It is the capacity of the mind (nous) to grasp that identity-through-change which underwrites all science. And that is metaphysical! — Wayfarer

I've been challenging this notion that metaphysics underwrites all science.

I can understand what you say here. I suppose I believe that we can grasp less than identity-through-change, that we are not connected to nous, and so on.

I guess I've come out, on the other side, as a metaphysical absurdist.

I’m not sure I agree. I take something closer to Susan Haack’s view of what counts as a scientific approach. Methods that have been established within an intersubjective community, that have replicable and predictable results, where there's a body of standards and best practices based on empirical experience, would certainly include areas like plumbing, electrical work, and even boat building. All achieved over time through testing an idea, trial and error and experiment. Many fields fit this broader account of disciplined, evidence‑based inquiry. — Tom Storm

That's interesting.

Yes, many fields do.

Would judges, in a court of law, count?

I hear you. Although I wouldn’t say philosophy as a whole. Some philosophy, perhaps even most. But I wouldn’t include something like logical positivism, for example. The problem is whether we can treat all philosophy as a form of truth, even while recognising that some philosophy is mistaken, and in some cases perhaps even wilfully ignorant. — Tom Storm

I think logical positivism is a worthy area of study.

Basically I think it's worthwhile to study false things. Sometimes I think it's more worthwhile to study false things than true things, but then I shake myself back to reality :D

Also I ought note that one need not study philosophy to be good at what I was saying. One can have their own ways of listening which the philosophers we read have not bothered to articulate and those ways of listening is what I think philosophy can help one learn.

The odd part there is that in studying philosophy one can also learn to do the opposite -- to defend one's viewpoint from all possible objections and prove oneself right.

:rofl:

Be nice if your parents and grandparents were proud of you, instead of second-guessing everything you do. — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's the attitude I'm encouraging.

Though, to be fair, the children second-guess everything the parents/grandparents do, too -- and it'd be nice if we could recognize our common humanity and stop that game.

Yes.

In spite of my pronouncements, though, I believe I'm a realist of the metaphysical sort.

But I would not follow your description of Einstein's realism. From what I can see God plays dice.

Interesting. Do you think many scientists identify as anti‑realists, and also as Kantians—understanding space and time as forms of cognition rather than external features of the world? — Tom Storm

I don't think so, no. But I don't know, either -- I'm not sure if we'd be able to even poll the group "All Scientists" due to lack of ability to ask everyone who is a scientist.

Realism I think is more common among scientists, but what that realism is realism about varies quite a bit. A mentor of mine in biochemistry was both a determinist and a Catholic which is pretty much the exact opposite of my view on the world and on science. :D

And I've run into many different worldviews among scientists. Philosophy is only sometimes a shared interest and usually I don't get the time to talk it because we're talking science(also, I don't broach it).

What are you thinking here? — Tom Storm

History is my go-to example because it is academic, it's about the world, and people generally believe that historical events are also real: we may disagree on the causes of World War 2, but that there were causes of World War 2 is a frequent belief.

History is about the real world, and yet produces knowledge. And History does not follow the methods or presuppositions of Science. Ergo, there's more to knowledge than science even in the highly constrained world of academia.

But also I like to note that almost all of our beliefs are formed by non-scientific means. Science's stringency is such that even if we're committed to science as the best and only we can't possibly fulfill that in our day-to-day life, and this kind of knowledge is still knowledge. I know that my wife will want me to do such and such not because I've done studies but because we have a relationship in which we communicate.

In some ways this personal knowledge is "higher" than scientific knowledge: Newton's Laws were true, but my marriage is preserved because I do what I need to do to keep it that way.

What would count as a different kind of truth? — Tom Storm

Philosophy! :D

At least I tend to think so. It's hard to characterize just what is learned by studying philosophy, but I can see that people who do are more able at thinking. It's not that they will not fall for traps but they'll be somewhat aware of possible traps and be open to error more than people who do not.

But art is another good example here I think. I think art explores the human condition and seeks Truth over decoration, at least at times.

Then there's the knowledge of the trades I think of: knowing the different types of switches you can install into a control panel is about reality but it's not really a scientific knowledge and it's not only know-that. It's technical knowledge. Plumbing, machining, electrical work seem to fit here as genuine kinds of truth that are even about the world but they're not doing the science thing.

