You don't impose it, you are subjected to it; that's just what it means to be a subject. — Janus

This confusion arises over how we are referring to the person. I have all along held that a person is composed of a variety of organs, each with their own function. That might seem obvious, but there is a trend within this thread to hold that it's the entire organism that experiences as a single holistic entity. So, it is accurate for me to say that my eye caused me to see the cup (as evidenced by my closed eye no longer seeing the cup). So, yes, I am subjected the image of the cup, but it might well be from another part of my body that I am so subjected to it, including a memory portion of my brain.

There is the belief that the homunculus objection overrides my claims of varying organs having different functions or, more specifically, that certain areas of the brain have particularized functions. The truth is that they do, which protects the homunculus concept from being a fallacy, unless you hold to the incorrect proposition of infinite regress.

An interesting wiki article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus

All of this is to say that there is an "out there," which I don't take to be another world, but the same world, just different objects within it. The "out there" affects me, a conglomerate of parts in many different ways. The cold affects different parts of me in different ways and there's no reason to speak only in the singular "me" as if cold makes me shiver. It does, but it also makes my nose run and my eyes burn.

My nose allows me to smell, which is me doing something to me, which is a thing, and which is not complicated or unusual.

And I know you've not said things to the contrary to much of what I've said to have elicited such a response. I'm just responding to everything right now, sort of as a summation of sorts.

I don't know what you think constitutes "context" in this situation [...] no doubt it would make sense to check along the path you took which would include, but not be limited to, the area of the streetlights — Ciceronianus

Admittedly I am confused. Context can be a very big place. In my post I suggested three approaches, one dogmatic which applies to all situations regardless of context, and two which accepted or even manipulated a hypothetical but not necessarily relevant factor in the environment. You seem to say that Dewey would prefer the third, scientific solution, and not the initial formal mechanical attempt. Am I missing something here?

found as far back as at least Platonic “knowledge of” vs, “knowledge how”, and later in Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance”, and a veritable myriad of similarities in between — Mww

I think the issue reaches pretty deep: roughly, is the rational, the cognitive, derived from the non-rational, the non-cognitive? This is, it seems, the principal issue in philosophy of mind. It is the issue Sellars was dealing with in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, in which he argued, broadly, that there is no magic thread to stitch the two together — “magic” here meaning: has one side that counts as non-cognitive and connects cleanly to the non-cognitive (our senses) and has another side that counts as cognitive and connects to our conceptual judgments and so forth. (It’s “sense impressions” of some sort that are supposed to pull this off, and Sellars argues nothing can possibly be what they need to be for empiricism to work.)

It’s also the issue that Wittgenstein was dealing with in arguing that the foundation of, well, everything we do, is, well, what we do, i.e., our practices, and our practices are something we are trained in, and must just accept, not something we analyze and judge and understand rationally. (Sellars was here too, and has a much more complicated version of the same stuff in his article about language games, offering a solution to the problem that apparently it would be impossible to learn a language game.)

That there are these two realms seems inarguable. The choices seem to be basing one in the other, or treating each as sui generis. One source of the temptation to base the rational, the cognitive, and the linguistic ,i.e., everything we think of vaguely as λόγος, in something not λόγος, is that children seem to make the passage from not having such capacities to having them, and mankind, we assume, made such a transition at some point. Darwin has complicated that question somewhat, and Chomsky after him.

It is also possible to read Wittgenstein as denying that are two realms and denying there is such a transition to be made: maybe words like “know” and “true” and “meaning” are just words like any other words that we learn to use in certain ways and not others, and maybe they shouldn’t be thought of as ‘special’ or ‘central’ for philosophy. You could read the ‘language-game’ approach as suggesting that there are rather more than two realms, but they’re all just a matter of how we use language in different ways for diverse purposes in varying circumstances.

I don’t purport to be able to dismantle the model of “knowledge that” underlying everything we do, at least not right here and right now. I think it has a somewhat dubious provenance — what we might call an “intellectualist prejudice” — and I think a great deal of its attraction lies in making analysis tractable. It is also resistant to empirical critique because any calculation or inference that it is plainly implausible to suppose we do, whether in going about our daily lives or in performing some extraordinary feat of skill, can also be swept into the rational and plenty-fast-enough but unconscious processes whirring along in our brains, whether those processes are merely postulated or actually supported by some evidence.

