Error is possible, but it arises within a shared field of meaning, not from a neutral reality battering a theory. — Joshs

The problem arises because we think of meaning as something shared between human beings and define "reality" as "neutral", i.e. meaningless. So we need to think differently about this. First, the "neutral" reality is constructed in order to serve certain of our interests, categorized as "scientific". Second and paradoxically, we need to recognize that neutral reality is a construction that serves some of our interests and values. So there is a point of view sense in which it is not value-free. Let's say, it doesn't assign values to its assertions, but does develop its practices in pursuit of certain values - "truth", in a certain sense.

Likewise, I don't see the categories of understanding as 'imposed', as if 'the world' is one domain, and they another. They are, rather, the inevitable grounds of comprehension. — Wayfarer

I'm a bit uncertain whether you are saying that they are the inevitable grounds of our ability to comprehend (cf. Kant) or whether they are the fundamental facts about the world that enable us to apply our categories to the world.

Why externalize and say that intelligibility is somehow "out there", immanent to things, as opposed to being something we do, or that it is simply possible for humans to understand things? — baker

Good question. I wish I had a straightforward answer for you. One way of putting the question is whether the world as we understand it is really ordered and rationaI or the order and ratonality we understand it is just a matter of the way we think about it. Another way of the issue is the question whether our understanding is something imposed on the world or whether it is something we recognize in the world. (I'm hinting here that it is, I think, at least possible that some is imposed and some is recognized.)
There is another issue, which is that "intelligibility" is a complicated concept. We can recognize it informally, partly because what it means is different in different contexts. If you consider specific questions in specific contexts, you can usually make some progress with it. But this is the general question - typically philosophical and problematic for that reason.

I would want to say something stronger than this: that intelligibility is there to be discovered — that being is the kind of thing that can be understood, and that our knowing is a response to that prior intelligibility, not its source. — Esse Quam Videri

The tricky part of this, I think, is that some understanding seems to be a matter of interpretation of given facts. This kind of understanding has elements of both alternatives.

So when we say the world is intelligible, we’re not describing a fortuitous correspondence between two independently constituted domains (mind here, structured being there). We’re describing a more basic fact: that being and intelligibility are internally related. The fit isn’t something that needs to be explained after the fact; it’s built into what we mean by “world” in the first place. — Wayfarer

This is where the tedious point that we are inescapably part of the world plays a part. We participate in the general conditions of existence - specifically order, structure, etc.

The tricky part of this, I think, is that some understanding seems to be a matter of interpretation of given facts. This kind of understanding has elements of both alternatives. — Ludwig V

I agree that much of understanding is interpretive, but I think this actually sharpens the realist point rather than weakening it. Interpretation is an attempt to make sense of what is given in a way that can succeed or fail — i.e. in a way that is answerable to the facts, to counterexamples, to coherence with other lines of evidence, and to the possibility of correction. The very idea of interpretation makes sense only in light of such constraints.

For example, “reality is still there” and “our stories do not capture it” already look like substantive theses about the relation between mind/language and world. If those aren’t truth-apt claims, what are they? And if they are truth-apt, then it seems metaphysics hasn’t been bypassed so much as relocated. — Esse Quam Videri

I've had a few thoughts in response to this. One is to go into truth-aptness to demonstrate how truth-aptness does not justify an inference to something existing. The other is to argue they are not truth-apt, but in a particular way which is somewhat related to how I think about truth-aptness.

But I'm not sure which is the correct response or if there's something else that's better.

But my belief is such that reality is there, and it is not intelligible, regardless of the rational justification that might get me there.

In the same way that Hart looks with incredulity at the claim that intentionality is impossible without Being being intelligible intrinsically my reaction is such that this belief is impossible given what we know. Mine isn't an inference from understanding Being, better -- I don't sit on both sides, as Hegel insists -- but rather by comparison of what we know and noting how in trying to universalize knowledge we have to make metaphysical choices which are, from my perspective, entirely capricious.

More or less we come to argue a metaphysical position because of this sort of experience of making sense prior to making sense of making sense. My suspicion is that this experience comes from our collective identities: by participating with others within a frame we come to get a collective sense of the world prior to its articulation.

But this isn't really a philosophical process. It's pre-philosophical, and what I believe to be the source of our intuitive commitments.

But for the two arguments that I keep coming back to:

Truth-aptness is the result of the form of the proposition. When we write a sentence of the form "A is f" we have a truth-apt statement. But this sentence need not capture anything about the world -- it can turn out to be false, for instance. Or it could be a funny sentence about sentences.