But it is a metaphysical presupposition. There are others, like causation and the idea that the world is ordered. And pragmatically this works for us ( for the most part). — Tom Storm

I want to say that intelligibility, causation, and the idea of an ordered world can be metaphysical presuppositions, but I don't believe they must be a part of science as a whole.

We could interpret "causation" as "patterns of events" and make events ontologically primary to the logical category of causation -- i.e. here causation wouldn't be a metaphysical presupposition but an epistemic collective necessity where one is reporting events but not committed to metaphysical causation actually existing.

This is what a basic anti-realism of science looks like: there are constraints of method, but these are not metaphysical presuppositions.

Is Dawkins? Many would say so. And yet he writes with vitality about the centrality of art, poetry and music in his life. I think perhaps scientistic tendencies begin with the idea that we apprehend reality and it can be described in full and that science is the only pathway to truth about subjects that matter ( eg, consciousness) Or something like that. How do you see scientism? — Tom Storm

Dawkins fits, by my lights. I'd differentiate myself here in saying that I'm not just saying that philosophy is important while science is the best method for discovering causal reality, or something along those lines. I genuinely believe there's more to knowledge than science. Even philosophy counts here -- it's just seeking a different kind of truth than science seeks, by my lights, and due to the practices of science being made relatively free of metaphysical commitments (at least, necessary metaphysical commitments), which is evidenced by the wide interpretations of science even by scientific practitioners (i.e. a naturalist vs. an idealist, say) while the practice continues to be successful.

Making any kind of sense?

For me what remains interesting is that science is built upon philosophical axioms ( e.g., reality can be understood) and how strongly these are believed depends on how scientistic we are or whether we are metaphysical or methodological naturalists. — Tom Storm

Is science built upon philosophical axioms? Is "Reality can be understood" an axiomatic belief?

My thought is that scientism is the belief that science can resolve philosophical questions or that it has priority in all matter of things regarding reality, ethics, and knowledge. I'd say this is a philosophical belief, though, and not a scientific axiom. I don't think that methodological naturalism is necessary for the sciences, even -- one who believes that the universe is intelligibly structured due to our inability to understand intentionality can still do science with or without that commitment.

Much of my insistence on dividing philosophy from science is that I think both are valuable and different from one another, and I think a multitude of philosophical beliefs which conflict can contribute towards scientific practice: it doesn't matter if we believe we're describing random patterns or nature's structures or the results of a deeper intelligibility which structures reality what matters is that we're able to do science together through a shared practice.

I say "not even methodological naturalism" is necessary because of the different metaphysical frames we can interpret scientific evidence in, and it seems that the practice has evolved to a point that it's somewhat independent of metaphysical beliefs. Rather than necessary preconditions or necessary philosophical presumptions there's a multiplicity of possibles.

And I'd say I'm not committed to positivism or scientism with this because I don't believe science is the end-all-be-all on reality. There's history. There's personal experience. There's art. There are all kinds of ways of knowing reality that aren't bounded by scientific practice or inference.

But perhaps you’re saying that’s not how you see yourself in relation to a claim like: ‘science is what we arrive at when philosophy has been successful and weeded out all the dead ends.' — Tom Storm

Yes.

I'd put it that science shares a genealogy from philosophy, but has become something a bit different than what philosophy has pursued in doing metaphysics. The interests are the same along with various commitments to reason. I don't see philosophy as a dead end at all but as a fruitful activity that will always be around, but I can see how we do science now relates to philosophical influence, and how science has gradually become independent from philosophy -- at least as a discipline (i think philosophy of science is a thing and interesting and worth investigating too).

I think this a position often held by positivists. Russell makes similar points about philosophy: — Tom Storm

I'd like to differentiate myself from positivists in some way.

Some people hold a view that philosophy is merely speculative, whereas science deals with reality - no doubt there are hard and soft version of this. — Tom Storm

I wouldn't put it like that.

To use Srap's story -- it's not like the grandparents cease to visit in or have influence.

The sciences are philosophy's greatest achievement. — Srap Tasmaner

I've enjoyed your contributions to this thread.

Does this then mean that philosophy actually has evidence that it "does" something?! :D

I never thought about science like this but I like it.

If one has already moved beyond billiard-ball mechanism, then Hart's argument will seem overwrought. — Esse Quam Videri

That helps put him in perspective for me.

