There are some subject areas, or ideas, OR PHENOMENA which are not amenable to the kind of analysis NOW that will yield the kind of empirical evidence that is considered scientific, so questions about those kinds of topics aren't considered legitimate at all by scientific standards. — Wayfarer

I added the bolded, underlined parts. IOW it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena, but rather than science does not or cannot now. There can be all sorts of reasons for that: necessary technology is not present, interest by that community is not present, paradigmatic shifts need to take place such that energy will be put in those areas...perhaps other reasons also. Science is not finished, it is in the middle, and will continue to be.

it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena — Coben

In some cases, it is exactly that. Cases such as 'Does God exist?', where there is no (scientifically-acceptable) evidence. Cases such as 'What is Objective Reality?', where there is also no possibility of us gathering evidence. And so on.

So I think one way of putting that is that Hume is arguing that we can't actually perceive a necessary relationship between cause and effect, but that Kant counters that, without the 'categories of the understanding', which intuitively perceive such relations, then experience itself wouldn't be cohesive - we literally couldn't think, let alone argue. — Wayfarer

I agree very much that we need the categories of the understanding. This is being 'in' a language. And I have read about both of their conceptions of causality. I lean toward saying that yes there is a kind of faculty that projects necessity. But what do we mean by this? How is this so different from expectation?

There is no consensus, of course, over whether Kant’s response succeeds, but there is no more consensus about what this response is supposed to be. There has been sharp disagreement concerning Kant’s conception of causality, as well as Hume’s, and, accordingly, there has also been controversy over whether the two conceptions really significantly differ. There has even been disagreement concerning whether Hume’s conception of causality and induction is skeptical at all. — SEP

I agree that Kant went in to far more detail about our conceptual structuring of reality, but I think the popular rendition cuts to many corners.

3. Nothing, at first view, may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. To form monsters, and join incongruous shapes and appearances, costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects. And while the body is confined to one planet, along which it creeps with pain and difficulty; the thought can in an instant transport us into the most distant regions of the universe; or even beyond the universe, into the unbounded chaos, where nature is supposed to lie in total confusion. What never was seen, or heard of, may yet be conceived; nor is any thing beyond the power of thought, except what implies an absolute contradiction.

But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted. A virtuous horse we can conceive; because, from our own feeling, we can conceive virtue; and this we may unite to the figure and shape of a horse, which is an animal familiar to us. In short, all the materials of thinking are derived either from our outward or inward sentiment: the mixture and composition of these belongs alone to the mind and will. Or, to express myself in philosophical language, all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones. — Hume

As you can see, Hume believed in ideas like 'gold' and 'mountain.' He doesn't mention that perceiving a mountain as a mountain involves structuring, but that's not his focus.

He clearly thinks the mind has a structure --is a system of faculties:

It cannot be doubted, that the mind is endowed with several powers and faculties, that these powers are distinct from each other, that what is really distinct to the immediate perception may be distinguished by reflexion; and consequently, that there is a truth and falsehood in all propositions on this subject, and a truth and falsehood, which lie not beyond the compass of human understanding. There are many obvious distinctions of this kind, such as those between the will and understanding, the imagination and passions, which fall within the comprehension of every human creature; and the finer and more philosophical distinctions are no less real and certain, though more difficult to be comprehended. — Hume

In some cases, it is exactly that. Cases such as 'Does God exist?', where there is no (scientifically-acceptable) evidence. Cases such as 'What is Objective Reality?', where there is also no possibility of us gathering evidence. And so on. — Pattern-chaser

Well, first off, I said it is not necessarily that kind of thing

it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena — Coben

though I could have made my wording clearer. I meant, that just because cannot test something empirically now, does nto mean will not be able to later.

But further we have no idea what questions Science will be able to answer later. I suppose one could argue that if God is purely transcendent answering that question might be ruled out via science- but most Gods have empirical effects and/or break 'rules' and/or reveal themselves. Right now issues in cosmology considered untestable are turning out to have ways to reveal evidence empirically. I don't think we can rule out the future potential of science.

Notice the emphasis on the 'synthetic a priori' - this is the idea that, unlike purely a priori truths which are tautological, in some sense, the synthetic a priori 'synthesis' rational arguments to arrive at a novel conclusion, i.e. one which is not implicit in the premisses. — Wayfarer

Indeed, and the passage on geometry in Hume suggests that Hume was aware of what Kant called synthetic a priori truths. http://www.humesociety.org/hs/issues/v13n2/steiner/steiner-v13n2.pdf To be sure he didn't focus on them or call them that.

