This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth. — Joshs

Do you think your emotions determine what is true?

Do you think your emotions determine what is true? — wonderer1

It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. Do I think such a mechanism determines what is true? No.
Conservatives like to say that facts don't care about our feelings. I think the arbiter of empirical validation is not the raw, independently existing facts of the world. Rather, empirical truth and falsity is a function of whether and to what extent events are construed as consistent with our anticipations, which defines our purposes and values, and our knowing of this relative success or failure is synonymous with feelings such as anxiety, confusion and satisfaction. Validational evidence is just another way of describing the affectively felt assimilative coherence of the construed flow of events and therefore it is synonymous with feeling valence. Validated construing is neither a matter of forcing events into pre-determined cognitive slots, nor a matter of shaping our models of the world in conformity with the presumed independent facts of that world via the method of falsification. Rather, it is a matter of making and remaking a world; building, inhabiting, and being changed by our interactive relations with our constructed environment.

In the Philebus Plato addresses the question of the relation between language and world.
It raises the problem of what Aristotle called the “indeterminate dyad” .

The dyads include:

Limited and Unlimited

Same and Other

One and Many

Rest and Change

Eternity and Time

Good and Bad

Thinking and Being

Being and Non-being

Each side stands both together with and apart from the other. There is not one without the other.

Ultimately, there is neither ‘this or that’ but ‘this and that’. The Whole is not reducible to One. The whole is indeterminate.

And yet we do separate this from that. Thinking and saying are dependent on making just such distinctions.

When I hear the word ‘same’ I read it as ‘similar’. — Joshs

Well, there's your problem. "Same" and "similar" are not the same. Phenomenology will only add to such confusion.

You specified that multiple people were to draw the same vase. Not similar vases. Each will draw a different drawing, have a different perspective, give a different interpretation, of the same vase. This is not the same as each drawing a different vase.

Honestly, all this looks to be no more than vacillation on your part...

Is there a fact of the matter about anything? — Joshs

Yes. That you are reading this, for example.

Is there a fact of the matter about anything?
— Joshs

Yes. That you are reading this, for example. — Banno

I have to say some of the nuances of philosophical thinking make me long for the simpler world of common sense delusions. I guess any idea can be picked apart using a given schema and will doubtlessly appear coherent to the acolyte. What I find most challenging is not knowing which way to go in matters like this. I suspect these rarified debates about the nature of reality and how language functions are primarily for the benefit of the cognoscenti, a bit like Star Trek lore or stamp collecting.

Same" and "similar" are not the same. Phenomenology will only add to such confusion.

↪Joshs You specified that multiple people were to draw the same vase. Not similar vases. Each will draw a different drawing, have a different perspective, give a different interpretation, of the same vase. This is not the same as each drawing a different vase. — Banno

Same and similar are two of many species of difference.
Did you read this?

‘similar’ is a species of difference, as is disparate, homologous, analogous, synonymous, opposite. Identity and same are also species of difference. Unlike similar, people tend to use the concepts of identity and same in circumstances (A=A) where difference goes unnoticed even when it implicitly forms the basis of the comparison. This is typically because subtle changes in sense and relevance are considered as peripheral to the meaning of the objects being compared. They are dismissed as just subjective colorations which can be ignored when doing logic and ascertaining empirical truth.

It sounds like you subscribe to a traditional ( and outdated) notion of emotion as a physiological mechanism peripheral to cognition. — Joshs

Not at all. Of course our cognition can be affected by emotions in a great many ways. The brain has a quite interconnected structure. Certainly my desire to understand the weirdness of my brain played a huge role in me studying relevant science, resulting in me being quite confident that I have a more up to date perspective on the subject than you do.

Do you think there is any significance to whether a person has looked into the relevant science or not?

In the Philebus Plato addresses the question of the relation between language and world.
It raises the problem of what Aristotle called the “indeterminate dyad” . — Fooloso4

Interesting. But I find that a distinction can be made between necessary dyads and unnecessary dyads (however it would be best to lignuistically distinguish them). As an example of this distinction:

Left and right form what I've termed a necessary dyad. It is impossible in all cases and at all times to have one devoid of the other's occurrence (same with up and down and many other dyads).

