On knowing

Astrophel

I think I know what it is to know. At the basic level of inquiry, that is, philosophy, Descartes was essentially on the right path, but it's not the cogito that grounds knowing because the "I" that thinks remains at a distance from that which is thought. "I am" is an ontological claim; "I think" is epistemic. One will never close the distance between these two (not that Gettier cared about such a thing), unless it is established that there is an account of what IS that is contingent on what it is to know, and vice versa!
What Descartes didn't see was that the "Deus deceptor" could indeed still be constructing an illusion, for, again, there is NOTHING in "I think" that presumptively possesses ontology. OR, this has yet to be shown, how the two make one, if you will; how thinking entails being.

So, what is it to know at the basic level of analysis? It is the ontological 'proximity" of the intimation. A bit like Plato's forms and the empirical world: the latter yields knowledge only to the extent that the former is logically embedded in it (the latter has a "share" of the form if you like). The idea is that there really IS something real in the "absolute" sense. But here, we put Plato's rationalist metaphysical extravagance aside, and further admit that logic as such is simply empty (so its apriority is of no help; apriority among observations in error gives us nothing but error), and turn to the world we experience for this confirmation and ask, is there no way to ground knowledge claims (leaving Descartes' absurd Deus Ex Machina out of it) in the plain sight of things?

Yes, there is: foundational intuition. If it can be shown that there is such a thing, then all of our serious knowledge claims, while certainly not being thereby true absolutely, will be seen occurring, while still "at a distance, within the "play" of an absolute.

The claim here is: underlying our knowledge of the world, there is a foundation of intuition, an essential "givenness" that is presupposed in meaningful knowledge claims, that underwrites that whole, the "totality", of meaningful thought about the world. Eventually, epistemology will be seen for what it is: it is a revealing of ontology. The two are one.

Or am I wrong about this?

RogueAI

"I think" is epistemic. — Astrophel

Isn't the following necessarily true: there exists at least one thinking mind?

wonderer1

Yes, there is: foundational intuition. If it can be shown that there is such a thing, then all of our serious knowledge claims, while certainly not being thereby true absolutely, will be seen occurring, while still "at a distance, within the "play" of an absolute. — Astrophel

I don't really know what you are trying to say here, and I don't know what "foundational intuition" would be. I'm inclined to think that rather than having a foundational intuition, I have an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions.

Or if you prefer, a poetic take.

Astrophel

Isn't the following necessarily true: there exists at least one thinking mind? — RogueAI

Keep in mind that "one thinking mind" is a language construct. How, it may be asked, did one get this? And where does its authority find its basis?

Astrophel

I don't really know what you are trying to say here, and I don't know what "foundational intuition" would be. I'm inclined to think that rather than having a foundational intuition, I have an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions.

Or if you prefer, a poetic take. — wonderer1

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute.

RogueAI

Keep in mind that "one thinking mind" is a language construct. How, it may be asked, did one get this? And where does its authority find its basis? — Astrophel

"If A then B; A, therefore B" is also a language construct. Are you a radical skeptic?

Mww

Or am I wrong about this? — Astrophel

There is no wrong in speculative metaphysics; just coherence, and logical consistency to support it.

The notion of foundational intuitions initially became coherent, within its own logically consistent framework, in 1781.

Attempts to dismiss them as such, or maybe realign them as something else, began in 1818, been going on ever since.

I like sushi

↪Astrophel

You are correct. The epistemic and ontological distinctions are of convenience.

Sadly people like Heidegger used this problem to talk meaningless twaddle :D

wonderer1

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute. — Astrophel

I don't see it as absolute. As i said, "an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions." Recognition of the evolving aspect seem important to me, as it allows for paradigm shifts.

Astrophel

"If A then B; A, therefore B" is also a language construct. Are you a radical skeptic? — RogueAI

Of course not. But one has to see that, first, tautologies are vacuous. Logical validity says nothing about the world, but is self referential. Second, as rigorous as logic is, it is still conceived in an historical casting of terms. I may be very certain modus ponens is right, but when you ask me how my words represent this coercive intuition that binds parts of a proposition in logic, I am lost. This "binding" is simply given, and unspeakable.

