Thanks.

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'?’ — Joshs

Cool. Thanks for the essay.

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. — Joshs

Yes, I do appreciate this and I understand something of the source material. We know our ideas can be tracked back to other ideas. What I am referring to however is that most of us don't have the inclination to 'look under the hood and tinker with the engine.' :wink:

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. — plaque flag

Yes, I think I see this and agree. As I said earlier, most of us probably recognize we are tied to a world of ideas and platforms built by our ancestors. But we take this as a given and move on. We don't have the disposition for exploration, nor the foundational knowledge to be of any use in unpicking those ideas and imagining alternatives. Except perhaps is a strictly transactional way through incremental improvements in politics and how we conduct our businesses. Or something like that.

Yes, I do appreciate this and I understand something of the source material. We know our ideas can be tracked back to other ideas. What I am referring to however is that most of us don't have the inclination to 'look under the hood and tinker with the engine — Tom Storm

I don’t think you’re missing much. Philosophy was an acquired taste for me. And to this day my favorite thinker is not an academic philosopher but a psychotherapist and personality theorist, George Kelly. Sure, one could translate his ideas into a full-fledged philosophical treatise, but that’s just dressing up the language and tying it with a bow.

Cool. I noticed there is a George Kelly Society. I've read about him, but not in any detail. I'll follow this up. Thanks.

Thanks, but I wasn't able to follow that. Are the two vases the same, or different? What's "the" vase?

I've in mind something along the lines of the analysis of simples in Philosophical Investigations, §48 and thereabouts. You have some understanding of Wittgenstein. Hilary Lawson seems not to have moved past the Tractatus.

I do not wish to conclude that there is a vase, since that there is exactly one vase is taken as granted in @Joshs' story. I am just pointing to the error in concluding either that there are only vase-phenomena or that there are no true sentences about the vase.

But folk hereabouts pay little heed to the logical consequences of their positions, preferring to "double down" and keep painting false pictures. Making shit up instead of thinking things through.

Thanks for your thoughtful response, Moliere; while you haven't convinced me to read further into Derrida, I can relate to where you seem to be coming from in your understanding of his work.

OK, I'll take a look.

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. — Fooloso4

Thank you for this, but I'm not sure I follow. What are you saying this tells us about language? That its relationship with the world is one of an irreducible dyad? Can you expand this point a little?

Are the two vases the same, or different? What's "the" vase? — Banno

There is just the ordinary worldly vase, at least at first, for then one can contemplate the vase-for-Alice as a private-internal object. Our public language allows for private objects which are nevertheless understood to be in one and the same world. (My dream of a purple bear is in your world, even if you don't access in the same way I do. It's caught up in the same inferential system.)

I've no idea what a "private object" might be.

I gather you are familiar with the private language argument?

Your purple bear is no longer private.

Yes, I think I see this and agree. As I said earlier, most of us probably recognize we are tied to a world of ideas and platforms built by our ancestors. But we take this as a given and move on. We don't have the disposition for exploration, nor the foundational knowledge to be of any use in unpicking those ideas and imagining alternatives. Except perhaps is a strictly transactional way through incremental improvements in politics and how we conduct our businesses. Or something like that. — Tom Storm

:up:

I agree, though a few do have the obsessive disposition for inquiries into foundations. So there's a trickle of what I'd call genuine science that is mostly not respected, perhaps not even called science. I don't want to be a sentimentalist here. I also mostly want to the tool that will scratch my back, even if I also enjoy Husserl, say, more than most.

Yes, I know the PLA and find it convincing, etc. Also, I lean toward direct realism.

The private object is just the object of representationalism. Maybe it's like phlogiston or ether (a bad posit), but it has a role in the philosophical language game. I lean toward an inferentialist semantics.

A less philosophical example would be a dream or a toothache. We might speculate that a performance of Heartbreak Hotel was subpar because Elvis had a toothache at the time.

The private object is just the object of representationalism. — plaque flag

Well, that at least might be a different approach. How would it work?

Well, that at least might be a different approach. How would it work? — Banno

I was just trying to speak from within the indirect realist perspective. So none of this will be new to you. It'll just be us finding words in common.

For them, the private object is the given, the most undeniably real and present. Then the public world is a hypothetical construction from all of these streams of experience. 'The' vase with the red flower is a useful abstraction, perhaps a fiction, used to organize a plurality of red-flower-experiences.

This view is problematic for a number of reasons, but it's the official philosophical cliche.

For them, the private object is the given, the most undeniably real and present. Then the public world is a hypothetical construction from all of these streams of experience. 'The' vase with the red flower is a useful abstraction, perhaps a fiction, used to organize a plurality of red-flower-experiences. — plaque flag

A neat summation of a basic flaw that is rampant hereabouts. Do you see it in @Joshs story?

For them, the private object is the given, the most undeniably real and present. Then the public world is a hypothetical construction from all of these streams of experience. 'The' vase with the red flower is a useful abstraction, perhaps a fiction, used to organize a plurality of red-flower-experiences. — plaque flag

I wouldn't say it is a hypothetical construction; it is rather a logical entailment; if we can all agree on the minutest details about objects, then it follows that the objects must have some kind of independent existence, either just brutely existent, or on account of our minds being conjoined in some way we have no awareness of. In either case the objects do not depend on any particular mind, and so are mind independent in at least that sense.

