This isn't it. Its not: 'we look at things from a particular frame of reference'; its: 'the frame brings out the very things we can see to begin with'. I should mention, one of the reasons I called Psuedonym's post a piece of sophistry - which it remains, and yours tends in the same direction - is that the very terms 'subjective' and 'objective' and mostly meaningless: 'framing' - and the vocabulary isn't great because it leads to misunderstandings of the kind in your post - is not merely a 'subjective' act, if by 'subjective' is meant something like 'arbitrary'. A particular framing is always motivated in part by whatever it is that is being framed - it is never arbitrary, nor a matter of whim and fancy. I tried to explore some of this in my more recent 'math' post where I tried to thematize the question of motivation more thoroughly. But yeah, this kind of objection almost entirely misses the mark. This is symptomatic of it: — StreetlightX

I haven't encountered Bryant before, so my response was based on what you wrote. I didn't fully grasp his idea of framing. I agree that the way I framed my criticism wasn't a good response. However, after reading more, and I don't pretend to completely follow his philosophy, I don't find it very convincing. Moreover, to properly respond to his ideas would take more time than I'm willing to invest, so I'll just leave it at that for now; but I would like to read more, and also to read the critiques of his ideas. Do you have any suggestions?

One last consequence of this is that to then speak of philosophies as being 'wrong' - in any way other than as a figure of speech - is to misunderstand totally the vocation of philosophy. Philosophies are only more or less useful, more or less interesting, more or less significant. As Bryant says, those who hold philosophy to the criterion are truth are nothing less then cretins. — StreetlightX

I think that we typically don't have enough meta-cognitive perception in order to recognize that our brain mechanism works through finding patterns in otherwise "noisy" environments. Philosophy in such context would be the attempt by the brain to fill the gaps and find some pragmatic meaning where there may be none, or where it's difficult to assign meaning.

I really don't think that "framing" would be adequate-enough analogy to describe what is happening.

Perhaps analogy may be that of a Lego set with no manual. There's a bunch of pieces of difference colors. Let's call these facts, and each philosopher takes the exact same "existential lego facts" and molds these into something that he proposes has a name and some purpose.

One takes and builds something and calls it a robot. It walks this way, and these round things are eyes. The other builds a "car" and claims that the round thins are wheels that it rolls on, etc.

The point being is that we can connect various patterns that we observe in reality into some coherent whole in a wide variety of ways. I think that philosophy is exploration into giving facts possible meaning.

1.

"The great debates of philosophy are questions of how existence should be framed. — StreetlightX

2.

Every great philosopher then, is measured by what he or she brings into view; — StreetlightX

3.

is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration, to the very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question — StreetlightX

4.

Any philosophical distinction - say between the sensible and the intelligible, — StreetlightX

5.

Philosophies are only more or less useful, more or less interesting, more or less significant. — StreetlightX

In 1) "Should" implies a shouldn't, in 2) "measured" is literally the terminology of science (truth is that which can be measured), in 3) it's turned into "necessary", implying there is an 'unnecessary', by 4) its either "sensible" , or "intelligible", again implying there is nonsense or unintelligible,and at 5) it's become either "useful", "interesting" or "significant".

This thread a very nice potted history of epistemology (albeit not in order). Truth as correspondence has been thrown out at the beginning, but all that has happened is not a rejection of philosophy as 'truth-seeking' but a translation of philosophy's traditional 'truth-seeking' objective into just about every theory of truth that's out there.

"sensible" - Coherence theory.

"useful" - Pragmatism.

"intelligible" - Tarski, or perhaps Austin, depending on what is meant by "intelligible".

"necessary" - any number of deflationary theories.

All I see happening here is a shifting of the location of truth, not any proposition that philosophy is not striving for it.

If frames can be be "sensible", "useful", "intelligible",or "necessary", and if solutions to problems really do just 'fall out' from having chosen the 'right' frame, then selecting the 'right' frame is epistemologically equivalent to having the 'right' solution. If frame and solution become equivalent, in terms of truth value, and "sensible", "useful", "intelligible", and "necessary" are just synonyms for "true" under various theories of truth, then how has any of this taken philosophy away from a preoccupation with truth?

All I see happening here is a shifting of the location of truth, not any proposition that philosophy is not striving for it. — Pseudonym

All I see here is the epistemological frame. How does one identify the 'right frame', when the frame is what establishes what is right? I thought Banno had beaten this one to death ages ago.

Duck or rabbit: which is the right way of seeing it - the truth of the thing?

Impressive!