On the other hand, love and hate give an example of what I've tentatively termed "an unnecessary dyad": yes, they stand in direct opposition to each other as a dichotomy and therefore comprise one set, but: while one cannot ever hate in manners fully devoid of love - namely, of love for that which is valued, typically one's own self - a person can potentially experience love in manners fully devoid of hate for anything (at least transiently). So, unlike left and right, while hate necessitates love in all cases, love will not likewise necessitate hate.

Ultimately, there is neither ‘this or that’ but ‘this and that’. The Whole is not reducible to One. — Fooloso4

Getting back into cosmology :razz: , in cosmological models wherein some the absolute state of being is equated to pure (cosmic) love - maybe such as the Neo-platonic notion of "the One"? - the unnecessary dyad of love-hate terminates in manners where only love remains at the expense of all hate. So that the Whole here can be theoretically reducible to One - this due to not all dyads being a matter of "this and that" (some in fact being "this or that"). [Other possible cases of unnecessary dyads might also be potentially discerned.]

p.s., yes, deep down, I'm sincerely philosophically minded about this issue of opposites. Though I'm not sure that if fits in with the thread's theme.

...rarified debates... — Tom Storm

I hope that, that you are reading this, now, is not something of which you need philosophical reassurance.

So apparently the idea is that @Josh takes a group of folk into a room with one vase, asking them to draw the vase, and supposedly the differences between the drawings show that there never was only one vase, but instead a multitude of vase-phenomena.

And to back that up, we must be told that

Same and similar are two of many species of difference. — Joshs

...as if Joshs did not really mean there to be only one vase in the room.

Seems to me that there is a clear sense in which two folk can each draw a different picture of the same vase. Joshs seems to deny this. To me, that reeks of sophistry.

I hope that, that you are reading this, now, is not something of which you need philosophical reassurance. — Banno

No, that much I don't find problematic.

Seems to me that there is a clear sense in which two folk can each draw a different picture of the same vase. Joshs seems to deny this. To me, that reeks of sophistry. — Banno

I don't take @Joshs for a sophist and perhaps that's not what you meant. I think he has a very particular and complex frame of reference for these matters, which are not necessarily intuitive or easy to describe (outside of a domain of discourse). Or compatible with other ways of describing the world (for want of a better phrase). I think he is saying in essence that reality is co-created and that we can't take any particular account for granted. What we see is partly, or largely, based on our suppositions and the very words we use. I don't think he is saying there is no truth but that there are contingent truths that they are not all compatible and generally align with particular worldviews or 'value systems'. Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity?

Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity? — Tom Storm

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.

Well, as Searle points out in the podcast, even if we "can't take any particular account as granted", it does not follow that nothing we say is true!

Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity? — Tom Storm

Seems to me that if one were to follow antirealist ideas into ethics, one would be setting aside any such ethical truths, just as for ontology. Putin, not Christ, is the consequent.

Derrida is saying, at a minimum, that "tone, language, posture, gesture," are philosophically important -- else he wouldn't have written what he wrote, since Heidegger already wrote it. — Moliere

OK, I got the idea, but I want to know why and how they are philosophically important. If all he did was paraphrase Heidegger in even more obscure language, why would I bother to read him instead of Heidegger, since the latter would afford the same insights with less effort on my part?

But also that provides a clue into reading his philosophy: start with Heidegger, and then try and read what's different. — Moliere

If you've made the effort to penetrate Derrida's philosophy, and Heidegger's, to the point where you can understand both sufficiently to be able to see the difference between the two, then I can only take my hat off to you.

On the surface, at least, they both seem to share a certain suspicion of categorization. The present-at-hand and presence perform similar roles in that they have a non-visual complement -- the ready-to-hand and absence, which are meant to show how our phenomenology and language rely upon not just the metaphysics of presence, but this other unexamined side as well. — Moliere

I understand the difference between vorhandenheit und zuhandenheit, and I think that is a valuable phenomenological insight, but it is also an example of categorization.

Although I should point out that my understanding is that the former is a reflective presence, while the latter is not so much an absence as it is a transparence. The hammer becomes "invisible" when I use it, but it is there nonetheless. This is also foreshadowed by the ideas of the conscious and the unconscious, or the explicit and the implicit. I am not consciously or explicitly aware of the hammer as I use it, but its presence in my hand is unconscious and implicit.