To be sure Kant made explicit something important. We aren't born knowing the Pythogorean theorem but only with a shared spatial intuition that makes the perception of its truth possible for all of us, more or less independently of our cultural-linguistic software.

IOW it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena, but rather than science does not or cannot now. There can be all sorts of reasons for that: necessary technology is not present, interest by that community is not present, paradigmatic shifts need to take place such that energy will be put in those areas...perhaps other reasons also. Science is not finished, it is in the middle, and will continue to be. — Coben

I quite agree - but this only supports a point made in the Aeon essay - that 'if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the [current] claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like.'

So if or when a paradigmatic shift occurred away from physicalism, it will be very interesting to see what emerges in its place.

I lean toward saying that yes there is a kind of faculty that projects necessity. But what do we mean by this? How is this so different from expectation? — g0d

Well, there's the element of discovery, of the disclosure of something unknown previously. So that is unexpected, it's novel. And it's a crucial element in scientific discovery.

The point of the synthetic a priori proposition, is that it enables a kind of deductive certainty with respect to contingent outcomes. I mean, prior to Kant, there was a distinction between the domain of necessary truth and the domain of the contingent. But the synthetic a priori enables us to acquire a kind of deductive certainty with respect to phenomena that you might think were only inductively true. 'Kant understood that both everyday life and scientific knowledge rests on, and is made orderly, by some very basic assumptions that aren't self-evident but can't be entirely justified by empirical observations. For instance, we assume that the physical world will conform to mathematical principles. Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason that our belief that every event has a cause is such an assumption; perhaps, also, our belief that effects follow necessarily from their causes.' ~ Emrys Westacott.

We aren't born knowing the Pythagorean theorem but only with a shared spatial intuition that makes the perception of its truth possible for all of us, more or less independently of our cultural-linguistic software. — g0d

Note this quote from Einstein:

I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.

(One quibble - I can't see how it would be approximately true, but I'll let it go.) But the point I want to make is that while I agree that the Pythagorean Theorem is true independently of anything said or done by us, or even of our existence, it is nevertheless only something that can be known by a rational mind. I am not doubting the fact that it's valid, but I'm questioning the sense in which it exists. In what sense does such a theorem exist? You can't perceive any such thing through the unaided senses, its existence is purely intellectual, but it's real, just as Einstein says.

So the Pythagorean theorem is not 'out there somewhere', it doesn't exist in a phenomenal sense at all. Rather it is close, I think, to what ancient philosophy designated an 'intelligible object' - something the existence of which is mind-dependent, but it is not dependent on a particular mind; it is a noetic device, if you like, through which we then are able to view and explain phenomena.

This mind is not "one mind" or a global mind or some ethereal world-mind, because then you fall back into Cartesian dualism. It is not 'something that exists' but is nevertheless real.

Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.

This actually is a really deep conundrum in modern philosophy, we can't just brush it off. — Wayfarer

This seems to me a misrepresentation of Dennett's faith in rationality. I take it that Dennett thinks rationality is effective in getting to the truth precisely because it has evolved as a tool which has been honed and refined by natural selection. What else could justify the deliverances of reason beyond the mere fact that they are deliverances of reason; in which case you would be left with an empty circularity?

The deliverances of reason are never merely deliverances of reason in any case; if they are to be of any relevance, and not merely tautologies, they they must be underpinned by experience, observation and experiment. That natural selection operates in a way analogous to the the processes of experience, observation and experiment is arguably a valid way to think about evolution provided we do not fall into anthropomorphization by imputing human-like intention to the process. As intention is absent from evolution so is prediction, and those are characteristics of rationality that are uniquely animal, with humans, via symbolic language, amplifying their efficacy, and consequently the power of reason, to unprecedented heights.

This is a great issue. We might as well bring out the text:

It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called a priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.

But the expression, “a priori,” is not as yet definite enough adequately to indicate the whole meaning of the question above started. For, in speaking of knowledge which has its sources in experience, we are wont to say, that this or that may be known a priori, because we do not derive this knowledge immediately from experience, but from a general rule, which, however, we have itself borrowed from experience. Thus, if a man undermined his house, we say, “he might know a priori that it would have fallen;” that is, he needed not to have waited for the experience that it did actually fall. But still, a priori, he could not know even this much. For, that bodies are heavy, and, consequently, that they fall when their supports are taken away, must have been known to him previously, by means of experience.