Existential statements, in this view, are quantifiers over statements in the proper form. So "A is f" and "there exists an A such that A is f" are two different claims.

Parsing "Reality is there" I'm not saying anything about reality but simply noting that what we mean by reality exists. This doesn't say anything about reality, like it is intelligible or that it is chaotic, though I believe that it is chaotic.

So, yes, I'm engaging in metaphysics by making the claim -- but I'm not committed to the intelligibility of Being in making that statement.


The other argument I have in mind is noting what kind of thing "reality" is -- basically that it is no thing at all. It's somewhat funny to apply the logic of existential statements to reality because we very much mean by "there exists a..." to be within the domain of "Reality": the set of all those nameable entities exist within reality.

This argument is less clear but lays out some of my intuitions/prejudices here: it seems to me that when we reach a certain point of "elevation" what we mean by sentences and statements can look like they're truth-apt because they're of the form, but because of the generality which we're discussing that form of truth ceases to be applicable. They're not truth-apt, like that -- which gets to my thought on mythopoesis as being the kind of truth, but I admit I'm not clear on that enough to be able to rule out Hart.

I hope I've gone some way to showing that I'm not falling in contradiction here though.

Not odd to me, I suspect most people are drawn to philosophy to find “better” justifications for what they already believe. It’s hoarding weapons and artillery. — Tom Storm

I suppose to me it is odd in relation to what philosophy purports to aspire towards, but you're right about human nature.

But, then, human nature can be configured differently from this combative philosophical attitude. Perhaps that's the oddity.

circles had that ratio before any minds existed to notice it. — Wayfarer

How do you know that?

I'd rather say circles didn't exist prior to minds arising.

Now maybe mind pre-exists humans and is in some way interwoven into reality itself, but if not then it seems hard for me to believe that circles existed prior to minds. Circles co-arise with mathematical ability to conceive of circles. I'd say this is an imaginative process which starts rough and becomes better defined over time because that's what the mathematical mind wants: it's a product of imagination and desire rather than discovery.

Upon having a system of mathematics worked out it appears like it could never be otherwise. But then all you have to do is change an axiom, a starting point, or ask an interesting question and you're off exploring another hiccup in the imagination.

What does he mean? Is the reasoning any good? That’s the main thing I was looking for. Seems to me after 9 pages, the question may be unanswerable or perhaps, I just can't make sense of it. — Tom Storm

I rather thought we got somewhere on this.

I'm offering my objections from a different perspective, but I'd still say his reasoning is just fine. It's part of what makes the question interesting. Using @Quid Est Vertias's depiction it's a transcendental argument which is frequently employed in philosophy. Usually incredulity is the basis of such arguments: for Hart it's intelligibility and naturalism being impossible, for Kant it was the success of science and Hume's criticism of causation both being impossible. (Just to break things down)

That's when I really like philosophy, I guess -- when comparing it isn't just a matter of looking for error, but reflecting after seeing a different conclusion without having made an error. So what I mean to say is that in terms of a basic analysis his argument checks out and makes sense -- which part doesn't make sense to you?

I agree that much of understanding is interpretive, but I think this actually sharpens the realist point rather than weakening it. Interpretation is an attempt to make sense of what is given in a way that can succeed or fail — i.e. in a way that is answerable to the facts, to counterexamples, to coherence with other lines of evidence, and to the possibility of correction. The very idea of interpretation makes sense only in light of such constraints. — Esse Quam Videri

What it means to succeed or fail, to be true or false, correct or incorrect, depends on qualitative systems of criteria. Such criteria define the basis of facts, evidence and intelligibility. If criteria are subject to interpretation along with the facts they orient and constrain, then making sense doesn’t begin only after the world is given, it constructs the conditions and modes of givenness
which constrain fact-finding. This raises the question of why we think we need intelligibility to be the kind of thing which is anchored in a once and for all qualitative criterial ground. We can instead conclude that intelligibility isnt an achievement but what it means to be thrown into a world which is always already relevant to us in some way.

What it means to succeed or fail, to be true or false, correct or incorrect, depends on qualitative systems of criteria. Such criteria define the basis of facts, evidence and intelligibility. If criteria are subject to interpretation along with the facts they orient and constrain, then making sense doesn’t begin only after the world is given, it constructs the conditions and modes of givenness which constrain fact-finding. — Joshs

True, but I'd argue that there is still an irreducible asymmetry at the bottom of inquiry. To re-quote Braver:

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening...