But I do think there’s room for an alternative story, one which doesn’t begin by stipulating that the foundation of all our interactions with the world amount to predication — observing objects and events and classifying them, making inferences from our classifications, and so on. I think it is possible to take other ways of interacting with things as more fundamental.

One example I’ve had on my mind for a little while is reading. My daughter mentioned to me recently that now and then she kind of burns out on reading and begins to actually notice letters on the page rather than reading them. When you have mastered the skill of reading, and your brain isn’t messing with you, we would have to say both that you see the letters, obviously, else you’re not reading, and that you do not see the letters, that you see right through them and your mind is filled only with their meaning. You have to see them without noticing them. Heidegger talks somewhere about the tool nearly disappearing from the craftsman’s mind as he works, and that it only stands out as something to be contemplated when it’s broken, or missing, or the wrong tool for the job at hand. So it is generally when we use rather than mention words — you pass right through however the words are physical inscribed (in ink or air) to the meaning, and maybe right through the meaning to a response, an action, a reaction, a feeling, a reflection, an occasion of knowing something new. We begin learning to read by looking intently at each letter, assigning the proper sound to it, and all that, and perhaps to become skilled at that process of observing and classifying individual stimuli as a b or a d or a p means precisely for it to become faster and unconscious (to move from System 2 down to System 1), but it is still an open question what supports even those steps of learning that are later ‘automated’ to become ‘second nature’. Learning to read is a specific sort of activity, embedded in a terribly sophisticated environment, and only possible for an already very sophisticated person, who can already speak their native language fluently and understands quite a bit about learning new things.

I don’t have a knock-down argument that the cognitive (rational, linguistic) is grounded in the non-cognitive (non-rational, non-linguistic). I’m not sure there can be one. On the other hand, the arguments in the other direction come so easily that they are unconvincing, and involve a disconcerting amount of handwaving. There is, for instance, a story about a music student who was writing a paper about Coltrane and he agreed to talk to her about his music. She brought along a transcription she had made of one his solos that she wanted to ask about. He tried to play from her transcription, but, after a couple of tries, he gave up and told her it was “too hard”. How hard would it be to concoct some explanation about the sequence of decisions he ‘must’ have made when he improvised that solo and all of the factors he was taking into consideration every, say, tenth of a second, and explain the entire performance as if he were doing a peculiar bit of math, rather quickly, in his head, and unconsciously. It’s easy to describe such a ‘mechanism’ but pointless, because there is no chance at all that you could describe an algorithm that could predict what he was going to play. All you’ve really achieved is an alternative description of what he actually did and then claimed that it was perfectly understandable because we could so describe it. (It’s a sort of ‘argument from notation’.)

My instinct is that we see in the way a musician or an athlete or a craftsman acts, in the ‘decisions’ they seem to be making, an involvement with the things in the world, a responsiveness, that underlies everything we do, including knowing. It’s just a bit more spectacularly on display when it’s Coltrane playing saxophone than when it’s just me making a pot of coffee. I’d like to think of this ‘involvement’ as being prior even to the distinction between cognitive and not, but I think inevitably from the cognitive side it’s just going to look like ‘not’. Oh well.

think the OP is working on the premise that "facts of the world" are also such conventions
— baker

Why would the OP, writing in defense of Naive Realism. believe this? — hypericin

As was made clearer further down the thread, the OP isn't actually defending naive realism.

Now you're just being stupidly perverse. You know that was not what I was talking about. Go troll somewhere else. — Janus

Oh god. Showing your true colors.

All of this is to say that there is an "out there," which I don't take to be another world, but the same world, just different objects within it. The "out there" affects me, a conglomerate of parts in many different ways. The cold affects different parts of me in different ways and there's no reason to speak only in the singular "me" as if cold makes me shiver. It does, but it also makes my nose run and my eyes burn.

My nose allows me to smell, which is me doing something to me, which is a thing, and which is not complicated or unusual. — Hanover

But what are blacks doing to you, or a book?

Because this is where the matter of perceptions/affectings gains special relevance.

You say there are things the cold, for example, does to you, to different parts of you.

How about books or blacks?

Our senses evolved really for one purpose, survival, but survival and the true nature of reality are two different subjects. — Brian Greene (Theoretical physicist, mathematician, string theorist)

Compare the above quote which implies that reality and our picture of reality may not correspond in order that we may live long enough, in evolutionary terms, to mate and rear offspring to the widely-held belief that if one loses touch with reality, one is doomed.