By the term “knowledge a priori,” therefore, we shall in the sequel understand, not such as is independent of this or that kind of experience, but such as is absolutely so of all experience.
...
In all judgements wherein the relation of a subject to the predicate is cogitated (I mention affirmative judgements only here; the application to negative will be very easy), this relation is possible in two different ways. Either the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A; or the predicate B lies completely out of the conception A, although it stands in connection with it. In the first instance, I term the judgement analytical, in the second, synthetical.
...
The science of natural philosophy (physics) contains in itself synthetical judgements a priori, as principles. I shall adduce two propositions. For instance, the proposition, “In all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged”; or, that, “In all communication of motion, action and reaction must always be equal.” In both of these, not only is the necessity, and therefore their origin a priori clear, but also that they are synthetical propositions. For in the conception of matter, I do not cogitate its permanency, but merely its presence in space, which it fills. I therefore really go out of and beyond the conception of matter, in order to think on to it something a priori, which I did not think in it. The proposition is therefore not analytical, but synthetical, and nevertheless conceived a priori; and so it is with regard to the other propositions of the pure part of natural philosophy. — Kant

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm#chap08

Kant made a strong case (against received wisdom) that math was indeed synthetic a priori
knowledge. I agree. The a priori and a posteriori distinction isn't perfect though, as others have suggested.

But what does it mean to say that 'in all changes of the material world, the quantity of matter remains unchanged'? I think what's important here is simply our ability to frame the world as incapable of changing its quantity of matter. The quantity of matter 'must' be constant. 'I know that 2000 years from now that we'll have the same amount of matter.'

Our experience is rich with this kind of structure, and perhaps Hume did not do it justice. Perhaps Hume also understood the subject as passive in this regard, when in fact we spontaneously generate theories (sometimes to our detriment.) What Hume didn't emphasize was perhaps the 'conceptual experience' of law. He was aware of such laws but maybe not as explicitly aware as was Kant. I'd have to read more to know for sure.

Still, as Nietzsche liked to joked, Kant's answer was basically 'by means of a faculty.' I guess it's no small thing to bring such a faculty into the direct light of reason as an explicit object of investigation.

But the synthetic a priori enables us to acquire a kind of deductive certainty with respect to phenomena that you might think were only inductively true. — Wayfarer

I agree that it allows us to think deductively about nature. We can still be wrong. We can postulate some necessity (the quantity of matter is constant), deduced expected measurements, and check them against actual measurements.

I am not doubting the fact that it's valid, but I'm questioning the sense in which it exists. In what sense does such a theorem exist? You can't perceive any such thing through the unaided senses, its existence is purely intellectual, but it's real, just as Einstein says. — Wayfarer

What does it mean for something to be? Do different entities have different modes of being? I say yes, different modes of being. The 'what-it-is' of grasping a theorem just... is what it is? In the same way redness is redness? There is no gap, no representation more or less correct, but just it, right there. We do have the beetle in the box problem. I can't know that others experience what we call 'red' as I do, and I can't know what it is like for them to grasp the theorem. I think we tend to naturally trust that my red is your red, my toothache is your toothache, my spatial intuition is yours, etc. In my wife's face I think I see my own feeling reflected.

So the Pythagorean theorem is not 'out there somewhere', it doesn't exist in a phenomenal sense at all. Rather it is close, I think, to what ancient philosophy designated an 'intelligible object' - something the existence of which is mind-dependent, but it is not dependent on a particular mind; it is a noetic device, if you like, through which we then view and explain phenomena. — Wayfarer

I agree with mind-dependent and individual-independent. I can't prove this, because it's a beetle in a box. But I think 'world 3' exists for others as it does for me.

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong. — Popper

And another text:

To sum up, we arrive at the following picture of the universe. There is the physical universe, world 1, with its most important sub-universe, that of the living organisms. World 2, the world of conscious experience, emerges as an evolutionary product from the world of organisms. World 3, the world of the products of the human mind, emerges as an evolutionary product from world 2.”

“The feedback effect between world 3 and world 2 is of particular importance. Our minds are the creators of world 3; but world 3 in its turn not only informs our minds, but largely creates them. The very idea of a self depends on world 3 theories, especially upon a theory of time which underlies the identity of the self, the self of yesterday, of today, and of tomorrow. The learning of a language, which is a world 3 object, is itself partly a creative act and partly a feedback effect; and the full consciousness of self is anchored in our human language.” — Popper

These ideas are in other thinkers too.