So yes, the criteria are subject to interpretation, but even here reality will have its say regarding the adequacy of such interpretations, taking the form of recalcitrance in the face of denial.

I'd argue that there is still an irreducible asymmetry at the bottom of inquiry. To re-quote Braver:

Lately, I've become interested in these moments of revolutionary experience, when our whole sense of what the world is like gets turned inside out and we are forced to form entirely new concepts to process what is happening...

So yes, the criteria are subject to interpretation, but even here reality will have its say regarding the adequacy of such interpretations, taking the form of recalcitrance in the face of denial. — Esse Quam Videri

Braver is taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Levinas. For them, recalcitrance is not a brute, uninterpreted Given pushing back from outside all conceptuality; revolutionary experience isn’t contact with a naked world. Is this the direction you want to go in?

So, yes, I'm engaging in metaphysics by making the claim -- but I'm not committed to the intelligibility of Being in making that statement. — Moliere

I hope you don't mind if I press you on this point a bit. Consider the statements:

(1) Reality is chaotic
(2) Being is not inteliigible

How would you describe your intention in making such statements if not to affirm an insight into the nature of Being? In denying my claim that Being is intelligible are you not implicitly committed to the notion that I have gotten it wrong? And does this not imply a standard that both your claim and mine are answerable to, and can fall-short of? And what is this standard? Is it merely personal whimsy, or communal sanction? Mustn't it be something that outstrips and constrains both of those? Otherwise, we would be forced to say that truth is exhausted by the caprice of the individual or the community.

So there is a sense, I think, in which the claim that "Being is not intelligible" quietly self-undermines. This isn't intended as a cheap "gotcha"; it's a reflection on what is presupposed in the act of making an assertion, asking a question or seeking an acceptable answer.

The other argument I have in mind is noting what kind of thing "reality" is -- basically that it is no thing at all. — Moliere

I agree -- reality (or Being) is not a "thing", and I don't think metaphysical realism requires it to be thought of as a thing. Likewise, I don't think it makes sense to say "Being exists". To my mind, to affirm the intelligibility of Being is just to acknowledge that the world can be correctly understood, even if only partially, imperfectly and subject to the conditions of finite subjectivity.

How would you describe your intention in making such statements if not to affirm an insight into the nature of Being? — Esse Quam Videri

By affirming an insight into the patterns which arise rather than affirming something of the nature of Being. I'm still talking about the world -- one which I'm enfolded within and composed of, by my lights.

In denying my claim that Being is intelligible are you not implicitly committed to the notion that I have gotten it wrong? And does this not imply a standard that both your claim and mine are answerable to, and can fall-short of? And what is this standard? Is it merely personal whimsy, or communal sanction? Mustn't it be something that outstrips and constrains both of those? Otherwise, we would be forced to say that truth is exhausted by the caprice of the individual or the community.

I think the way metaphysical questions are decided is by personal whimsy or communal sanction, yes. And to count as knowledge it would have to be more than this caprice.

But given the history of metaphysics it does seem that the choice is capricious. I don't think it will ever be decided once and for all. Rather it seems to me that it fulfills some need for totality which cannot be satisfied. So, yes, it will be a continual rise and fall of various viewpoints without any final end (or purpose).


Here, in order for it to be decided elsewise, we'd have to find some common standard to which we're appealing. Now we're both interested in philosophy and presumably we're both adhering to some kind of standard of rationality due to that so it's not like it's totally unshared -- only that I don't think this reflects on Being.

There's a myth I like to tell of the carpentercoopercobbler, oi (mind fart) who sees the universe as being really in the shape of a shoe, when you look at it. So it looks to me with philosophers: philosophers are so attracted to the intelligible and their profession is such that it can come to seem as if, at bottom, the world really is, in some far away sense, structured intelligibly.

Where from my perspective all I see is chaos and whimsy, especially when it comes to metaphysical claims. Sometimes out of that whimsy shared norms arise for various reasons which seem unrelated to Being to me.

That isn't to say that it's bad, mind. If anything it seems to me that the more we invent the more possible patterns we might see arise: so intelligibility really does require us to keep making stuff up rather than converge on the world.

It only starts to converge on once we have some shared criteria, which I don't really see philosophy as having initially -- you have to look for it somewhere.