Now, I can talk about these ideas in plain language, but I cannot think of any of Derrida's ideas that I could do the same with, unless they come to seem trivial. Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong. Logocentrism was foreshadowed by Klages, and the irony is that there is no philosopher more logocentric (or logorrheic) than Derrida. Are there any other of Derrida's ideas that can be explained in plain language, while remaining insighful and not becoming trivial? This is a genuine question since I have never penetrated far into the Derrida landscape, and so cannot claim to know that there could not be anything there that I've missed.

The tone, though! What a difference! Heidegger the joyless and serious spiritual questor for a Truth long forgotten, vs. the joyful and playful linguist. — Moliere

If you find Derrida joyful to read, then that's great: it's always good to find something joyful to read. I've tried to read him and don't find it joyful at all.

Is there a fact of the matter about anything? I can explain Derrida in clear language but that doesn’t mean you’ll understand it. — Joshs

I see no reason to think that if you could explain Derrida in clear language that I would be unable to understand it. Give it a go and we'll see.

It has nothing to do with language except insofar as we use language to report. And I'm not talking about "relevant meanings" either. Find any complex object with many distinct features and invite a friend to tell you just what she sees at the precise locations you point to on the object. You will find that she sees just the same features that you do.
— Janus

Why aren’t you talking about relevant meanings? Is there such a thing as a neutral meaning, divorced from relevance? This is crucial to understanding how we construct sense and language. Heidegger’s thesis in Being and Time centers around the fact that how things matter to us is not separable from what they are in themselves. Extracting a neutral fact of the matter is “an artificially worked up act.” — Joshs

I was arguing that people seeing the same vase, when they paint it, and in support of that I made the point that people will agree on small and precise features of objects if questioned. You have not addressed that argument but have instead changed the subject.

Cheers, good points.

I think he is saying in essence that reality is co-created and that we can't take any particular account for granted. — Tom Storm

Right, I think it is obvious that reality, if we mean what is experienceable (which we should, since we cannot talk about what is not experienceable, except to make groundless speculations about what we imagine might be the case), is "co-created". Although we do know from experience that we cannot make the process by which we are affected such as to experience the world of phenomena, from which we infer a shared empirical world, so there is a sense in which we have no say in the creation of the phenomena we experience.

The co-creation part comes in with the socially., culturally and linguistically mediated interpretations that produce the model we call "the external world". But let us not forget the more primordial biologically and semiotically mediated dimensions, which we have in common with other organisms. Shall we say that other organisms also co-create their Umwelts?

It seems there is a lot of co-creation going on—perhaps it is co-creation all the way down. :wink:

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically. — frank

No, it was a provocation about the relativistic dimensions of postmodern thinking. But your point is interesting.

Seems to me that if one were to follow antirealist ideas into ethics, one would be setting aside any such ethical truths, just as for ontology. Putin, not Christ, is the consequent. — Banno

And given Putin' s war is blessed by the church, they are perhaps not so far apart in some people's worldviews. But that's a separate problem. I agree that foundational thinking (of which morality must be a form) is impossible in the land of the dead metanarrative.

Well, as Searle points out in the podcast, even if we "can't take any particular account as granted", it does not follow that nothing we say is true! — Banno

Yes. It's easy to throw out babies with bathwater. The other (and similar) position is to argue that since truth can't be taken for granted or even identified (whether it exists or not) why worry about it?

The co-creation part comes in with the socially., culturally and linguistically mediated interpretations that produce the model we call "the external world". But let us not forget the more primordial biologically and semiotically mediated dimensions, which we have in common with other organisms. Shall we say that other organisms also co-create their Umwelts? — Janus

Nicely done. Agree. Reality, such as it, is is embodied cognition.

perhaps it is co-creation all the way down. :wink: — Janus

The other option is confusions all the way down. That seems fairly popular too. On a separate note, I did hear a philosopher (I forget who ) in a guided discussion on truth saying, 'What's wrong with endless recursion, anyway?' Not a notion we hear very often. I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source.

The other option is confusions all the way down. That seems fairly popular too. On a separate note, I did hear a philosopher (I forget who ) in a guided discussion on truth saying, 'What's wrong with endless recursion, anyway?' Not a notion we hear very often. I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source. — Tom Storm

Confusion all the way down...I like that!

I'm not so keen on Rorty's relativism, or at least I think it only applies to the relatively minor moral values, like the age of sexual consent, general social etiquette, the ethics of taking mind-altering substances and so on. When it comes to the really significant moral values—condemnation of murder, rape, torture, theft and so on—I think they do find their source in social pragmatics. On that connection though, we have to also acknowledge that we are not yet a global village, and maybe never will be.

Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong — Janus

It is just plain wrong , and it is not what Derrida is saying. First of all, differerance doesnt just refer to words, it refers to all forms of experience. Second , Derrida isnt arguing that the chain of referential meanings of words leads to an infinite regress. You’re just offering a confused mishmash of Saussurian linguistic structuralism here. For Derrida, performing a deconstructive analysis of a culture milieu reveals intricate, stable patterns and themes.

For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] , a better way, and let i t b e said i n passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, preciSion, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread.

Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example, socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy. ( Derrida, Limited, Inc)

I was arguing that people seeing the same vase, when they paint it, and in support of that I made the point that people will agree on small and precise features of objects if questioned. You have not addressed that argument but have instead changed the subject — Janus

The differences in how each painted vase looks gives more insight into how individuals are interpreting it than their verbal agreement on small and precise details. One can agree with others on small and precise details because those small and precise details are couched in abstractive linguistic terms that cover over all sorts of subtle differences in the sense of what those small and precise terms mean to each person. This flattening of individual difference is what language is designed to do, in order to foster communication. That’s why we have to employ more intricate means of determining exactly how someone means their use of a small and precise term. Heidegger never said that in using a hammer, the hammer itself as a present to hand object can be extracted and separated from the sense of how it is used. The difference in the appearance of the vase in each person’s rendering of it reveals the intricate differences in how those agreed upon small and precise terms are being used. ( You still think I was changing the subject, or do you now see the connection?)

[

I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source. — Tom Storm

That’s a cartoon version of relativism that Rorty often made fun of , and which is why he rejected the label of relativist.
Within a given cultural , ethical or scientific milieu, there is a certain dynamic stability of shared values which makes possible agreement on matters of common concern. This is why scientists are able to reach consensus, technologists are able to build machines, there can be agreement on legal matters.

I guess Rorty argues similarly by saying (my paraphrase) that all of our values are contingent on other values and so on forever, without the possibility of a final resting place or source.
— Tom Storm

That’s a cartoon version of relativism that Rorty often made fun of , and which is why he rejected the label of relativist. — Joshs

Wasn't meant to be a cartoon, it's simply what I hear when I read him put it like this:

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

- Contingency, Irony and Solidarity


It's not my intention to misrepresent him.

Within a given cultural , ethical or scientific milieu, there is a certain dynamic stability of shared values which makes possible agreement on matters of common concern. This is why scientists are able to reach consensus, technologists are able to build machines, there can be agreement on legal matters. — Joshs

I'm happy to hear it.

It is just plain wrong , and it is not what Derrida is saying. First of all, differerance doesnt just refer to words, it refers to all forms of experience. Second , Derrida isnt arguing that the chain of referential meanings of words leads to an infinite regress. — Joshs

If that is so, then provide a textual reference which unlike the one you did provide is not a mere apologetic, lacking any argument for why we should not think that his work is as I said it is. Also explain how differance could refer to experience, and cite where Derrida says this.

It's easy enough for a relativist to simply claim, without actually backing it up with an argument, that they are not a relativist, even though their works as interpreted certainly seem to fit the bill.

OK, I got the idea, but I want to know why and how they are philosophically important. If all he did was paraphrase Heidegger in even more obscure language, why would I bother to read him instead of Heidegger, since the latter would afford the same insights with less effort on my part? — Janus

Here's where my in-between-ness will be a handicap more than a help. I started on Derrida a long time ago before I was really able to comprehend him, and I still struggle. I wanted to understand what the fuss was all about given these two impressions of Derrida I had. At this point I think I've read enough to be able to say that I'm persuaded he's got a good philosophical point, but I don't feel enough confidence to say "And you should bother to read him too", because I'm still a bit shaky on some of the concepts. He's a pretty hard philosopher in the same way Nietzsche is hard because they don't come right out and say their point. Even Heidegger, in his circuitous way, was clearer than both.

Further, I know with certainty there's others who are better at Heidegger than I. I have a reading on B&T, but that's about it.

So it could very well be that Heidegger says the exact same thing in a different way, but I'm just picking up some of the bits from Derrida and some of the bits from Heidegger.