Astrophel

There is no wrong in speculative metaphysics; just coherence, and logical consistency to support it.

The notion of foundational intuitions initially became coherent, within its own logically consistent framework, in 1781.

Attempts to dismiss them as such, or maybe realign them as something else, began in 1818, been going on ever since. — Mww

I would first ask that the history of this thinking be put aside. Philosophical ideas are timeless, which is why even the pre Socratics still have relevance. Just argue the matter on its manifest merits.

Speculative? This, I am arguing, is not the case at the very basic level. I claim there is an existentialabsolute, that is, something in our contemplative midst that cannot be reduced to what argument can say, cannot be second guessed. This is the bare givenness of the world.

Astrophel

You are correct. The epistemic and ontological distinctions are of convenience.

Sadly people like Heidegger used this problem to talk meaningless twaddle :D — I like sushi

Well, I like sushi, that is a bold statement. I wonder if Being and Time can be called meaningless twaddle in the context of an examination of his thought. Or is this just bluster?

I am not correct because I think epistemic and ontological distinctions are of (mere?) convenience. I am saying quite the opposite: there is an ontology that stands behind, with, and in, all knowledge claims, rendering them epistemically non arbitrary. This is the point.

RogueAI

↪Astrophel

Aren't you as certain that thinking/mind/thought exists as you are about the truths of logic?

Astrophel

I don't see it as absolute. As i said, "an evolving web of multitudinous interacting intuitions." Recognition of the evolving aspect seem important to me, as it allows for paradigm shifts. — wonderer1

I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate.

Astrophel

Aren't you as certain that thinking/mind/thought exists as you are about the truths of logic? — RogueAI

As a thought "exists" and constitutes a presence, a language presence of inner auditory qualities, it stands irrefutable. However, what I can say about this is contingent and interpretative.

RogueAI

a language presence of inner auditory qualities — Astrophel

When you visualize a sunset, how is that a "language presence of inner auditory qualities"?

wonderer1

I have no issue with paradigms shifts and an evolving understanding. But there is an untested assumption in all of this, in whatever scientific field you choose (even the science of getting up in the morning. The world is a science laboratory) that it is not all, in the exhaustive analysis of it, "made". There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate. — Astrophel

:up:

Astrophel

When you visualize a sunset, how is that a "language presence of inner auditory qualities"? — RogueAI

To visualize anything is not to be an infant with eyes to see only. One implicitly KNOWS it is a sunset prior to witnessing, that is, sunsets, like trees and clouds, are already established in a ready to hand explanatory matrix and when one sees one understands, even if one does not actually utter the words. The words are "there" in the background. informing the moment and giving a sense of comfort and familiarity.
But do thoughts exist? Of course. They are clearly not heavy or large like physical existence, but their presence is undeniable. Do they exist when they are only implicitly there (per the above), in an unarticulated experience of a sunset or whatever? Of course, they are unconsciously attending, for the moment requires orientation to be a moment of human experience at all (contra an animal orientation, which carries familiarity, certainly, but no language contexts, save the occasional meow and chirp, that have no cognitive function, or at best, a proto-language function). So: it appears that one cannot take understand as a presence if it does not show itself as such, and implicit thoughts are by definition, not appearing. This is kind of question goes to the generative source of thought and experience itself. Such a generative source cannot be seen. We stand at the threshold of metaphysics.

RogueAI

↪Astrophel

I have a philosophy degree, but you need to dumb it down for me. I have trouble understanding that. My position is that we can know a few things about reality. Cartesian truths. Mind, thought and consciousness exist. We can't be wrong about that.