This post is interesting because it so clearly shows just how far our common points of reference are, and why, perhaps, we're simply speaking across each other. I mean, to play your game of sampling:

1) 'Sensible/Intelligible': The intelligible/sensible distinction is thoroughly Platonic in provenance and refers to the sensory ('feelings/affects') and the rational/conceptual. You can find it in Plato, Averroes, Descartes, Kant and Sellars, among other places. It's pretty much among the most basic and classic distinctions in all of philosophy. That your first associations were with - of all people and things - Austin, Tarski and 'coherence theory' - just speaks to, well, the completely different universe of discourse that you occupy. An entirely idiosyncratic one, at that.

2) 'Measurement': Sorry, but this one really is just pure and unadulterated sophistry. Leaving aside the obvious fact that 'measurement' in the context it was used was clearly a synonym of 'assess' or 'evaluate', the idea that 'measurement' belongs exclusively to a scientific vocabulary is only something a non-native speaker of English could ever think. When Protagoras declared that ἄνθρωπος μέτρον - man is the measure of all things - do you think he meant that humans are scientific instruments? That this has to be even pointed out is embarrassing for us both.

3) 'Necessity': you think necessity refers to deflationary theories?? Really? Really really? You think necessity has not been thematized with truth in philosophy until a bunch of boffins in early 1900s decided to do it? Try Plato.

So yeah, if I sound frustrated it's because I am. The very terms in which you read me belong to an entirely alien discourse, one in which philosophy suddenly sprang up out of nowhere just over a century ago or something. Most of what you say is not even wrong, it's just... irrelevant and uneducated.

The point being is that we can connect various patterns that we observe in reality into some coherent whole in a wide variety of ways. I think that philosophy is exploration into giving facts possible meaning. — Devolved

I think this is close, but runs the risk of confusing philosophy for ordinary 'sense-making' which we do everyday; the 'mere' act of perception, for instance, is an effort of sense-making, of relating the world around us to possible actions upon them, etc. I see philosophy more as a kind of 'second-order sense making': a practice of 'making-explicit', where we make sense of... how we make sense of things. An effort of re/framing frames, as it were.

I mean, one of the lessons of phenomenology is that all our basic actions in the world, from perception to movement, understanding and communication, all take place against a background of significance and meaning which we are bound up in ('being-in-the-world', etc). But I don't think this means that we are 'doing philosophy' by virtue of, well, existing. I think you need to add an element of reflexivity to this definition, where philosophy 'brings out' and attempts to realign - according to various imperatives - how we make sense of the world 'naturally'.

(There's a little bit more to it than this, I should add, but I'll leave this refinement here and see what comes of it for now).

1) 'Sensible/Intelligible': The intelligible/sensible distinction is thoroughly Platonic in provenance and refers to the sensory ('feelings/affects') and the rational. You can find it in Plato, Averroes, Descartes, Kant and Sellars, among other places. It's pretty much among the most classic distinctions in all of philosophy. That your first associations were with - of all people and things - Austin, Tarski and 'coherence theory' - just speaks to, well, the completely different universe of discourse that you occupy. — StreetlightX

I fail to see how Platonic intelligibility has any bearing on the use of the term in your argument. What I referred to earlier was not the concept that there exists a distinction between intelligible and unintelligible in a Platonic sense, but that that distinction has any bearing on 'Good' or 'Bad' philosophy. It's not the sentence here that I object to, it's its use to label certain philosophies 'bad' on the basis of their "unintelligibility" (which you yourself have done, but you're certainly not the first). Intelligibility here is not being used in the Platonic sense, it's being used in the Tarskian sense, that the truth value is judged by it (see Patterson's Essays on Tarski for a full account). If what is meant by the term really is Platonic, or Kantian a priori, then we're on the same page afterall, but you'd also have to concede then that if someone (anyone in the world) can think of it, it is intelligible. All philosophical theories are intelligible by virtue of the fact that they have been thought of.

2) 'Measurement': Sorry, but this one really is just pure and unadulterated sophistry. Leaving aside the obvious fact that 'measurement' in the context it was used was clearly a synonym of 'assess' or 'evaluate', the idea that 'measurement' belongs exclusively to a scientific vocabulary is only something a non-native speaker of English could ever think. When Protagoras declared that ἄνθρωπος μέτρον - man is the measure of all things - do you think he meant that humans are scientific instruments? That this has to be even pointed out is embarrassing for us both. — StreetlightX

To measure something is to compare it to some scale or other, in all uses of the term. The way it enters into non-scientific use is when that scale is either subjective, or metaphorical, but the scale is still there, and that's the point here. In the sentence "Every great philosopher then, is measured by what he or she brings into view" The scale is what? The quantity of things brought into view? The weight? The volume? I think not. I think it's fairly obvious from the use the term is being put to that the scale here is the 'rightness' of the views, which means we still have not escaped a search for 'truth'. If you think it refers to some other scale, I'd be interested to hear your interpretation.