On the whole Heidegger's political orientation at least makes me interested in a re-expression of his philosophical ideas. I think there's something there, but I also think that Heidegger's romanticism is the bad kind of romanticism. Derrida, while playful, doesn't seem dressed up in the romantic gestures of Heidegger towards a forgotten past where only a God can save us from ourselves as much as he's looking towards a future. But that's just a seeming on my part, and not what you're asking after.

I understand the difference between vorhandenheit und zuhandenheit, and I think that is a valuable phenomenological insight, but it is also an example of categorization. — Janus

True -- but it's a category meant to disrupt the old categories of being-as-presence, as if presence is the whole of metaphysics. This act of revealing/creating categories which our present categories are reliant upon is the similar connection I see between the two thinkers. For Heidegger the question of being, and for Derrida the same -- only Derrida continues this move to other categories within other texts because he believes that Heidegger trips across something which he, as a lecturer on the history of philosophy for his day job, sees occuring throughout texts within the canon. Rather than a phenomenological reflection, though, he turns this into a reflection upon texts to attempt to demonstrate this pattern of the super-transcendental, in a way -- categories without name. And since there's this idea going on that categories don't capture being, but rather set it out in a certain way, and since we only have categorization to utilize within philosophy to set this out, this is the reason for the difficulty in the writing of Derrida -- he's trying to say what normally cannot be said and becomes yet another part of the super-transcendental.

At least that's where my thoughts go about. As I said in my opening I'm not at the level of saying "And this is why you should read him", only at the level of being persuaded there's something worth studying there.

Although I should point out that my understanding is that the former is a reflective presence, while the latter is not so much an absence as it is a transparence. The hammer becomes "invisible" when I use it, but it is there nonetheless. This is also foreshadowed by the ideas of the conscious and the unconscious, or the explicit and the implicit. I am not consciously or explicitly aware of the hammer as I use it, but its presence in my hand is unconscious and implicit.

Now, I can talk about these ideas in plain language, but I cannot think of any of Derrida's ideas that I could do the same with, unless they come to seem trivial. Differance, the idea that words only have their meaning in terms of other words which leads to the indefinite deference of meaning is, I think, either trivially true or just plain wrong. Logocentrism was foreshadowed by Klages, and the irony is that there is no philosopher more logocentric (or logorrheic) than Derrida. Are there any other of Derrida's ideas that can be explained in plain language, while remaining insighful and not becoming trivial? This is a genuine question since I have never penetrated far into the Derrida landscape, and so cannot claim to know that there could not be anything there that I've missed.

I think that question a step too high for me. I'd have to read more to make the point definitive. I can justify my interest, but I'm not so certain I can justify everyone else's interest. There's a lot of philosophy out there, after all, and only one life to live.

There is nothing to be known about anything except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other things. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

So you might wonder how we get from this relativistic web to anything that can be considered to evolve or improve, much less to anything that can offer any stable grounds for making distinctions. The answer is that, just as what we consider a solid object is actually a web of such relations on the quantum level, so are larger social and empirical understandings. But just like our use of the fiction we call a solid object, our use of cultural and empirical knowledge allows us to anticipate changes in the world around us in reasonably stable way.
It also allows us to see the revolutionary paradigm shifts from one era of science to the next as an improvement. This is how Rorty puts it in ‘ What Do You Do When They Call You a 'Relativist'?’

”…the intuition that we are making intellectual progress is simply the intuition that, in respect to self-conscious­ness and intellectual responsibility, we are getting farther and farther away from the cavemen; it does not need backup from notions like "closer to Real­ity" or "more nearly universally valid". This would be analogous to saying that the intuition that inquiry is in touch with reality is simply the intuition that it is constrained by reality; it does not need backup from notions like "corresponding" or "mapping.”

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It's easy enough for a relativist to simply claim, without actually backing it up with an argument, that they are not a relativist, even though their works as interpreted certainly seem to fit the bill — Janus

Try this. It’s only 6 pages:

What Do You Do When They
Call You a 'Relativist' by Richard Rorty

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On the other hand, love and hate give an example of what I've tentatively termed "an unnecessary dyad": — javra

Empedocles claimed that Love and Strife are active principles of the universe. In the Metaphysics Aristotle says:

... everything is reducible to Being and Not being, and Unity and Plurality; e.g. Rest falls under Unity and Motion under Plurality. And nearly everyone agrees that substance and existing things are composed of contraries; at any rate all speak of the first principles as contraries—some as Odd and Even, some as Hot and Cold, some as Limit and Unlimited, some as Love and Strife. And it is apparent that all other things also are reducible to Unity and Plurality (we may assume this reduction) .. (1004b)

In the same section of the Metaphysics Aristotle says:

Being qua Being has certain peculiar modifications, and it is about these that it is the philosopher's function to discover the truth.

