturalist might explain the how in terms of the neural architecture that supports this ability, and the dopaminergic reinforcement that drives the behavior. And the why, in an analysis of game playing, that it fosters social connection, reinforces hierarchy, and most importantly it is a platform for learning. Each of these in turn might be subject to a how and a why analysis. Eventually, the whys will resolve to hows: to a discussion of adaptive advantage, and how such advantage propagates across generations.

A naturalism that was restricted to purely casual explanations would be hopeless! This seems like a cartoon straw man.

Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense. — Esse Quam Videri

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world.

:up: I would add that if intelligibility is merely 'pragmatic', then our beleif in our capacity to understand reality would be an illusion. It would seem as if we can understand (in part) but we would be wrong to believe we do.

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world. — Moliere

I agree that norms of assertion and justification are socially articulated, and that standards of evidence and demonstration are embedded in communal practices. But while social practices can explain how we enforce norms (what counts as warranted, what gets sanctioned, what gets treated as knowledge), they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. I’m happy to grant that epistemic norms are socially mediated — but that mediation itself seems to presuppose an independent constraint: the difference between what is justified-for-us and what is actually the case. Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing.

Yes—exactly. If intelligibility is reduced to pragmatic usefulness, then “understanding” collapses into successful prediction and control. But then the naturalist has given up the stronger claim that our beliefs are answerable to how reality is in itself, rather than merely to what works for organisms like us.

In that case, it’s not that science becomes false, but that its truth-claims are quietly reinterpreted as instruments. And once that slide happens, it becomes unclear what grounds the normativity of truth and correctness rather than just adaptive success.

they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure that they are. Though...

Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think that follows, either.

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements?

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements? — Moliere

Yes, I agree that norms can be historically situated and yet we can still make true statements.

My point is about what makes that success intelligible. If norms are wholly internal to a community, then “true” collapses into “licensed by current communal standards,” and any notion of correction becomes hard to distinguish from mere change in consensus. We could still shift norms, but we wouldn’t have a basis for saying we were previously mistaken rather than merely operating under different standards.

Put differently: the very idea of “successful reference” seems to presuppose a distinction between what is warranted-for-us and what is actually-the-case, because success and failure aren’t defined by communal uptake alone. That’s the sense in which inquiry appears answerable to something beyond consensus, even if it is always socially mediated in practice.