On the one hand, we have Brian Greene and those who think like him who are of the opinion that reality is being, in a sense, photoshopped - made more attractive and less ugly for instance - for our benefit in terms I already talked about and, on the other hand, we have some people - especially those who write books on critical thinking - who believe that our senses, if they'd ever lie to us about reality, would mean an early, possibly gruesome, death.

We explain mental illness, to the extent we can, as we explain other illnesses to which living organisms are subject. To the extent they are aberrations, they are in the same sense as any other disease. Illness, disease, are present in the world with everything else. Being part of the world doesn't imply normality. Extraordinary and unusual things happen all the time. If we must, we can ascertain what is normal statistically. Morality is something we learn as we learn other things; by interaction with others and the environment in which we live. There are no illnesses or morality which are "outside" of the world. — Ciceronianus

Aberrations and diseases are things we want to get rid of, eliminate them. We see them as things that shouldn't exist.
It's in this desire and effort to destroy or eliminate certain objects, events, or people that shows that we think they shouldn't be part of our world.

So it's not clear how a person who believes there is just this world can be consistent when they believe there are things that shouldn't exist.

We can (or should) acknowledge that we live in a world we're a part of, and understand that we necessarily are dependent on it, but don't merely receive impressions caused by it because we're participants, not observers. — Ciceronianus

I think this idea that we're observers and that there exists a world "out there" is a reflection of seeking satisfaction out there and feeling that the out there is sometimes the source of our suffering. It's your child or that piece of cake that makes you happy, it's that bad weather or obnoxious person who makes you miserable.

I don't think either of us disagree with whether we are speaking to one another intelligibly. The disagreement is whether there has to be a common point of reference in order to do so. I don't see why there must be, considering we speak of pain to one another, yet there is no pain outside the phenomenal state to point to to be sure we're speaking of the same thing. — Hanover

That's because pain is the phenomenal state. The injury that triggers the pain is outside the phenomenal state and is what you're talking about when talking about your pain. What use is talking about your pain if you're not really referring to your injury?

When a doctor asks you to describe your level of pain they are asking for a description of your injury.

Do either of you disagree on the concept of space-time and the fact that you both occupy different locations RELATIVE to the thing be talked about and then account for the distinction when talking the thing your taking about?

To say that there needs to be a common point of reference is to say that you have to be the same observer to be able to understand each other, but that is nonsensical in a world of time and space where we each occupy different points. Something that humans have been able to figure out is that the same object looks different from different points in space-time. You don't need another observer to figure that out for yourself. Just move around the object, change the lighting, etc. and you can see for yourself how the your perspective changes. You know that you are the one that changed,, and not the thing being perceived,, so you deduce that the change in the perspective is a result of you changing,, not ta change in the object being perceived. We understand that it's not the object that changes, rather it is the information of the object relative to our position in space-time that changes. We then assume others have these various views given the same sensory organs observing from different points in space-time. If not, then we can usually point to causes outside the phenomenal state as reasons for the discrepancy (the person's eye-brain system is abnormal).

We both look at a cup and we may have no idea what part of the cup is descriptive of the cup and what are things we impose in order to better navigate our world. It's likely we see the cup the same way, but not necessarily so, and it's not required in order for us to speak of the cup. — Hanover

Seems like descriptions are the things we impose in order to better navigate the world. They are both the same thing. We have multiple senses. Maybe each sense provides a different description of the same property of the thing we're talking about and objects seem more complex than they are given we're using more than one different sense to describe/impose.

Think about how a cup feels in your hand vs how it sounds when it is dropped on the floor. Two very different experiences of the cup are descriptive of the just one property of the cup - the material it is made of.

When a doctor asks you to describe your level of pain they are asking for a description of your injury. — Harry Hindu

Then why don't they clarify it like that?

Moreover, it is sometimes (often) not possible to describe the level of one's injury because one simply doesn't know it. For example, you may have sharp pains in your abdomen on the right side. You don't know what is causing those pains. You could have gallstones, intestinal spasms, a number of things. That's why you went to the doctor so that they can examine you and find out what it is.

is the rational, the cognitive, derived from the non-rational, the non-cognitive? — Srap Tasmaner

Seems necessarily so. No brain, no conscious thought, right?

there is no magic thread to stitch the two together — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe there isn’t a need to stitch together that which is inseparable.....

That there are these two realms seems inarguable. — Srap Tasmaner

.....sorta just like that.