The remaining question (and I think it’s the one you’re gesturing at) is whether a non-mechanistic naturalism is stable as a metaphysics, or whether it either collapses into deflationary quietism or else starts to look like a cousin of the older metaphysical traditions—just with different vocabulary. — Esse Quam Videri

Both/and here as well. I say that naturalism is my prejudice, though, because I don't believe that it's an object of knowledge. It's a frame which makes sense of making sense. And we really only come to believe these things through a shared experience with others.

Which is why I was questioning the place of metaphysics as if it were an object of knowledge or explanation in the first place: naturalism isn't a theory that explains how we come to know the world, and neither is NeoPlatonism, from my perspective, but these are the myths which help us to make collective sense at all. It's more of a choice than something which is simply true or false. It's mythopoetic Truth which metaphysics pursues, and both kinds of metaphysics are good to know. (or pass over in quietude if one doesn't feel the metaphysical need, or has come to see that it's not strictly satisfiable in terms of criteria of knowledge)

Reality is still there, though. I just believe that our stories do not capture it, lay it out, place light upon the subject, mimic the forms, or so on. They're for-us more than in-itself.

The interesting question is whether those generous naturalisms are still naturalism in any meaningful sense, or whether they've quietly conceded the ground Hart is fighting over. If one's naturalism includes irreducible intentionality, real directedness toward ends, and the genuine ontological priority of meaning over mechanism — at what point has one just become a fellow traveler with Hart who prefers different vocabulary? That's not intended as a "gotcha" — just an interesting question about where the boundaries of the dispute actually lie. — Esse Quam Videri

That's a fair question.

To summarize: I think Hart's challenge is serious. I'm sympathetic to the claim that intentionality and normativity are irreducible, but I'm less convinced that irreducibility forces you all the way to Plotinus or even to classical theism, rather than to a richer-than-mechanistic view of nature. Hart's argument doesn't force you to become a theist — but it does force you to decide whether you really believe that nature is exhausted by efficient causation. — Esse Quam Videri

I think I've thought "no" to this question so long, while being sympathetic to naturalism and pondering it, that I find the argument hard to process.

Billiard-Ball causation, I thought, has long been left behind -- insofar that this is the only target of his criticism then, yes, I'm a fellow traveller. But I suspect that I'm not at the same time.

Sartre comes to mind to me as a counter-part to Heidegger. Rather than a misreading I think of him as a materialist reading of Heidegger: and in those terms that consciousness is nothingness seems to fit a post-critical materialism (that would at least be on par with an updated NeoPlatonism or Neo-Aristotelianism).

I think this seems to be a good summary of the matter along with the tension for naturalists. — Tom Storm

Heh, thanks. I suppose I can't help myself but to be critical because it's a question I've often wondered about this sort of argument. I tend to skew skeptical with respect to metaphysics while claiming my prejudices are naturalistic, of a sort, so it's just where I come from.

Or do you hold to the idea that pudding just resulted from a random combination of ingredients in just the right way. — kindred

Something along those lines though I don't want to put the onus on "ingredients" as if there's a material world with powers invested in it and these powers manifest due to particular combinations of atoms. That strikes me as being too close to an essence which matter possesses. It does appear to me that life is not like a watch, though. The evidence thus far indicates that most life dies out and the lucky winners -- if they are in fact lucky and not miserable -- are selected by environmental pressures beyond our abilities.

So rather than looking at nature as if it has powers or structures or even causes I see it as absurd, uncaring, and without intrinsic meaning. We draw patterns on the arising chaos because we are the meaning-makers of this environment. By finding patterns our species has gone into overshoot -- so we are soon to see if this capacity for creating meaning will, in fact, be as advantageous to our evolutionary future as we tend to believe or if it will be our downfall.

If you were to discover a watch on a sandy beach would you not assume that watch had a watchmaker? In fact it’s easier to accept a watchmaker rather than the watch being assembled on its own. — kindred

I think once you start getting down into the details of life it becomes difficult to believe species were "designed" for anything at all. There are absurd cruelties all throughout nature which explain why we see the diversity of life that we do.

Where is it most vulnerable? Probably around P3 and P6. A naturalist will say: the “end” that organizes present action is just a neural representation — a predictive model of a future state that causally shapes present behavior. — Esse Quam Videri

For me I found myself saying "But..." at his depictions of naturalism. I find phenomenology -- even participatory metaphysics -- as compatible with a kind of naturalism. A naturalist doesn't need to believe in the singular present moment as the only existing physical reality, and the mechanistic picture is more of a reductive move than a naturalists move.