Astrophel

I have a philosophy degree, but you need to dumb it down for me. I have trouble understanding that. My position is that we can know a few things about reality. Cartesian truths. Mind, thought and consciousness exist. We can't be wrong about that. — RogueAI

But consciousness is a problematic term, because ask what it is, and you refer to something else, like knowledge relations and occurrent experiences, feelings and moods, anticipations, memory and so on; I mean, it is not as if conscious is irreducible, and so one then has to go to its parts, its judgments and affectivity and the structure in which we find these.

Mind is the same. Is this a reference to thought only? But even here, there are questions begged: What is it to think at all? Can thought be "about" what lies before the thinker to be witnessed? Is witnessing something a "pure" event such that the witnessed object imparts knowledge of its nature? Or, is the witnessing bound to the relational features of perception, such that perceiving as a subject act, passive or otherwise, is actually part of the object; the point here being that when I see my cat, the "seeing" is not some impossible transparency, or "mirror" as Rorty put it, but an act thick with epistemic qualifiers. Memory and anticipation appear to be a temporal dynamic inherent to consciousness: what about an analysis of this? How does conscious ever get to be a singularity when it is reductively reducible to many things?

Descartes thought he had found in the cogito an absolute grounding for knowledge claims about the world, because the "I am" cannot be called into question (and then on to God who doesn't deceive about things), but this "I am" is no simple given, is it? It is called 'I am' in the context of language; it is complex in that when you look for the 'I am" you find a multiplicity, not a singularity. One finds thinking, felling and the rest; but a single "I" does not show up.

No philosopher's' names here, save Rorty, in passing. No confusing vocabulary. Just straight thinking about consciousness.

Mww

I claim there is an existential absolute (…). This is the bare givenness of the world. — Astrophel

There is a confidence that science is "about" something, even if that something is implicit and elusive. It is here I wish to elucidate. — Astrophel

So the main thesis does not concern foundational intuitions, but rather, an existential absolute with respect to the implicit and elusive something science is “about”?

Any idea what that would be, what form it would take? Is that the scope of your elucidation?

Astrophel

So the main thesis does not concern foundational intuitions, but rather, an existential absolute with respect to the implicit and elusive something science is “about”?

Any idea what that would be, what form it would take? Is that the scope of your elucidation? — Mww

Foundational intuitions? We have to know what these are before choosing in favor of something else. It is important to see that it is not going to a continuity that runs through familiar paradigms, but rather will jump to the chase, so to speak. Such an intuition is accessible to observation. The access lies in the manner in which one takes up this ordinary world. One can observe that there is an error in one's taxes, but then one can turn away from this and ask more basic questions about taxes, their nature, justification, and so on. The latter you could call a "meta" observation about the former. Examining presuppositions of a thing is a move toward a meta review, a review that is about itself. Here, I take this term to the threshold of possible review: the assumptions about the world AS world, the place Wittgenstein wouldn't go, and ask for "review". But now the playing field is very limited. I mean, ask for a review of a language, you step into a metalanguage, perhaps another language, or within the same language, but examining a point of grammar or semantic--THIS meta position is rich with explanatory details. But to pull away from the world, one finds oneself in a kind of no man's land: what lies before one is the world, but any reference to an explanatory source is not available, for all such sources are IN the world and that would b question begging.

But then, one is still IN the world; one has simply arrived at a point where the understanding looses its footing. The question arises, what is there that one loses ones footing about? Here is the encountered intuitive landscape. The meta question turns out to be an encounter with the foundations of existence.

Of course, this has issues.

Mww

Any idea what that would be, what form it would take? Is that the scope of your elucidation?
— Mww

Foundational intuitions? — Astrophel

No. An existential absolute. Or, apparently, just recently, your foundation of existence. Is one the same as the other?

Janus

Well, you have just admitted to having intuitions. You find this kind of thing anathema among analytic philosophers, for it implies something directly apprehended, free of interpretation; and if this is what you mean by intuition, then you are making a very strong claim, the strongest, namely, that the world, through intuition, discloses its nature or essence. This stands apart from science's paradigms that are open to theoretical "progress"" one is already there, in possession of something of the same epistemological status as, say, the Ten Commandments. An absolute. — Astrophel

There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting them into words (and thus interpreting or distorting them). The idea that there are intuitions which directly reveal the "true essence" of reality is a discursively formed idea, which is itself not a "pure intuition".