Braver is taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Levinas. For them, recalcitrance is not a brute, uninterpreted Given pushing back from outside all conceptuality; revolutionary experience isn’t contact with a naked world. Is this the direction you want to go in? — Joshs

Not entirely. I think Braver is hitting on something important with his insight that reality can disrupt established conceptual frameworks. I also agree that recalcitrance does not take the form of a brute, uninterpreted Given.

Where I would part ways is with the inference from the recalcitrance of reality to the irrational excess of Being. I believe that we can acknowledge that reality always outstrips our current framework without surrendering to the unintelligibility of that excess.

I believe that we can acknowledge that reality always outstrips our current framework without surrendering to the unintelligibility of that excess. — Esse Quam Videri

Here I want to note I agree.

It's only that the outstripping is what makes it seem like it is unintelligible, and it's us who are making up the meanings to make sense of the unintelligible.

It could be, in some larger sense, intelligible for all that. I just don't believe it to be so because of the diversity of thought is presently unable to be universalized in the manner of the philosophers without smudging out differences. And then it seems to me that differences in thought about the world (which are true) are what points to a reality greater than the mind: something beyond the intelligible.

All the theist has to demonstrate in this instance is that intentionality can’t be explained by physicalism or naturalism (not materialism per say).

And remember that the famous atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel presents arguments similar to Hart. — Tom Storm

That sounds like proving a negative. I suppose a theist is more likely to point to (demonstrate) the absence of physical evidence for mental phenomena in matter --- other than animated matter, which raises the question of how Life & Mind emerged from physical/material evolution. Of course there are philosophical theories*1 on the topic, for whatever that's worth. Like Deacon's conjecture, my own thesis is based on scientific evidence, but also on philosophical interpretation.

Thomas Nagel*2 has said that he hopes there is no God. But I assume he's referring to the intervening God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. Yet ironically, his "intelligibility" and "nonpurposive teleology" seem to point toward some ultimate intentional cause --- structured by whom? --- of physical existence and directional evolution. :smile:


*1. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter is a 2011 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon that explains how life, consciousness, and meaning arise from the physical world, arguing that "absences" or constraints are key to complex systems. The book synthesizes philosophy, biosemiotics, and neuroscience to propose that purpose and subjectivity emerge from "teleodynamic" processes, where one system's dissipation drives another's, creating aim-directed, self-organizing dynamics. It's a dense, ambitious work that bridges the gap between physics and the subjective experience of being human.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+mind+emerged+from+matter

*2. Thomas Nagel argues that the universe is fundamentally intelligible, meaning it is structured to be comprehensible to conscious minds, rather than a random, mindless byproduct of evolution. In Mind and Cosmos, he challenges materialist, neo-Darwinian, and theistic explanations for failing to account for how subjective consciousness, reason, and objective value arise naturally within the world.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=thomas+nagel+intelligibility
Note --- "Nagel, an atheist, clarifies that his argument is philosophical and not based on religious belief, though he defends the right to consider ideas like intelligent design"

Give it a try. What vocabulary can you come up with to talk about the objective pole that doesn’t already imply a contribution from the subjective pole? — Joshs

This sounds like a game where I come up with some awkward formulation that is supposedly free of subjectivity, and you point out that this and that element of my awkward formulation are supposedly still conditioned on subjectivity, then repeat.

But this is beside the point. After all we can still talk about objectivity using language which contains subjective elements. Language would be useless otherwise.

Your claim was more radical:

If you remove all of the idealizations that minds impose on the world of appearances, there is not much to say about the nature of what is mind-independent. — Joshs

So you will have to explain how, after subtracting all subjective elements from a claim such as:

The earth orbits the sun.

there is nothing left to the claim.

Where I would part ways is with the inference from the recalcitrance of reality to the irrational excess of Being. I believe that we can acknowledge that reality always outstrips our current framework without surrendering to the unintelligibility of that excess. — Esse Quam Videri

Ok, so if Braver, Kierkegaard and Levinas dont work for you, maybe the left Sellarsians of the Pittsburgh school are more compatible.

For John McDowell, experience is already conceptually structured, but it is still answerable to the world. He uses the language of “receptivity” within the “space of reasons.” That sounds close to your idea that interpretations are constrained by reality’s recalcitrance. McDowell would agree that criteria are not self-legitimating; they must be responsive to how things are. However, McDowell would resist talk of “recalcitrance” if it suggested a brute, extra-conceptual impact. For him, the world’s constraint shows up within conceptual capacities, not as an external shove. If you mean recalcitrance in a quasi-empirical, brute sense, McDowell would push back. If you mean it as rational answerability, then there’s strong alignment.