A neat summation of a basic flaw that is rampant hereabouts. Do you see it in Joshs story? — Banno

I tend to agree with Josh in spirit, but on this issue he may not give the world enough attention. We experience the [ same ] red flower differently (in a series of adumbrations perhaps).

The world exist through/for different individual nervous systems (which are themselves in and of that world.) It's a bit like a Möbius strip. I don't think it can be reduced in either direction. Hence the 'lifeworld' as (if we need one) the realest or most basic world.

wouldn't say it is a hypothetical construction; it is rather a logical entailment; — Janus

Even here it's something that one argues for. One takes the arguing self and its voice as given and only then reasons, from that foundation, to a shared world.

But for me the logical norms and a meaningful language (two aspects of the same phenomenon) used to prove the world are both implicitly self-transcending and already worldly, already assume the world.
To me the self is no more given than the world. They come together even. A meaningful language 'is' a world.

I think the shared world is the more discursively fundamental, because once you have the language to discourse you have already been inducted into the shared world. It might be objected that the most primordial thing for the individual is being somato-sensorially affected, but prior to developing the sense of self that co-arises with the sense of the other and of world, there really is no individuality.

I agree with you that logic and language are both self and world transcending and yet worldly, because without prior sensory experience no logic or language would be possible. This is captured nicely in Kant's idea of the synthetic a priori; it is synthetic in that it is synthesized from experience and yet is transcendentally prior in that, once synthesized, it needs no longer to be checked against the world.

There is a sense in which I would agree that a meaningful language is a world: as I often say I think the world is a collective representation. We don't actually experience a world; it is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience. I think animals also synthesize their Umwelts in the same kind of way, and in that sense, they have their own circumscribed worlds, so I don't see it as being wholly dependent on language, except in the reflexive phase. Without that ability to synthesize an Umwelt, language would not be possible in the first [place.

I tend to agree with Josh in spirit — plaque flag

Quite a few folk say that. What is it you are agreeing with? Searle explicitly agrees with Hilary Lawson that our language is a construct, but points out the error of concluding that therefore the world is a construct. @Joshs seems to repeat that error.

The world exist through/for different individual nervous systems — plaque flag

I don't see how to make this right. Things are generally not dependent on one's nervous system for their existence.

What are you saying this tells us about language? — Tom Storm

The Greek term logos gives us a better sense of the problem then 'language'. What is at issue is the logic of saying, a logos of logos. The ability to give a comprehensive account. It is addressed in Plato's Sophist:

Theaetetus:
We really do seem to have a vague vision of being as some third thing, when we say that motion and rest are.
Stranger:
Then being is not motion and rest in combination, but something else, different from them.
Theaetetus:
Apparently.
Stranger:
According to its own nature, then, being is neither at rest nor in motion.
Theaetetus:
You are about right.
Stranger:
What is there left, then, to which a man can still turn his mind who wishes to establish within himself any clear conception of being?
Theaetetus:
What indeed?
Stranger:
There is nothing left, I think, to which he can turn easily. (Sophist 250)

To count rest, change, and being as three would be mistaken. Being is a higher order than rest and change. It is not a third thing to be counted alongside them.

The Stranger identifies five Kinds. In addition to change, rest, and being, there is sameness and difference (Sophist 254c)

Sameness and difference is the most comprehensive indeterminate dyad.

Contrary to Parmenides, the Stranger says that it is not possible to give an account of being without introducing non-being. Non-being is understood as otherness or difference.

There can be no comprehensive account of being without a comprehensive account of non-being. But what is other is without limit and cannot be comprehended. On the one hand this means that there can never be a comprehensive account of the whole, but on the other, it encourages an openness to what might be; beyond our limits of comprehension.

I don't see how to make this right. Things are generally not dependent on one's nervous system for their existence. — Banno

The world (for us) is experienced through or with or by the human body. This body is of course encompassed by the world it knows. The lifeworld is the everyday world of people with jobs and parents and promises and jokes. The scientific image exists within this world (along with labs and grants and journals), a mere fragment, along with outlandish metaphysical theories.

While we are alive within functioning bodies and a functioning sedimented culture, we can contemplate mathematical models that point before our own arrival and beyond our likely extinction. I'll grant that this is weird. The individual nervous system is obviously not important for holding the world together unless it happens to be my own. So far as I know, the world that can be talked about is always for a body (seen through a particular pair of eyes, smelled with a particular nose, etc.) It is still the world, our world -- as our language inexorably insists.

We don't actually experience a world; it is a synthetic inference from the impressions, sounds, feels and images that we experience. — Janus

I understand why one would say this, but I'd counter that impressions and sounds and so on only make sense within a tacitly accepted framework on an animal in an environment.