My thought where he says "this is impossible" is to ask "Why's that?" -- in some sense, if we're good naturalists, we'd say we may not know how something arises and so need not "sit on both sides" to point to a limitation. Rather that seems to me that Hart believes reality is intrinsically structured with intelligibility and it's a rather handy explanation for a problem he sees in naturalism.

I agree with your rendition that he's using Heidegger as a sort of continuum between Neoplatonic metaphysics and modern philosophy to attempt to deny the critical turn. But then I'm critical of Heidegger too so I wouldn't say modern philosophy stops at Heidegger. :D

Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up: — Tom Storm

Heh thanks. I didn't know and mostly was just worried that I went out into left field too much.

I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject. — Tom Storm

Fair point.

I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts.

Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.

Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content. — Tom Storm

Cool. Sorry for starting out critically, then. It was my first instinct and reactive.

I wouldn't put naturalism in terms of mental states and brain states, though I can understand that rendition. I suppose part of me is thinking that it's easy enough to adapt naturalism in different ways such that there is no explanatory gap.

Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument.

I think we’re actually quite close on several points. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree.

But I’m not convinced that this makes explanatory scope, unification, etc. merely “aesthetic.” They look more like epistemic virtues that have proven themselves precisely because reality pushes back: ad hoc theories tend to break under novel testing, while unifying theories tend to be more counterfactually robust. So while we can’t directly compare a theory to “Being,” we can still distinguish better and worse ways of being answerable to constraint. — Esse Quam Videri

Not "merely" aesthetic -- but aesthetic.

Epistemic virtues work well enough for me. I wouldn't draw a hard distinction between ethics and aesthetics here -- especially with respect to intelligibility and naturalism.



What I don't know about is the "that have proven themselves because...."

But then your conclusion I agree with -- we can still distinguish better and worse ways of answering.

On voltage: I agree we invented the concept and the measurement practices, but it seems hard to deny that electrical potential differences existed long before we conceptualized them. That is, the conceptual scheme is constructed, but what it latches onto is not. — Esse Quam Videri

It does seem that way.

Yet we have the example of Ptolemy who surely felt the same. And it's possible that we're in a similar scenario. Perhaps electrical potential, in the future, will turn out to be another phlogiston.

And on your last point: I’m sympathetic to the modesty of “some statements are true,” but I’m not sure we can cash out even that minimal claim without implicitly presupposing that what makes a statement true is not constituted by our norms of justification. Otherwise “true” collapses into “warranted by our best lights,” which reintroduces the very distinction we’ve been debating. — Esse Quam Videri

To get back to how we agree in many ways: I agree that collapsing "true" into "warranted" isn't right.

And actually I find your rendition here much more agreeable: the minimal claim "some statements are true" implicitly presupposes that what makes statements true is not the norms of justification. In some ways this is almost analytic to what we mean by truth (except when we don't, of course ;) )

But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility.

The problem with this formulation is that even for Hart the argument is independent of theism. Hart is quite comfortable to say that his argument does not lead to theism specifically; it merely identifies an inadequacy in physicalism's explanatory power, for reasons that wafarer has often pointed out (and he is not a theist either). Thomas Nagel holds a similar view and he is an atheist. — Tom Storm

Let me try a different formulation then.

The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists.

The naturalist is content with it being a capacity of our species that was selected for through a chaotic process. When Thomas Nagel talks about consciousness as a metaphysical problem for naturalism the naturalist simply shrugs. I'm criticizing the persuasive power of the argument. Hart can make a conceptual division, and of course the argument can be rendered independent of theism, but the appeal of the argument will be heavily determined by the beliefs of a listener.

I think it's better to identify the specific reasoning and work out what is actually going on. But the first step is to understand the argument properly, and I’m not convinced that I do. Hence my OP. — Tom Storm

Fair. I'm not convinced I do either, especially as I haven't read Hart -- only the thread.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. They are only similar in that both issues seem to be unresolved, but they are not addressing the same type of question. — Tom Storm

I just mean to say that the way we'd answer either question won't be by abduction -- there's not an inference to the best explanatory route by which we can decide whether naturalism is adequate to explaining intentionality or not.

Even your formulation of the issue isn’t quite right: the question is not 'why the world is intelligible', but how naturalism explains intelligibility. Given that naturalism presents itself as the predominant explanatory framework for all things, the question seems apropos.