Another member of that school, Robert Brandom, makes norms and correctness internal to discursive practice. What counts as “reality pushing back” is ultimately cashed out in normative scorekeeping, commitments, entitlements, incompatibilities. Brandom does preserve a notion of objectivity (through the idea that norms outrun any individual’s perspective), but he doesn’t posit a metaphysically independent “say” from reality outside the space of reasons. If you imagine recalcitrance as something extra-normative, Brandom would not endorse that. For Brandom, constraint is socially articulated normativity all the way down.

Robert Pippin emphasizes that objectivity arises within self-correcting historical practices. Error and failure are internal to the activity of giving and asking for reasons. Like McDowell, he would affirm asymmetry: not every interpretation works, but he would resist describing this as an external reality confronting us. The asymmetry is built into the logic of norm-governed practices themselves. Failure is intelligible only within those practices.

So your position can be made consistent with these thinkers, but only if “reality has its say” is understood in a Hegelian way: not as a brute outside, but as the immanent norm of correctness that practices uncover through their own failures. If instead, you really mean that something non-conceptual or extra-practical interrupts interpretation from outside, then you would be moving away from McDowell, Brandom, and Pippin, and toward a more robust metaphysical realism than they typically defend.

So what I mean to say is that in terms of a basic analysis his argument checks out and makes sense -- which part doesn't make sense to you? — Moliere

I really just wanted to see what others thought, to be honest, because it seems so simple and avoids all the usual banalities about the nature of consciousness which is more commonly proffered in arguments against physicalism. I have no real idea what the argument means or how it works.

I have no real idea what the argument means or how it works. — Tom Storm

Hrm, well I feel like I do, which is why I was hoping you'd say what's not clicking :D In an effort for understanding I'll try and pick up the other side here and spitball with you.

Not Hart, of course -- I still haven't read Hart, only the renditions here. But the general thrust of the argument which I've seen before is something I feel like makes sense, at least, I just don't agree with the conclusion because I don't believe in the premises.

I will say a point in favor of his speculation is that I don't think we have a real explanation for meaning, right now (or aboutness). The stories I've offered are just-so stories, too.

By my lights intentionality arose with our ability to speak, and one can see the clear short-term evolutionary advantages so there's nothing to rule out that randomly occurring due to biological selection.

But that's not really an explanation for how matter becomes intelligent, either, and if we're naturalists that does seem to be the sort of "puzzle" that's being put forward: if it started as the big bang and life came from non-life and meaning arose with the development of mind just what is it, within the materialist's framework, that is mind?

Hart seems to believe that all explanation presupposes intelligibility, and so physicalism ends in a kind of contradiction while utilizing the tools which indicate a deeper intelligent order to reality itself.

Yes, this much I get. But to posit it isn’t possible for physical processes to explain intentionality, I wonder if this is a question for expertise rather than a problem for reasoning. What would it mean for a physical processes to produce meaning? I’m not even sure we know what meaning is. I feel like this piece of reasoning, while interesting, is excluding a multiplicity of other relevant matters I know nothing about so I don’t feel it’s a self-contained argument one can make use of. But that may just be me.

That sounds like proving a negative. I suppose a theist is more likely to point to (demonstrate) the absence of physical evidence for mental phenomena in matter — Gnomon

I’m interested in what people think more than looking for answers . I’m not sure what you were saying in your post.

What would it mean for a physical processes to produce meaning? I’m not even sure we know what meaning is. — Tom Storm

Good question.

I'm sure that we don't know what meaning is. :D

Or, at least, it's always appeared to me to be something like a mystery. To a point that I wonder if "conceptual confusion" is a possible answer, but that doesn't seem so to me. In a straightforward way we talk about the world, our talk about the world is about the world, and this aboutness -- insofar that language is real and not an illusory set of squeaks and squawks we don't really understand as much as feel like we understand -- is as real as the rest around us insofar that we are non-dualistic naturalists.

I feel like this piece of reasoning, while interesting, is excluding a multiplicity of other relevant matters I know nothing about so I don’t feel it’s a self-contained argument one can make use of. But that may just be me. — Tom Storm

Naw, that's how I feel too. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

I prefer to keep meaning mysterious, at this point, rather than thinking any of our manners of making sense really make sense of it after all. (or, insofar that they do, surely there's other ways of making sense....)