It might be objected that the most primordial thing for the individual is being somato-sensorially affected, but prior to developing the sense of self that co-arises with the sense of the other and of world, there really is no individuality. — Janus

I agree. I'd also note here that 'sensorily' takes the sense organs existing in an environment for granted. What I call the constructive approach seems to want to take an interior as given and construct the exterior from this interior --but this conception of an interior seems to quietly depend on common sense.

As you note, the concept of the self co-arises with the concept of others and the shared world. As Sellars might put it, there's no such thing as understanding a single concepts. Meaning lives largely in the relationships between concepts (for instance, in their inferential relationships.)

think animals also synthesize their Umwelts in the same kind of way, and in that sense, they have their own circumscribed worlds, so I don't see it as being wholly dependent on language, except in the reflexive phase. Without that ability to synthesize an Umwelt, language would not be possible in the first [place. — Janus

I agree with you. I've been on a Husserl jag, and it's made me appreciate the 'hardware' of the individual body. Language as tribal software is something like a collectively accumulated set of reasoning skills. The historically sedimented tribe as a whole thinks through my individual brain, though not without addition and modification. But the body has to be enculturated, through its senseorgans,etc. Language depends on these bodies, but our knowing this is the case depends on both language and these bodies in nature.

This is captured nicely in Kant's idea of the synthetic a priori; it is synthetic in that it is synthesized from experience and yet is transcendentally prior in that, once synthesized, it needs no longer to be checked against the world. — Janus

I take this synthetic apriori as the generation of hypotheses from experience. But I'd say such knowledge is fallible. We may act on it without checking (and surely we do), but it could turn out to be wrong. Math might be an exception, but that gets us into the weeds of the philosophy of mathematics.

Quite a few folk say that. What is it you are agreeing with? — Banno

Roughly, I think the continental philosophers are brilliant but sometimes indulge themselves and go too far in their language. Perhaps the essence of self-consciousness is becoming more and more aware of the subjects contribution or even construction of reality. But one can't forget the raw material entirely, or overlook the fact that language is fundamentally worldly and social.

For instance, I mostly agree with:

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. — Joshs

But I'd also emphasize our having been thrown into something more or less given. We reason from what is more or less taken for granted by the community toward something nonobvious or even counterintuitive. More practically, reality is not infinitely malleable. Our interpretations (our worldmaking techniques ) are constrained. Without calories and oxygen, we die. Our environment rewards some techniques and ignores or punishes others. For this reason, I wouldn't call the environment constructed but only partially constructed. There's something like a deep layer that we are forced to deal with, though we can and will endlessly debate the details of stubborn giveness, at least while bloodsugar continues to flow through our brain, the famous glucose hog.

I'd also note here that 'sensorily' takes the sense organs existing in an environment for granted. What I call the constructive approach seems to want to take an interior as given and construct the exterior from this interior --but this conception of an interior seems to quietly depend on common sense. — plaque flag

Or at least dependent on how much of the science of organism-and-environment has become common knowledge. (Phenomenalism as a philosophical approach being subtly dependent on knowing that the eye registers 2D images, that sort of thing.)

One way constructivism is right but misrepresents itself is in presenting the individual as constructing the world all by themselves, kinda from scratch, the mind as a perfect little scientist. It's true, of course, that each individual organism needs to construct their own, in some sense 'private', model of the world (and themselves in it), because that's what brain development just is, but it's not true that each organism constructs the framework they will use to construct the world from scratch. There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others.

That gives a pretty clear way of allowing that the world is a construction -- because there are just so many ways in which it obviously is -- but accounting for agreement among people of the same species, the same culture, and so on.

Ontogeny gets to recapitulate phylogeny rapidly because what used to be endlessly branching little pathways are now high-speed rails. As Hume put it, there are questions Nature has deemed too important to leave to our own fallible and imperfect reason.

There's an inheritance. A lot of 'choices' have already been made for you (by evolution, and on top of that by culture) so you build your own, sure, but not completely idiosyncratically -- and not incommensurably -- but using the same inheritance as everyone else, for the base level, and as everyone in your culture, your speech community, and so on, for others — Srap Tasmaner

How does each individual respond to their culture inheritance? Do they simply introject and internalize it? Does the culture enforce conformity on us through this inheritance? Or is it the case that even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture?

As George Kelly wrote:

“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955)

“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the person’s own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and persons manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”

Our interpretations (our worldmaking techniques ) are constrained. Without calories and oxygen, we die. Our environment rewards some techniques and ignores or punishes others. For this reason, I wouldn't call the environment constructed but only partially constructed. There's something like a deep layer that we are forced to deal with, though we can and will endlessly debate the details of stubborn giveness, at least while bloodsugar continues to flow through our brain, the famous glucose hog. — plaque flag

Well, there’s certainly SOMETHING that constrains our constructions, but aren’t biologistic and physicalist terms like blood sugar, calories and oxygen contestable concepts that shift their sense along with revolutionary changes in the scientific and cultural epistemes that make them intelligible?
Why claim on the one hand that constructive processes ground and alter social phenomena, but that something called material nature is protected from such contestation?
Why not say that the material constraints are themselves species of discursive constraints?