3) 'Necessity': you think necessity refers to deflationary theories?? Really? Really really? You think necessity has not been thematized with truth in philosophy until a bunch of boffins in early 1900s decided to do it? Try Plato. — StreetlightX

Again, the provenance of 'necessity' is not the issue. My preference is to reference the most recent exposition to make the point, many philosophical propositions get refined in a way that most people find useful. I'm not sure how the Platonic necessity works here for you (Plato used the term to distinguish intelligible from material necessity), but If you still find Platonic concepts of necessity useful then we can probably work with those. It doesn't make any difference to the argument, which is that necessity entails teleology (necessary for what?) and unless I've missed something teleology has not yet yielded anything other than a mire of just about every conflicting theory it is possible to have.

Most of what you say is not even wrong, it's just... irrelevant and uneducated. — StreetlightX

Or we could discuss this like adults...

There's little of substance to discuss here I'm afraid; a game of bad faith and ignorance - the one generating the other by turns - that I'm uninterested in playing.

I see philosophy more as a kind of 'second-order sense making': a practice of 'making-explicit', where we make sense of... how we make sense of things. An effort of re/framing frames, as it were. — StreetlightX

I agree.

That certainly would flow from our brain function, since the primary function of the brain is "reactive". The secondary, which we would describe as "conscious experience" is a "post-evaluation" of that reaction in context of a wider array of sensory and contextual experience. Since the second one takes time to "compute" it's not what tends to drive our immediate actions, but it's important to formalize and "adjust" the reactive part.

The broader problem is that we tend to categorize too much. Certainly, specialization is important, but we tend to divide and label thought process into categories of activities, which as a whole are same thing.

Thus, there is abstract demarcation of science, religion, and art, when in reality these are mean of brain to post-analyze and connect facts, form some models, and communicate these to the rest of us.

To make the matters even worse, the language is axiomatic. We can argue to what extend it forms some "first principles" and subsequently copies off previous patters, but it's an arbitrary pattern that has no bearing on nature of reality that it supposed to communicate. There's no escaping this problem using mere nominal communication.

I'm a fan of Tarkovski. It's unfortunate that he didn't get to write and create more, but his concept of a philosopher/artist is similar in terms of "framing metaphors".

A quote from Sculpting In Time:

“We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”

The way I understand the above is that "nominal verbal" will always be a very limited "digital abstraction". Something either a chair or it is not a chair. Something is either a number 1 or it is number 2. It's very rigid in achieving precision, and yet it's imprecise when we attempt to map it to nature. Thus, Newton had to lock himself up and come up with Calculus, or means of mathematical approximation.

Thus, it seems like we would like to map "truth" to some absolute, instead of understanding that truth is a principle that's best left to the realm of a metaphor. A principle (or a metaphor) will map to a variety of contexts, which our "nominal" understanding of truth can't.

Thus, it seems to me that truth is always an approximation, at least in the way that we work with it, and the broader and less-precise the approximation, the broader and more applicable the truth we are talking about in terms of how it maps to reality out there.

Example, 2 + 2 = 4 is true in context of our nominal language of mathematics, and how we map that language to reality, but there's no 2 in nature. 2 would be a projection on some similar patterns of reality. It's useful in our assessment of "quantity", but it doesn't go any further than that. Thus, it is only true, because we call it true. It's a nominal truth derived through abstraction for purpose of deriving ratios.

What Tarkovski points out is that "truth" is instead a mirror-reflection of actuality. It's not something you can always verbalize apart from describing some broader "truism" packaged as metaphor. In such truth is not "is", truth "is like".

Yet another way to put this is that the object of philosophy - I want to say its only object - is sense. Philosophy is an exploration of sense, and not truth. Any philosophical distinction - say between the sensible and the intelligible, the material and the ideal, immanence and transcendence - is an exploration of the sense of these terms, of the way in which they are articulated and the way in which they allow us to speak about the world (in certain ways and not others). One last consequence of this is that to then speak of philosophies as being 'wrong' - in any way other than as a figure of speech - is to misunderstand totally the vocation of philosophy. Philosophies are only more or less useful, more or less interesting, more or less significant. As Bryant says, those who hold philosophy to the criterion are truth are nothing less then cretins. — StreetlightX

There is a sense of the word "true" which is consistent with this description of philosophy. This meaning is along the lines of genuine, right, honest. And derivative of this usage is another sense which is to adhere to a course of action, stay true to one's principles. This is not coherency, it's honesty. Accordingly, a philosopher who writes in contradiction is not staying true to one's principles, and is therefore speaking untruths, being dishonest. Much more common, and often very subtle is the philosopher who utilizes ambiguity to produce a conclusion through equivocation. Again this is a case of not adhering to one's principles, therefore being untrue. Many at tpf write these untruths habitually without even noticing that it is only by switching the meaning of the words that their professed conclusions are produced.