Fair.

What do you say to my updated reply I started with?

In my own life (I agree with you) I am content with not having explanations for things, like life or consciousness. My favourite three words are 'I don't know' and I wish more people would employ them. But that's a separate matter to trying to understand this argument. — Tom Storm

Sure.

For my part I'm not sure naturalism "explains" anything anymore than non-naturalism does with respect to intentionality. I feel like that's the wrong sort of way to think about metaphysical questions.

But I’m not sure that supports the stronger claim that there’s “no measure” of tracking what is the case better. Even if our access is historically conditioned, we still distinguish theories by explanatory scope, unification, counterfactual robustness, and coherence with independent lines of evidence. — Esse Quam Videri

I'd say there's no measure to reality itself. When we're distinguishing theories with these criteria -- scope, unification, etc. -- we're comparing and contrasting theories to one another on the basis of our aesthetic criteria for knowledge rather than on the basis of Being. Neither has a "more direct" accessibility relationship to reality itself -- in terms of their accessibility relation two theories are on par with one another.

I mean how would you measure your "correctness" to reality? Isn't that just to say "My theory is true, and here are the reasons why"?

it’s just the minimal realist point that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate. — Esse Quam Videri

I agree that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate. I don't know if I'd call that "realist", though -- it's not like Voltage was waiting to be discovered. We have to invent new ways of thinking which in turn lead to productive research paths. Reality unfolds and even changes shape with knowledge-production.

I'd prefer to put it that the realist position is something like "There are true statements": rather than an explanation of Being as an independent category wherein we have potential structures to discover I'd pass over that in silence and prefer to say "Some statements are true", which is much more manageable a claim than claims on Being.

Relating back to @Tom Storm (sorry for going a bit off topic there)

I find this argument lacking because it depends entirely on one's beliefs. If one is a theist then the plausibility of naturalism is simply false, and if one is a naturalist then intelligibility couldn't have come from anything but a blind watchmaker.

It's really only appealing to someone who already believes the conclusion.

But some things aren't in need of an explanation. "Why is the world intelligible?" may not have an answer at all. It's something like asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if there be an answer it won't be of the sort which we abduce. Intelligibility is the mystery which philosophy reflects upon, and all the metaphysical stories we tell about it aren't strictly explanations or descriptions but rather frames for us to be able to say "this is intelligible" in the first place -- frames which I think comes from cooperating with others.

So when in Rome the world is intelligible due to Apollo. And when we're now the world is intelligible because it arose out of a chaotic process of natural selection. But in either case the world is intelligible and intelligibility somehow is "beyond" these stories, or grounds these stories in the first place.

But the reason we call the geocentric framing “oblivious” rather than merely “a different discourse” is precisely that it failed to track what was actually the case — Esse Quam Videri

This is where things are a bit tricky I think. It's not so much that it failed to track what was actually the case but that a different way of looking at the world was developed such that we could describe what was previously certain as oblivious. Here "affordance" helps, I think -- it's not so much that Ptolemy did not describe what-is-the-case. Like I said his predictions were actually better than Galileo's, in that time. Rather Being is such that it affords both a Ptolemaic and Copernican description.

We can say it as oblivious, now, because we've now journeyed outside of Earth and taken pictures. But Galileo and the rest had no such benefit. It's only now, in light of our techonlogical ability, that the picture seems quaint and so it's easy to think Copernicus, et al., were superior because they laid out what-is-the-case better and reality broke the Ptolemaic model.

But in fact science only changes with new generations -- the new model was interesting, lead to new avenues of research, conflicted with orthodox opinion and so was attractive.

It happens to be the case, now, that the Earth is not the center of the universe. But it's not like I have a time machine to go back to then where I can send a rocket into the sky to make sure the Earth was, then, not the center of the universe. We'd predict that it was not, but that's not because we're tracking what-is-the-case better -- at least, there is no measure of such a thing, even if we believe that we have more truth now than they had then regarding astronomy.

This what-is-the-case then becomes something like a thing-in-itself.

I think your last paragraph is exactly right: warrant concerns justification, whereas truth concerns what is the case. I’m completely on board with that distinction. — Esse Quam Videri

:up: Cheers.