You could read the ‘language-game’ approach as suggesting that there are rather more than two realms, but they’re all just a matter of how we use language in different ways for diverse purposes in varying circumstances. — Srap Tasmaner

Yeah, well......we already knew all that from the manifold of both possible and impossible experiences, your “varying circumstances”, that the construction of the language a priori represents. Doesn’t matter; however many more than two realms are posited, all reduce ultimately to just the original two.

I don’t have a knock-down argument that the cognitive (rational, linguistic) is grounded in the non-cognitive (non-rational, non-linguistic). I’m not sure there can be one. — Srap Tasmaner

Hume acknowledged as intellectually empty and philosophically lazy (paraphrased) in arguing that we think merely because we have a brain, in regard to the principle of cause and effect. How a singular cause affords an infinite plurality baffles us, and is by that, quite unsatisfying while at the same time being rather undeniable. So, no, I’m not sure there can be one either, other than how can it be otherwise, which is pretty much what Hume thought 300 years ago.

“...It is certain that the easy and obvious philosophy will always, with the generality of mankind, have preference above the accurate....”
(E.C.H.U. 1. 1. 3., 1748)

It’s easy to describe such a ‘mechanism’ but pointless, because there is no chance at all that you could describe an algorithm that could predict what he was going to play. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep. Hence the notion of spontaneity. Great as a mechanism, but just try demonstrating where our internal, pure, spontaneity comes from. Even choosing that conception prohibits anything to be said about it. The entirety of Kantian conceptual schemes depends on it, not because it is necessarily true, but only that it doesn’t contradict anything. And in a purely logical system, what more is needed?

Oh well. — Srap Tasmaner

(Sigh) Same as it ever was........

How about books or blacks? — baker

They affect parts of me, not my knees, but probably my emotions, my intellect, my knowledge. Somewhere between my hat and my neck.

I may have misunderstood your post, then. Dewey would definitely prefer the scientific approach.

Aberrations and diseases are things we want to get rid of, eliminate them. We see them as things that shouldn't exist.
It's in this desire and effort to destroy or eliminate certain objects, events, or people that shows that we think they shouldn't be part of our world.

So it's not clear how a person who believes there is just this world can be consistent when they believe there are things that shouldn't exist. — baker

I don't see how there would be any inconsistency. We don't commit to the view that the world cannot or should not be altered if we acknowledge we exist in and participate in the world. Nor does the desire or the capacity to alter it commit us to a belief that there are more than one world.

Oh god. Showing your true colors. — baker

Oh god, yes, may they shine a light like the darkest night!

Then why don't they clarify it like that?

Moreover, it is sometimes (often) not possible to describe the level of one's injury because one simply doesn't know it. For example, you may have sharp pains in your abdomen on the right side. You don't know what is causing those pains. You could have gallstones, intestinal spasms, a number of things. That's why you went to the doctor so that they can examine you and find out what it is. — baker

Exactly. Your description of your pain indicates where the doctor should narrow his search and reasons for your pain. If it turns out you don't have an injury where you say you have pain then the problem might be more in your head.

We are almost always talking about the causes of our experiences rather than the experience itself. It is the world we share and not each others heads, so it is the shared world that our shared language is about, and not what is going on in our heads.

Why would it be that similar causes lead to similar effects in the world but that not be the case for the causal relationship of perceptions with what is perceived? Why wouldn't similar sensory organs and brains have similar perceptions and when they don't we can always point to some cause that is different (being located in a different point in space-time, different lighting, abnormal brain function, etc.)

I don't think either of us disagree with whether we are speaking to one another intelligibly. The disagreement is whether there has to be a common point of reference in order to do so. — Hanover

Then you haven't determined if either one of you is speaking intelligibly if you haven't determined if a common point if reference is needed. What would a common point of reference even look like and how would you both agree that one exists?

What is a common point of reference if not a view from everywhere which both of your perceptions would be part of? So it seems that only upon agreeing on what it is that you both perceive has a common point of reference been achieved.

A common point of reference implies space-time and every point in space-time is relative to another. But by merging the information from different points do you end getting a better understanding of what it is that is perceived. But you'd have to assume that your perception of others with senses is accurate to be able to assert that there are other points of reference other than your own.

There’s a bit of the argument that strikes me as a little odd.

1. Bees and humans perceive the flower differently.
Therefore,
2. We cannot know what the flower itself is like, but only how we perceive it.
Therefore,
3. Jack and Jill know only their individual perceptions of the flower, not the flower.