The dyads are not simply concepts about the world, they are regarded as principles of the world.

p.s., yes, deep down, I'm sincerely philosophically minded about this issue of opposites. Though I'm not sure that if fits in with the thread's theme. — javra

With regard to 'necessity', Plato's Timaeus identifies two kinds of cause, intelligence and necessity, nous and ananke (ἀνάγκης). Necessity covers such things as physical processes, contingency, chance, motion, power, and the chora. What is by necessity is without nous or intellect. It is called the “wandering cause” (48a). It can act contrary to nous.

Aristotle says:

But chance and spontaneity are also reckoned among causes: many things are said both to be and to come to be as a result of chance and spontaneity. (Physics, 195b)

Spontaneity and chance are causes of effects which, though they might result from intelligence or nature, have in fact been caused by something accidentally. (198a)

With regard to the theme of the thread, the sensible world, the world of becoming, is neither regulated by intellect nor fully intelligible. Thus there can be no map of the world.

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.
— frank

No, it was a provocation about the relativistic dimensions of postmodern thinking. But your point is interesting. — Tom Storm

Relativism appears to be built into thought itself, as we mentioned earlier wrt science.

Derrida is saying, at a minimum, that"tone, language, posture, gesture," are philosophically important -- else he wouldn't have written what he wrote, since Heidegger already wrote it. — Moliere

:up:

supposedly the differences between the drawings show that there never was only one vase, but instead a multitude of vase-phenomena. — Banno

Perhaps I can find middle ground between you and @Joshs --- though I do embrace the notion of the vase, worldly and social and objective.

To me language is ’primordially’ (automatically, inescapably) worldly and social, so that there ’must’ be the the vase. But the vase for Alice Vanity and the vase for Mr. Flowers are both also different objects in the world. We can talk about them, include them in our reasoning, relating them perhaps to an 'actual' vase.

One crucial difference between the ’the’ vase and the the vase for me is the differing role of both objects in inferences. For instance, I am not held to the same standards for supporting assertions about the vase-for-me, since I am (usually tacitly) understood to have a kind of incorrigible access to that vase.

More generally, I think a giant chunk of philosophical debate/confusion comes from our oddly stereoscopic situation. Our language has evolved to be more 'we' than 'me,' but it's still the individual nervous system through which the linguistically public world is accessed. One is tempted to say (absurdly) that the world is a dream thrown up by the nervous system (which has now become homeless.)

I suspect these rarified debates about the nature of reality and how language functions are primarily for the benefit of the cognoscenti, a bit like Star Trek lore or stamp collecting. — Tom Storm

To me it seems that philosophy is science is a high but not unpopular sense. Its loss of status seems to be an effect of our worship of technology. Moloch doesn't give us much choice, and perhaps we should confess that we have shown, as a species, a greater regard for engineering than we have for science.

In other words, logical norms are legitimate, but the 'rhetoric' of power is overwhelming. I can't afford to not use a money-making war-winning algorithm, even if I don't understand it. In our complex economy, we are constantly forced to specialists on topics we don't have time to learn about ourselves. As @apokrisis mentioned elsewhere, it costs energy to ask questions.

So maybe philosophers are a mostly ignored priesthood, who might as well be stampcollectors in the context of the way we live now. IMO, politicians are junkfood 'applied' philosophers who are nevertheless effective precisely through easily understood oversimplifications.

I suspect these rarified debates about the nature of reality and how language functions are primarily for the benefit of the cognoscenti, a bit like Star Trek lore or stamp collecting. — Tom Storm

Don’t believe it. As someone who works in the field of mental health, you may appreciate the fact that every major shift in approach to psychotherapy is directly linked to the outcome of these rarified debates. For instance, Freudian psychoanalysis is grounded in a certain form of realist materialism . Client -centered approaches rebelled against the authoritarianism this thinking authorized by tapping into existentialist strains of philosophy. Beck and Ellis’s cognitive therapies relied on a form of realism by deeming emotional distress to be the product of irrational thinking. Enactive cogntivism dumps this language of correspondence with one of adaptivity, due in large part to the influence of Pragmatist and phenomenological influences from philosophy.