I'm less sure about the suggestion that we’re only ever “talking about how we talk about” rather than referring to the thing itself. I agree that our interests determine which aspect of reality we’re talking about (we always carve out a facet, an affordance, a temporal slice, etc.). But that selectivity doesn’t seem to imply (on its own) that truth is merely an intra-discursive status rather than a genuine answerability to what is. — Esse Quam Videri

I want to note that I only meant that we're talking about how we talk about when we're talking about metaphysics, epistemology, science, and so forth -- we can certainly talk about more than our words.

Does that untangle some thoughts, or make things more confusing?

In fact, the possibility you mention — that a community can satisfy its own norms while being oblivious to something outside those norms — seems to presuppose precisely the asymmetry I’m pointing to: that what is warranted-for-us can fail to coincide with what is actually the case. If “truth” isn’t ultimately a constraint beyond our practices, in what sense is the community oblivious rather than simply operating within a different discourse? — Esse Quam Videri

"both/and" is my guess here, at least in the abstract.

They're both oblivious and operating within a different discourse -- suppose the many years of Ptolemaic astronomy.

They said true things, of course. Their predictions were better than Galileo's.

Yet to describe the universe as if the earth is the center of it is oblivious.

I think it’s magnificent either way divine intervention or completely naturalistic — kindred

Oh, yes. Definitely. I love science because of this magnificence.

Despite the Uray abiogenesis experiment there are so many leaps going from amino acids to rna replication to dna etc that it would be like winning the lottery multiple times in a row and I don’t think this was pure chance alone but some helping hand to get things started then let evolution do its thing. — kindred

I'm of the opposite opinion. I'm sure you're surprised ;)

Yes, it is like winning the lottery multiple times in a row. That's improbable and possible. And such is life from my perspective -- though there is a physics theory I've run across that tries to demonstrate that life is inevitable (even if it's rare).

Given an infinite universe the unbelievably unlikely will happen at least one time, though. (and if it's truly infinite, it will happen an infinite number of times)

If we collapse the normative distinction between warrant and truth, mustn't we relinquish the possibility of an entire community being wrong, even while fully satisfying its own norms of justification? — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think so.

This is the co-constitution going on, I think. Yes, we're talking about something. That's what talking often is. And we can satisfy our own norms while being oblivious to something outside of those norms.

I didn't collapse the distinction between warrant and truth -- I don't think there's even a distinction to be had there except that they are different things**. With both we're definitely talking about how we talk about, though, rather than referring to thing itself.

But what it is we are talking about in the first place is decided by our interest -- so it's not so much Being that we're talking about but a facet, an affordance, a temporal part that may never be again.

**"warrant" I associate with justification. "truth" I associate with statements -- i.e. a statement of the proper form is either true or false.

So a statement is about what is, and a justification is about why I believe something is.

Thoughts? — Esse Quam Videri

My thought is we do both, and more.

There is sometimes an asymmetry -- but I'd put it that this is when we're approaching a collective practice. The asymmetry comes from how many people of importance would say what, and that asymmetry can be on either side of this (from the perspective of Being) merely conceptual divide.

I see this problem as related to the question of where did everything come from. Big bang would say the naturalist without speculating any further of what existed before time and space and though there are scientific theories they cannot be proven ( such as cyclical universe, multiverse etc) — kindred

A bit. Though I ought note that scientists have already ventured beyond "the big bang" in terms of physics and such.

Scientists don't stop.

The theist would say something along the lines of god was before time and space alpha and omega etc. and it was the cause of the universe, prime mover etc.

Not sure what the naturalist would make of the prime mover argument.

The naturalist, in terms of people who believe in a prime mover, more or less assigns "prime mover" status to nature itself: rather than an intentional, intelligent cause with a reason for existence we arose out of a chaotic, blind process which we just happen to get to be a part of, and whatever that is that's nature.

I'm curious: how would you cash out the distinction between "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" if the norms of correction are understood as entirely internal to practice? — Esse Quam Videri

My thought here is that I jumped in when you were on board with the general phenomenological thrust of things: to use an idea from @fdrake "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" are mutually determinative of one another -- you don't get one without the other, they mutually constitute one another as a contrast, that sort of thing.

So the norms of correction are either neither internal/external or both/and external/internal. Which in turn would mean that we can't sneak in an "well, ultimately it's being" or "well, ultimately it's us"

they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure that they are. Though...

Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't think that follows, either.

Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements?