Here I want to note I agree. — Moliere

Cheers!

It could be, in some larger sense, intelligible for all that. I just don't believe it to be so because of the diversity of thought is presently unable to be universalized in the manner of the philosophers without smudging out differences. And then it seems to me that differences in thought about the world (which are true) are what points to a reality greater than the mind: something beyond the intelligible. — Moliere

For me, the diversity (and fallibility) of thought is a reflection of our finite situatedness rather than a reflection of the unintelligibility of being. I find it very difficult to make sense of possibility of rational inquiry under the assumption that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, whereas I feel that it's much easier to make sense of the diversity of thought in terms of the situatedness and limitations of the knower.

Or, at least, it's always appeared to me to be something like a mystery. To a point that I wonder if "conceptual confusion" is a possible answer, but that doesn't seem so to me. In a straightforward way we talk about the world, our talk about the world is about the world, and this aboutness -- insofar that language is real and not an illusory set of squeaks and squawks we don't really understand as much as feel like we understand -- is as real as the rest around us insofar that we are non-dualistic naturalists. — Moliere

Yes. I heard Hilary Lawson explain his view (derivative, I know) that meaning does not map onto the world. Instead, meaning is a human construction, something that drifts in and out of relevance but ultimately functions as a way for us to “close” the openness of reality, to impose structure where none intrinsically exists. Sometimes our closures work pragmatically, and sometimes they hold only briefly before being replaced by others. But we never arrive at Truth, at least not in the sense of truth as a “mirror of nature,” as Richard Rorty might put it. I find this view somewhat seductive.

circles had that ratio before any minds existed to notice it.
— Wayfarer

How do you know that?

I'd rather say circles didn't exist prior to minds arising. — Moliere

But those aren't circles. They look like circles in a rough sort of way and we can make approximations about its dimensions using the idea of a circle -- but in reality they aren't circles. We see them that way because they're close enough to count, but strictly speaking there isn't even a line there and the maxima, minima, or slopes will not be equidistant one from another.

No physical instance is mathematically exact. But that doesn’t mean circularity is an invention. Natural processes exhibit stable radial symmetry that manifests as a circle. The ideal form is realized under material constraints. It is just these kinds of lawful structural regularities that make the natural world intelligible in the first place.

(It may look as though this conflicts with my defense of a “mind-created world,” but it doesn’t. There I was arguing that the world as world — as articulated into objects, meanings, and determinate forms — is inseparable from cognitive disclosure ( or incomprehensible outside comprehension). But that is not the same as saying that such forms are arbitrary or invented. That circular patterns occur in nature is not realistically in dispute. The question is whether the intelligible form “circle” that they instantiate is reducible to our conceptual activity, or whether their intelligibility belongs intrinsically to what we designate as real in the first place. It is that very resonance between the ideal concept and the natural forms that underwrite philosophical Platonism. Compare Argument from Equals, The Phaedo.)

Ok, so if Braver, Kierkegaard and Levinas dont work for you, maybe the left Sellarsians of the Pittsburgh school are more compatible. — Joshs

Yes, indeed. In fact, I think I mentioned the Pittsburgh School as a major influence in a previous response somewhere.

Of the three you mentioned, McDowell is closest, but I don't think he would fully endorse the claim that reality has an intelligible depth that exceeds any historically available conceptual scheme. For that you'd have to look to someone like C.S. Peirce:

Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest possible sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms. — C.S. Peirce

This is perhaps an even stronger claim than I would endorse (without qualification), though I think it captures the spirit of what I've been arguing for.

No physical instance is mathematically exact. But that doesn’t mean circularity is an invention. — Wayfarer

If no physical instance is mathematically exact, and physicalism is true, then that does seem to imply that circularity is an invention of the mind being placed upon the natural world. It's something we made up.

I don't think you're undermining yourself. Like Hart I don't think you're committing a basic mistake.

I don't think the naturalist explanation is either, though.

I find this view somewhat seductive. — Tom Storm

Hrmm... almost a reason to suspect it already.... :D

For me, the diversity (and fallibility) of thought is a reflection of our finite situatedness rather than a reflection of the unintelligibility of being. I find it very difficult to make sense of possibility of rational inquiry under the assumption that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, whereas I feel that it's much easier to make sense of the diversity of thought in terms of the situatedness and limitations of the knower. — Esse Quam Videri

That makes sense to me.

It's not like I know either way.

I'm just following another path in the philosophy forest, as I like to call it.