One corollary of this, which Bryant doesn't dwell so much upon, is that philosophy then is largely an exercise is exploring the consequences of what follows once we've fixed our frame; it's an exploration of implications. — StreetlightX

Yes, this is the point, the fixing of the frame. Staying true means that the frame stays fixed. If we stay true to ourselves, we face the consequences which are implied by the frame. If the consequences are unacceptable, then we must reject the frame. This is analogous to rejecting premises which produce unacceptable conclusions. The problem occurs when we like the frame too much, and do not wish to dismiss it when the consequences prove bad. Then we twist and manipulate the consequences, painting them a rosy colour. In this case we are not staying true, because we are not accepting the true consequences of the frame in order that the frame may be maintained. Rather, to reject the frame because one cannot accept the consequences of that frame, is to stay true to one's principles. These are the principles which render the consequences unacceptable.

Bryant puts its scathingly but appropriately: "A critique of a philosophy shouldn’t be based on whether it’s internally consistent or whether it is veridical, but on whether or not it conceals or veils things that are unacceptable to veil. And here I’m inclined to say that the problems that motivate a philosophy never come from within philosophy. If, for example, you find yourself obsessed with the problem of how to refute the skeptic when developing your philosophy of mind, I’m inclined to think you’re a cretin that lacks a single important thought in your head". — StreetlightX

Again, Bryant seems to be right on the point here. Why do we veil the unacceptable? And by who's principles is it ever acceptable to veil the unacceptable, as if the veiling of the unacceptable would make it appear acceptable.

This drives toward a deeper problem What makes something unacceptable? What is the criteria for unacceptability? And why are we so prone to cover up the unacceptable, disguising it, to let it pass as acceptable, when deep inside we know that it is really unacceptable? Is it so difficult to let go of that frame which produces the unacceptable consequences? Yes it is, because letting go of that frame without having something to replace it with will leave you empty. Hence the claim by Bergson: "The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved." Of course this is not really accurate though, because necessity is the mother of invention. So we must reject the unacceptable first, and feel that emptiness, before we are inclined toward a real solution. This is difficult as it puts us in a state of deprivation.

In my opinion, a very good thread, StreetlightX. We need to frame 'truth" in a completely different way, one which is acceptable. Otherwise philosophers will continue endlessly with inane discussions about what the word means, without hope of agreement. That lack of agreement, is an unacceptable consequence of how philosopher speak about truth.

Excellent OP Street.

I want to critique the blog post you've argued in favor of, but not until I've given it due attention. Odd. I find much agreeable with regard to 'frames'. I argue along those same lines frequently. I use the notion for clarity when necessary as well. However, at first blush, it seems that the author takes this all quite bit further than good reason allows...

Jeez. I gotta take the time to read this thread... carefully. Again, excellent OP. I'm being reminded... strongly reminded... of Quine's "Ontological Relativity".

For Bryant - and I agree with him - philosophy operates at a level even more fundamental than truth, which is what he calls framing: philosophy brings things into view in such a way that we can talk about truth at all. — StreetlightX

Yet another way to put this is that the object of philosophy - I want to say its only object - is sense. Philosophy is an exploration of sense, and not truth. Any philosophical distinction - say between the sensible and the intelligible, the material and the ideal, immanence and transcendence - is an exploration of the sense of these terms, of the way in which they are articulated and the way in which they allow us to speak about the world (in certain ways and not others).

Claiming that philosophy operates at a level even more fundamental than truth is troublesome. I agree that one's framework allows us to talk about truth. I mean, more basically, language allows us to talk about truth. I find this hard fast distinction between truth and sense very problematic.

There are different senses of "truth".

Two of these point towards something that is not existentially contingent upon language, but rather something that language itself is existentially dependent upon, and thus some senses of "truth" point towards something more fundamental than sense itself, than frameworks themselves.

Banno and myself had a debate regarding whether or not truth was prior to language. This happened several years ago on the old forum. The interesting thing to me is how my opening argument(I argued in the affirmative) set out the basics of this threads' justification, in that I reminded the reader that the sense of "truth" being used limits and/or delimits what can be said afterwards. So, in a way, my own position finds much agreement with the notion that doing philosophy largely involves sense, and that one's linguistic framework will determine the parameters/scope of one's position.