Astrophel

No. An existential absolute. Or, apparently, just recently, your foundation of existence. Is one the same as the other? — Mww

It's an odd question to me. One is simply directed to purify one's gaze, deliver observation from the presumptive thinking that generally steps in and makes claims and argues. One don't argue about an intuition. One can deny that there are such things, and many do just this. They say that once an intuition is observed it is already embedded in context, and the "purity" (or innocence) of the observation is entirely undone. I see a sunset and I am already in a body of understanding that takes it in, identifies and classifies it. Innocence here is just an illusion that philosophy can undo just by talking about how impossible it is to observe something "stand alone" for observation itself is crowded with predelineated understanding.

But I argue that even though we face the world in a determinate historical way (educated and enculturated), the event of acknowledging something retains its original status as an intuition. case in point: the radical example of putting your hand in a pot of boiling water. One is not bound to a contextualized setting to understand this in the ways it intuitively presents itself.

The reason Dennett and others reject this kind of intuitionism is because they see only an abstraction in the intuition. That is, analysis places the intuition apart from the understanding, the former being affective, the latter cognitive, and the understanding is distinctively cognitive. Non propositional knowledge is not recognized.

Astrophel

There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting them into words (and thus interpreting or distorting them). The idea that there are intuitions which directly reveal the "true essence" of reality is a discursively formed idea, which is itself not a "pure intuition". — Janus

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"? If you define this as a kind of qualia, then the question is begged: for "being appeared to redly" isolates the color red from the complete engagement. Keep in mind that calling something "red" is an analytic abstraction, a category imposed on the world to identify in a social context. Our concepts (and I follow Rorty here) are inherently social pragmatic devices that divide an "originarily" undivided world. I think this is clear: when thought is brought to bare on the bare phenomenon, thought's categories slip away, and the abstraction of the social construct yields to an engagement in the world that is affective/cognitive/pragmatic all at once. Here, affect is not dismissed, as philosophy has always tended to ignore it into marginalization. Affect is now IN the qualia. Or, Moore's "non natural quality" (the good; see Principia Ethica) is reintegrated with the whole experience.

wonderer1

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition"? — Astrophel

Why would you want to?

Janus

And how are we to define a "true essence" of "pure intuition — Astrophel

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rational intuitions of reality, or the nature of reality. Are you agreeing with that position or not?

Astrophel

Why would you want to? — wonderer1

Well, it is the point I am raising. Consider what a pure intuition would be. We are so used to absolutes belonging to the "certainty" of logic, and logic being a mere formal, content free dimension of judgment that could yield no real knowledge because it is simply empty. But an existential intuition? Both about existence AND apodictic!
Such a thing is a revelation.

wonderer1

↪Astrophel

Sounds to me like a revelation is what you are looking for, but why think there is any relationship between intuitions and revelation?

Astrophel

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rational intuitions of reality, or the nature of reality. Are you agreeing with that position or not? — Janus

I am taking the notion of intellectual intuition to task. Intellectualism gives undo privilege to cognition, and the term cognition, like all terms, is an artificial structure imposed on the world to talk about it, manage it, have discourse on it, and so on. But the original whole out of which this categorical thinking issues remains what it is. It is all of what we might say, and yet none of these: certainly logic is not about nothing, nor is affectivity; but concepts like these that quantify and divide experience, because they are categories, do not represent the original uncategorized primordial whole.
The idea here is to put at bay the knowledge claims that spontaneously spring into play when we experience the world. Such a suspension delivers the world from the imposition of abstraction that the primacy of the intellect has brought to philosophy. And affectivity is no longer pushed into irrelevance.

The question then is, what does affectivity "say" in the setting of being restored to its place?

On knowing

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