Feuerbach made his first attempt to challenge prevailing ways of thinking about individuality in his inaugural dissertation, where he presented himself as a defender of speculative philosophy against those critics who claim that human reason is restricted to certain limits beyond which all inquiry is futile, and who accuse speculative philosophers of having transgressed these. This criticism, he argued, presupposes a conception of reason that is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths. He aimed to show that this view of the nature of reason is mistaken, that reason is one and the same in all thinking subjects, that it is universal and infinite, and that thinking (Denken) is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual. “In thinking”, Feuerbach wrote, “I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings” (GW I:18). — SEP

In short, the we precedes the I in a vital sense. Yet this 'we' and its 'world 3' depend on the lives of individuals. Our individual bodies are candles that share in one flame. I know this makes the haters cringe, but it's as mundane understanding English and talking about philosophy together. The individual ego is not abolished, but its power to disagree and stand apart is not its own. It learns the words it uses to construct its secret name from others.

So if or when a paradigmatic shift occurred away from physicalism, it will be very interesting to see what emerges in its place. — Wayfarer

So, do you take physicalism to be an ineliminable conceptual underpinning of physics or, more broadly, of science itself? What about systems and chaos theory; is that not already a "paradigmatic shift"?

The point of the synthetic a priori proposition, is that it enables a kind of deductive certainty with respect to contingent outcomes. — Wayfarer

This is either mistaken or misleadingly worded, it seems to me. There can be no "deductive certainty with respect to contingent outcomes". I suspect that what you mean is something like that we know that all contingent outcomes, insofar as they are experienced, must conform to the conditions that we know from examining and analyzing our experiences, viz. that they are invariably given spatiotemporally, are common to all experiences. You do seem to have difficulty with distinguishing between form and content, which I think your failure to even attempt to answer this shows:

↪Wayfarer
On the contrary I understand what you've written and I see clearly that the mere fact of the general form of our mental constitutions and social and cultural conditioning being more or less the same could only explain commonality between the ways in which we perceive not the common content of what we perceive. If you disagree then you will need to explain how it could. — Janus

This seems to me a misrepresentation of Dennett's faith in rationality. I take it that Dennett thinks rationality is effective in getting to the truth precisely because it has evolved as a tool which has been honed and refined by natural selection. — Janus

That's a good point, but Nietzsche comes to mind. Is what helps us survive therefore the truth? I'm not against pragmatism's 'truth,' but I think it's fair to point out a tension in this or that position. Why should we have evolved to perceive what we think we mean by 'truth'?

Or do we just call useful beliefs 'true'? (Then I remember my OLP and that we use 'true' in a million ways that don't add up to some clean, single concept.)

That's a good point, but Nietzsche comes to mind. Is what helps us survive therefore the truth? I'm not against pragmatism's 'truth,' but I think it's fair to point out a tension in this or that position. — g0d

No, I don't believe that what helps us survive is necessarily therefore the truth. My contention was more modest: that the general efficacy of reason to draw valid conclusions has been augmented by natural selection. The soundness of any conclusion will depend on the soundness of its premises (assuming that we are considering a valid deduction), and the soundness of premises, and the conclusions that follow from them, is a matter of speculation based on experience that informs our intuitions as to what is plausible.

And it does seem plausible to think that theories which entail predictions that are confirmed by observation and experiment are more likely to be true to the nature of things than those which do not.

My contention was more modest: that the general efficacy of reason to draw valid conclusions has been augmented by natural selection. — Janus

Of course that's plausible. I don't see how we could test, however. Let's say we could pluck out a sequence of ancestors with a time machine. We'd have to use the reason we've evolved to evaluate whether progress was made.

I think what we call our reason is an abyssal or groundless ground. I suppose that both individuals and communities (through individuals) employ faculties that they can't justify and mostly don't notice (personal and cultural liquid lenses.)

And it does seem plausible to think that theories which entail predictions that are confirmed by observation and experiment are more likely to be true to the nature of things than those which do not. — Janus

Of course this is reasonable. I think that's largely what beliefs are for. We only care about whether they are 'true' or not in terms of consequences. 'Your fuel pump's shot' helps us get the car going. Isn't this a classic issue? I do like instrumentalism for just dodging metaphysics.

A successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes.[4] Scientific theories are assessed on their usefulness in generating predictions and in confirming those predictions in data and observations, and not on their ability to explain the truth value of some unobservable phenomenon. The question of "truth" is not taken into account one way or the other. According to instrumentalists, scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws.[5] Initially a novel perspective introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906, instrumentalism is largely the prevailing theory that underpins the practice of physicists today.[5]

Rejecting scientific realism's ambitions to uncover metaphysical truth about nature,[5] instrumentalism is usually categorized as an antirealism, although its mere lack of commitment to scientific theory's realism can be termed nonrealism. Instrumentalism merely bypasses debate concerning whether, for example, a particle spoken about in particle physics is a discrete entity enjoying individual existence, or is an excitation mode of a region of a field, or is something else altogether.[6][7][8] Instrumentalism holds that theoretical terms need only be useful to predict the phenomena, the observed outcomes.[6] — Wiki

I don't see how we could test, however. — g0d

That is nothing unique, though; the truth of any theory cannot be tested. My point, in any case, was that IF it is true that evolution has honed the efficacy of reason, then to say that reason is an evolved, rather than some kind of "absolute", faculty would not be to undermine it. as @Wayfarer and Nagel's passage he quoted claim.

I'm not much interested in supporting one metaphysical theory over another; for me the interest in metaphysical thinking lies in what we can imagine. That said, I think that if some metaphysical theories were to be "true" (whatever you might take that "truth" to mean) then it would more likely be those which are in accordance with scientific understanding than those which are not. In assessing such likelihood and hence plausibility of metaphysical theories I don't see that we have much else to go on.

to say that reason is an evolved, rtaher than some kind of "absolute", faculty would not be to undermine it. — Janus

Well I can't help but use reason. I swim in it. So I wouldn't use 'undermined.' But I do think that reason is thereby demoted in some sense, and not for the first time. Does it change my feeling about science? No.

That said, I think that if some metaphysical theories were to be "true" (whatever you might take that "truth" to mean) then it would more likely be those which are in accordance with scientific understanding than those which are not. In assessing such likelihood and hence plausibility of metaphysical theories i don't see that we have much else to go on. — Janus

I agree. It seems to be our nature to try and integrate our beliefs, scientific and otherwise. More generally, I like this attitude:

When I speak of reason or rationalism, all I mean is the conviction that we can learn through criticism of our mistakes and errors, especially through criticism by others, and eventually also through self-criticism. A rationalist is simply someone for whom it is more important to learn than to be proved right; someone who is willing to learn from others — not by simply taking over another's opinions, but by gladly allowing others to criticize his ideas and by gladly criticizing the ideas of others. The emphasis here is on the idea of criticism or, to be more precise, critical discussion. The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff. He is well aware that acceptance or rejection of an idea is never a purely rational matter; but he thinks that only critical discussion can give us the maturity to see an idea from more and more sides and to make a correct judgement of it. — Popper

Reason is but one aspect of human life; it is by no means the sole medium we "swim in". It is good that reason should be "demoted" in my view; who (apart from Hegel) would want it to be the absolute?

Reason is but one aspect of human life; it is by no means the sole medium we "swim in". It is good that reason should be "demoted" in my view; who (apart from Hegel) would want it to be the absolute? — Janus

I never said I swim only in reason, and are you really setting me up as knee-deep in scientism? I'm just saying that I can't catch my own tail. If I reason that my reason is undermined, then I can't trust that my reason is undermined after all. On Certainty is great on this issue. I am in a 'system' that I can always only doubt piecemeal.

Also reason runs out of reasons. For me existence is a brute fact. We've discussed the question. 'Why is there a there here?' We don't want the kind of answer that we know how to give. We seem to be expressing wonder, perceiving the contingency of the rose without reason.

Science is a lovely instrument, but I also cherish my ironic mysticism of whatever anyone wants to call it. If the words matter, it's not the real thing, seems to me. And I'm @g0d, so that should count for something.

The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.”
...
This faith does not formulate itself—it simply lives, and so guards itself against formulae...It is only on the theory that no word is to be taken literally that this anti-realist is able to speak at all. Set down among Hindus he would have made use of the concepts of Sankhya,[7] and among Chinese he would have employed those of Lao-tse[8]—and in neither case would it have made any difference to him.—With a little freedom in the use of words, one might actually call Jesus a “free spirit”[9]—he cares nothing for what is established: the word killeth,[10] whatever is established killeth. The idea of “life” as an experience, as he alone conceives it, stands opposed to his mind to every sort of word, formula, law, belief and dogma. He speaks only of inner things: “life” or “truth” or “light” is his word for the innermost—in his sight everything else, the whole of reality, all nature, even language, has significance only as sign, as allegory. — Nietzsche on Christ

I was watching old Vonnegut videos lately, and I was thinking of the fundamental roles we adopt. I like the jokers. Seriousness is the toll we pay to keep waking up in the morning. For me it's really about something like laughing with the gods. [And of course the usual nice things in life, but I was thinking of intellectual pleasures.]