In (1) we’re comparing the perceptions of species but in (3) of individuals. That makes the “we” in (2) ambiguous: it could refer to anyone qua human being, or to anyone qua individual human being.

Why don’t we feel the need to distinguish how each individual bee perceives from how every other bee perceives?

What in the comparison of the perceptive ‘styles’ of species underwrites distinguishing the perceptive ‘style’ of one human being from another? If (2) says “Members of a species can only know how members of that species perceive the flower,” how do you infer that Jack knows only how he perceives and Jill knows only how she perceives?

What in the comparison of the perceptive ‘styles’ of species underwrites distinguishing the perceptive ‘style’ of one human being from another? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think it does.

But I suppose it is the fact that we cannot exist without that portion of the rest of the universe with which we interact which makes me wonder why we're inclined to separate ourselves from the rest of the universe in this fashion and in other respects. We're living organisms and like other living organisms we've been formed by our interaction with each other and the rest of the world over time. As we are part of the world, the idea that we are incapable of knowing what other parts of it really are doesn't make much sense. If we didn't have that knowledge, we wouldn't exist. — Ciceronianus

Ciceronianus....are you being serious? You are a pragmatist. Knowledge is pragmatic, not ontological. Knowing other parts, as you say, is a matter of knowing how to deal, solve problems, but issues about knowing the external world are ones that respond to the Cartesian claim that there is res extensa "out there" as opposed to res cogitans. Are you a res extensa proponent? If so, you are no disciple of Dewey, James, et al.

Ciceronianus....are you being serious? You are a pragmatist. Knowledge is pragmatic, not ontological. Knowing other parts, as you say, is a matter of knowing how to deal, solve problems, but issues about knowing the external world are ones that respond to the Cartesian claim that there is res extensa "out there" as opposed to res cogitans. Are you a res extensa proponent? If so, you are no disciple of Dewey, James, et al. — Constance

I'm not a disciple of any philosopher, though I favor some over others. I'm not even a disciple of my daemon, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And certainly not of Descartes, whose dualism was rejected by Dewey. I think Dewey also rejected the distinction you seem to make, separating the practical from the "ontological."

I'm not sure what you think I'm saying, but I think it's clear enough. Descartes made I distinction I don't. There's no "in there" or "out there." There's "here." There's no "external world" nor is there an "internal world." There's a world in which we live as participants in that world. I'm saying the philosophical conception of an "external world" and an "internal world" is misguided and confusing. I think this is what Dewey says, as well. We should speak of certain activities and things, what they are, what they do, as different parts of the of the same world, but should not speak of them as if they take place in isolated realms. I'm critical of the view there is an "external world" apart from us, which we merely observe and react to, somehow, though excluded from it.

What's odd is that in the minds of those who would criticise realism, the issue has moved from being about what is real to being about what one "perceives"... a term that pretty much assumes the duality that realism rejects. Hence the nonsense that what we see is not the object, but a representation of the object.

I think it's a case of taking an unremarkable fact as the basis for a remarkable conclusion. That we are different from bees is said to require the inference that the flower we interact with isn't the flower the bee interacts with. What we call a flower is instead something neither we humans nor the bees can ever know, just as no other living organism can, being limited by its capacities and characteristics, which are different in each case. So, we must conclude that the "real flower" or "flower in itself" is unknowable, and therefore that what we perceive to be the case cannot be the case. From this the perception is born, as distinct from the flower.

So, each creature has a separate perception of the flower; human, dog, cat, bee, rabbit, etc., and these perceptions are never completely the same. To the extent we interact with a flower, it merely results in our having a perception which is no more reflective of the real flower than any other perception. Simply put, the flower can never be known, not really.

In which case we have no real knowledge of the rest of the world, and never will. It's an unknowable knowledge.

I'm not a disciple of any philosopher, though I favor some over others. I'm not even a disciple of my daemon, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And certainly not of Descartes, whose dualism was rejected by Dewey. I think Dewey also rejected the distinction you seem to make, separating the practical from the "ontological." — Ciceronianus

That is promising. Nothing worse than the dogmatic adherence to what someone said. Less interested in this, much more in how this serves my own evolving thoughts.