I take it that Dennett thinks rationality is effective in getting to the truth precisely because it has evolved as a tool which has been honed and refined by natural selection. — Janus

That's the point of the criticism, though. If you have to underwrite 'reason' by appeal to 'what helps us survive', then how much confidence can you have in the faculty of reason?

That natural selection operates in a way analogous to the the processes of experience, observation and experiment is arguably a valid way to think about evolution provided we do not fall into anthropomorphization by imputing human-like intention to the process. — Janus

I don't agree in the least, I think it's a case where biological theories or metaphors are extended well past their actual domain of applicability. Apart from anything else, it amounts to subordinating philosophy, reason, and everything else about us, to the implicit aim of propagation and survival - as Wieseltier says, 'it animalises reason'. And that kind of criticism doesn't only come from ID types.

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature – even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man – frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity. The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason

What does it mean for something to be? Do different entities have different modes of being? I say yes, different modes of being. — g0d

So glad you see this, because it’s actually not generally recognised in analytical philosophy. I think it’s key to many things. (But unfortunately spouse is threatening reprisals if I don’t “get off the computer” so I will be back later.)

I was thinking earlier that philosophy for me at least was largely phenomenology. Words can simply point out and summon our attention to what is already there.
[/quote]

Heidegger argues that we ordinarily encounter entities as (what he calls) equipment, that is, as being for certain sorts of tasks (cooking, writing, hair-care, and so on). Indeed we achieve our most primordial (closest) relationship with equipment not by looking at the entity in question, or by some detached intellectual or theoretical study of it, but rather by skillfully manipulating it in a hitch-free manner. Entities so encountered have their own distinctive kind of Being that Heidegger famously calls readiness-to-hand.
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Tools-in-use become phenomenologically transparent. Moreover, Heidegger claims, not only are the hammer, nails, and work-bench in this way not part of the engaged carpenter's phenomenal world, neither, in a sense, is the carpenter. The carpenter becomes absorbed in his activity in such a way that he has no awareness of himself as a subject over and against a world of objects. — SEP

So the famous hammer has at least two modes of being, one as tool-in-use and the other as object for theory. And this is a beetle in the box. We can't weigh the hammer to check to for its 'handiness,' but we might realize afterward that we were dissolved with it and the scale in its weighing.

Because phenomenology does seem to aim at the beetle in the box (subjectivity), it give philosophy something to do that science isn't obviously equipped to do. Phenomenology does seem to aim at objective or unbiased truth, without, however, being subject to falsification.

Along those lines, here is something that also ties in with the OP.

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.-Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.---But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?---If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.--No, one can `divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of `object and name' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.

The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible---though unverifiable---that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. — Wittgenstein

For 'the sensation of red' we can substitute 'genuine spiritual experience' or 'what it is like to grasp a concept' or 'the kind of being a quark has' or 'happiness' and so on.

What does all of this mean or imply? I liked behaviorism when I first read about it as a clever way to circumvent the problem of elusive private consciousness. One interesting game with its own kind of purity is finding quantitative and causal relationships among public entities across time and space. Another is contemplating human existence as a whole with all of its troublesome beetles.

I quite agree - but this only supports a point made in the Aeon essay - that 'if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the [current] claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like.' — Wayfarer

Agreed. Further current physics should not be called a physicalism, since the set of what can be considered physical has expanded radically, now encompassing things without mass, fields, particles in superposition and so on. We not only have no idea what will be considered physical in the future - iow how little like matter it would seem to us now and certainly to naturalists in the 19th century or to Medieval theologians, for that matter, but that we already use physicalism as an empty term meaning something like 'the belief in things that are considered real via science'.

So if or when a paradigmatic shift occurred away from physicalism, it will be very interesting to see what emerges in its place. — Wayfarer

One can hope they drop a word with no longer useful metaphysical baggage, but they don't seem to care about that now. I suspect a paradigmatic shift may take place while the term lives on.

To turn the page for the moment, here's some Plotinus I like.

If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
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It has been shown elsewhere that man when he commands not merely the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection, has realised the perfect life.
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To the man in this state, what is the Good?

He himself by what he has and is.

And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself within the human being after this other mode.

The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks nothing else.
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Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good, are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.

Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.
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If the Sage thinks all fortunate events, however momentous, to be no great matter—kingdom and the rule over cities and peoples, colonisations and the founding of states, even though all be his own handiwork—how can he take any great account of the vacillations of power or the ruin of his fatherland? Certainly if he thought any such event a great disaster, or any disaster at all, he must be of a very strange way of thinking. One that sets great store by wood and stones, or . . . Zeus . . . by mortality among mortals cannot yet be the Sage, whose estimate of death, we hold, must be that it is better than life in the body.

But suppose that he himself is offered a victim in sacrifice?

Can he think it an evil to die beside the altars?

But if he go unburied?

Wheresoever it lie, under earth or over earth, his body will always rot.

But if he has been hidden away, not with costly ceremony but in an unnamed grave, not counted worthy of a towering monument?

The littleness of it! — Plotinus

Kojeve also mentions satisfaction as proof of the wisdom that philosophy seeks.

What also stands out is the detachment from disaster. The sage looks evil, cold, or irresponsible to those who take the news seriously. Part of the appeal of science to me when I was a young adult was what I perceived as its quest for this kind of detachment. It was above and beyond the good and evil of the tribe. Even if the sage is gentle, his or her detachment would be offensive to most.

All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.
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The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. — Marx

Small surprise given this response to Feuerbach that Marx would hate Stirner's sage-like response to Feuerbach. And Feuerbach himself was something of a contemplative. I've read swaths of all three, and the tone of each is different.

Maybe the point of philosophy is to change the philosopher into something more like the sage.

I don't think you've tended to like ironic Western quasi-mystics, but to me the difference is largely one of style. In all cases there's a quest for the high place and its perspective.

For at the stage of romantic art the spirit knows that its truth does not consist in its immersion in corporeality; on the contrary, it only becomes sure of its truth by withdrawing from the external into its own intimacy with itself and positing external reality as an existence inadequate to itself. Even if, therefore this new content too comprises in itself the task of making itself beautiful, still beauty in the sense hitherto expounded remains for it something subordinate, and beauty becomes the spiritual beauty of the absolute inner life as inherently infinite spiritual subjectivity.

But therefore to attain its infinity the spirit must all the same lift itself out of purely formal and finite personality into the Absolute; i.e. the spiritual must bring itself into representation as the subject filled with what is purely substantial and, therein, as the willing and self-knowing subject. Conversely, the substantial and the true must not be apprehended as a mere ‘beyond’ of humanity, and the anthropomorphism of the Greek outlook must not be stripped away; but the human being, as actual subjectivity, must be made the principle, and thereby alone, as we already saw earlier [on pp. 435-6, 505-6], does the anthropomorphic reach its consummation.

The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness, and its corresponding form is spiritual subjectivity with its grasp of its independence and freedom. This inherently infinite and absolutely universal content is the absolute negation of everything particular, the simple unity with itself which has dissipated all external relations, all processes of nature and their periodicity of birth, passing away, and rebirth, all the restrictedness in spiritual existence, and dissolved all particular gods into a pure and infinite self-identity. In this Pantheon all the gods are dethroned, the flame of subjectivity has destroyed them, and instead of plastic polytheism art knows now only one God, one spirit, one absolute independence which, as the absolute knowing and willing of itself, remains in free unity with itself and no longer falls apart into those particular characters and functions whose one and only cohesion was due to the compulsion of a dark necessity.[1]
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God in his truth is therefore no bare ideal generated by imagination; on the contrary, he puts himself into the very heart of the finitude and external contingency of existence, and yet knows himself there as a divine subject who remains infinite in himself and makes this infinity explicit to himself. — Hegel

Popper — g0d

Yes, this attitude is very consistent with the idea of reason being sharpened by experience (which is indeed a kind of externally imposed critique), and not at all with the Platonic idea of reason as an ultimate state of realization or with the Hegelian notion of it as absolute.

Indeed Popper targets Platonism and Hegelianism as paradigmatic examples of enmity towards the "open society".

I never said I swim only in reason, and are you really setting me up as knee-deep in scientism? — g0d

OK, but the metaphor seemed to be evoking an analogy with fish swimming in water, which is their sole medium, so I thought that was what you were coming from. Also, I know you love Hegel whose central thought is "the Rational is the Real", which is obviously an absolutization of reason, so....

I have no idea how you got the impression that I was accusing you of scientism though.