There's no "in there" or "out there." There's "here." There's no "external world" nor is there an "internal world." There's a world in which we live as participants in that world. — Ciceronianus

Then you are very much aligned with Heidegger and others. Of course, then you have to deal with the object as an analytical problematic. Here is my pen. At the level of the most basic inquiry, what IS it? Science has a lot to say, but this is not the most basic level. If it is stated that the pen has mass, e.g., we see that "having mass" is not as if the pen is some kind of eternal penness being intimated by the pen. Where did this designation come from? Of course, the sound 'pen' is what is being tossed around, but this sound is entirely arbitrary; it could have been anything. Then we have the concept (think structuralist Saussure), so how is it that concepts work? This is a thorny matter discussed for centuries, but out of this one thing is clear: Concepts are epistemic, objects are, traditionally, anyway, ontological. No way around it: Were are bound to include the epistemic IN the ontology.
Pragmatists do this, of course, regardless of the language that makes this into a complication. My pen is an event in time, for the epistemology, the apprehending of the pen, is an event. This requires an analysis of time, events, beginnings and terminations, and apparent fluidity (James' Stream of Consciousness, e.g.), meanings, aesthetics/ethics, and all that is IN primordial time. I think the pragmatists are right! Just incomplete.

I'm saying the philosophical conception of an "external world" and an "internal world" is misguided and confusing. I think this is what Dewey says, as well. We should speak of certain activities and things, what they are, what they do, as different parts of the of the same world, but should not speak of them as if they take place in isolated realms. I'm critical of the view there is an "external world" apart from us, which we merely observe and react to, somehow, though excluded from it. — Ciceronianus

But then, there I am, and there this cup is, and there is no denying that there is some "space" (space: more than one kind) between us; I mean, I am certainly NOT the kind of thing a cup is: A cup has presence, visible features like other things. I, on the other hand, don't have any of this. I am not an object to see; I have no presence, there, like a cup on a table. Nor am I a brain with a body. I can see brains, brain matter and its magnification, but to see my "I" is impossible, for the observational event to affirm this would presuppose the very "I" that I would be trying to affirm.

This is not to argue that there is no compelling reason to believe there is a brain/consciousness relation, obviously. It is merely to say that observation as such cannot achieve observational perspective on the generative source of an observation. This idea has a long history in philosophy. You can INFER that consciousness IS what consciousness observes in the world of objects, but this simply dismisses ad hoc that problematic mentioned here.

Descartes made I distinction I don't. — Ciceronianus

And speaking of Descartes, think of that wax of his: do you think a self, an "I" is reducible to what the was is reducible to in his famous analogy?

Then you are very much aligned with Heidegger and others. — Constance

There's need to be insulting. I may be aligned to Dewey, however, who knew this and wrote of it before Heidegger.

At the level of the most basic inquiry, what IS it? — Constance

The question I would ask, myself, is--When and in what circumstances do we, or anyone else, ask "What is a pen?" Or for that matter, "What is a cup?" I think the answer would be only in very isolated, contrived, artificial circumstances. The context in which such "questions" arise is significant, and when we ask them we're playing something like "Let's Pretend." Let's pretend, in other words, that we don't know what a pen or cup is, or whether they differ from us.

That should suggest to us that these aren't real questions; we have no doubt what they are, nor do we have any doubt that we're not pens, or cups. Why ask them, then? I'm inclined to think this is one of the non-problems which are fabricated when we accept dualisms and the concept of an "external world."

I am not an object to see; I have no presence, there, like a cup on a table. Nor am I a brain with a body. I can see brains, brain matter and its magnification, but to see my "I" is impossible, for the observational event to affirm this would presuppose the very "I" that I would be trying to affirm. — Constance

We clearly see ourselves daily, in mirrors and windows. We also see our hands when we use them, our feet when we use them, our hair as and after it's cut, etc. I have a presence, then, unless I believe that I'm not my hands, or my feet, or my legs, stomach, etc. Which would be to accept the mind-body dualism, and the belief in an "external world." I don't.

And speaking of Descartes, think of that wax of his: do you think a self, an "I" is reducible to what the was is reducible to in his famous analogy? — Constance

I only think it perplexing that he spent so much thought musing on the entirely unsurprising and obvious fact that wax will melt when place near a fire, and thought it to be instructive philosophically.

I only think it perplexing that he spent so much thought musing on the entirely unsurprising and obvious fact that wax will melt when place near a fire, and thought it to be instructive philosophically. — Ciceronianus

Not much of a philosophy fan, huh?

Not much of a philosophy fan, huh? — frank

I like to think philosophy encompasses something more than that, or should do so.

Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be the device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes the method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.--John Dewey

I like to think philosophy encompasses something more than that, or should do so. — Ciceronianus

Uh huh.