I think the kind of questions like "why is there a there there" although unanswerable are nonetheless valuable in opening the feeling for a larger context than that of mere reason.

That's the point of the criticism, though. If you have to underwrite 'reason' by appeal to 'what helps us survive', then how much confidence can you have in the faculty of reason? — Wayfarer

But this:

That is nothing unique, though; the truth of any theory cannot be tested. My point, in any case, was that IF it is true that evolution has honed the efficacy of reason, then to say that reason is an evolved, rather than some kind of "absolute", faculty would not be to undermine it. as Wayfarer and Nagel's passage he quoted claim. — Janus

should have alerted you to the fact that I am not trying to claim anything like that evolution "underwrites" reason ( whatever that could even mean) but rather just that it has honed it, and made it a more effective tool through natural selection.

I also have no idea why you would think that acknowledging the evolution of reason should "undermine" it. Perhaps you could explain your thought process regarding that?

In some cases, it is exactly that. Cases such as 'Does God exist?', where there is no (scientifically-acceptable) evidence. Cases such as 'What is Objective Reality?', where there is also no possibility of us gathering evidence. And so on. — Pattern-chaser

Well, first off, I said it is not necessarily that kind of thing

it is not necessarily that science cannot confirm or measure these things/areas/phenomena — Coben

though I could have made my wording clearer. I meant, that just because cannot test something empirically now, does nto mean will not be able to later. — Coben

Consider the standard thought experiment concerning Objective Reality.

• Your (senses + perception) deliver to your mind images of an apparent world. This world is Objective Reality.
• You are a brain in a vat. Objective Reality is the world containing your brain and the vat.

It isn't just that these two are indistinguishable to you, but that your experience in both cases is exactly the same. That's a defining condition of the thought experiment.

Science cannot distinguish these two. The evidence cannot be gathered. In the future, this will remain so, until and unless humans develop Objective Perception. This is an example of a problem that science cannot address. [It's not science that 'fails' us in this instance; this is a fixed and unavoidable limitation intrinsic to being human.]

But let's not concentrate on this one example. There are others too, e.g. solipsism. The point is that there exist problems that science cannot address, and will never be capable of addressing.

How do you deal with the claim that this is simply relativism, that the only truth we can know is the truth 'for us'? — Wayfarer

I think I would have to write a treatise to get across what I try to get across here, but then is it worth it, would anyone read it? Though no one will read it if I don't write it.

There are a lot of ramifications to this point of view I have so I wouldn't call it "simply relativism", or rather by the time you get a good idea of my point of view I think you wouldn't associate it simply with the idea of relativism you have now.

There is a relativist core in this idea, but even if you call it relativism is this such a bad thing? I see truth as an ideal that we strive towards but never reach. Something absolutely certain that we hope to hang onto no matter what amidst the apparent unpredictability of existence. Many claim to have found truth, but what have they found? They are deeply convinced of something, they hang onto it no matter what, but is there anything more to truth than this? If others do not agree with their truth, is it that they do not see the truth, or that they see differently?

I see truth as something we create for ourselves. And that's my truth. Maybe others would agree with me if they saw what I see. Maybe if they saw what I see they would still hope that there is some truth out there that doesn't depend on us. But why this need for a truth that doesn't depend on us, why this need to get ourselves out of the equation? I see the belief in a truth outside of us as a blind spot in itself, neglecting ourselves. In believing in such a truth we see ourselves as not ultimately responsible for our actions, we can justify doing anything in the name of an absolute standard that doesn't depend on us. We see ourselves as a tool working for an outside cause, or as slaves to outside laws that dictate how we behave and how we ought to behave, the being is not anymore the important thing, it becomes relegated to the background, and the outside truth gets the spotlight, and then we forget that we have created it ourselves, that we have created this world, that we are responsible for how the world is. No outside truth is responsible, we are.

But let's not concentrate on this one example. There are others too, e.g. solipsism. The point is that there exist problems that science cannot address, and will never be capable of addressing. — Pattern-chaser

That may well be the case, and the brain in vat/solipsism examples, I think are stronger examples than the God one. I think another stronger one would be the is this a simulation issue, since if the simulators are vastly further advanced then us they might be able to eliminate any possible clue. The three examples share properties since they are going after minds being separated from reality type issues. I think the God one is less easy to predict. It might be beyond science. It might not be. This raises another issue. If such an issue, as any of these, is beyond science, is it beyond any way of knowing? I would say 'not necessarily'.