If there were no laws to dictate how atoms behave what would there be ? Nothing I assume, well at least no matter but I’m no physicist. — kindred

I think this gets an understanding of scientific laws backwards: it isn't that there are laws to which we are approximating but rather we crave certainty and so law-like structures are appealing to us so we set out to find the law-like patterns that have arisen out of the chaos.

But they do not necessarily have to be this way, and we could in fact have them wrong. They aren't laws of the universe which particles must obey, but regularities we've observed so far which could turn out to be wrong.

Why would there be a fundamental forces of nature such as these in the universe in the first place ? Again this to me seems to point towards divinity. — kindred

Does there need to be an explanation? Doesn't explantion eventually reach a terminus?

I'd put it that the theist is satisfied with the logical terminus of God, and the naturalist is satisfied with the logical terminus of nature.

But both are consistent with the science so science doesn't really rule one way or the other.

What is wrong with believing in god or god and science ? — kindred

Nothing.

At least insofar that we recognize that this isn't where the science leads one, but is rather something we bring to the science.

Just boom, voila life seems a bit … well unbelievable to happen. And without any divinity it would be a magnificent deed indeed for life to emerge unaided. With divinity as explanatory power then not so much. — kindred

Sure it's unbelievable, on its face. Why else would it take so much effort to demonstrate, and even after such demonstrations people's beliefs often persist?

It seems like it's designed. But I think this appearance is deceiving, and somewhat cherry-picked. If we look at the totality of all the universe we see that life does, in fact, seem rare. If abiogensis is unlikely we'd predict to see a universe devoid of life, and that's what most of the universe is: without life.

Perhaps I’m trying to prove God here and to me the emergence of life from non life seems to be an appealing argument.

It's definitely appealing. Kant ranked it as the most natural argument for the existence of God.

But just like incredulity is not a reason to draw an inference an argument can be appealing and yet lead one to believe something false.

One thing that the science does not do, however, is rule out a creator. It just has no need of one because we can synthesize the molecules of life in a lab so it doesn't seem to add anything to the explanation when chemistry will do to explain how the molecules of life formed.

Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense. — Esse Quam Videri

I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.

Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world.

Abiogenesis is not an exact science and scientists have been unable to replicate the emergence of life from non life but that is not to say that it will not happen someday. This means that we’re left with naturalistic explanations that life did somehow emerge from non life through natural hit and miss chance or that there was a divine spark that set things in motion to begin with. For now the case remains wide open due to science having no answers yet in terms of replicating the jump of life from non life. — kindred

Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_experiment ?

I just find it improbable that life could emerge on its own without some sort of divine push to get things started…what is your take on this ? — kindred

Your implausibility is based upon:

As in the emergence or jump from inanimate matter to living things (abiogenesis) could not happen by chance alone. But then we’re inevitably drawn into the argument of probability to which I’d say that the complexity of life’s building blocks such as DNA and RNA is astronomically high. — kindred

Implying that complexity cannot be the result of physical processes without at least a divine spark or push to give what does not have life some sort of complexity-forming ability that it did not previously have.

This reminds me of the argument for intelligent design due to specified complexity. Here's a philosophy now article going over it., but it's different from what you're arguing though related (just a resource to think through your question).



What I think: Incredulity isn't a reason to accept a premise or reject a premise. At one point that there are irrational numbers was thought incredulous, yet it's been demonstrated that there are such numbers. Much of our discoveries were thought unbelievable -- until demonstrated that they had to be believed due to such and such evidence or argument.

Also, complexity isn't something unique to life. Computers are complicated, and inanimate. Cars are complicated and inanimate. M. C. Escher drawings are complicated and yet only drawings. The path a river follows is complicated, and the result of natural forces.

So it seems to me that complexity does not explain the "jump", or difference, between life and not-life.


Of course the creationist will point to the order of a river and human creation as ultimately deriving from the structure God imbues in creation.

The naturlaist will say: But it is, indeed, possible for order to arise out of meaningless chaos. Just look at evolution!

I'm finding your pre-Kant, Kant, post-Kant descriptions spot on and very clear and concise. Nice.

Nice.

Today I did a fast read from Disempowerment of the Subject to No-Man's Land. I feel like I understand his argument a bit better now and want to put it in my own terms to think through:

Heidegger makes Being into the thing-in-itself even more undefined than even Kant: being is being is being is being and not circumscribed by the categories. Adorno claims that Husserl stays just on the side of rationalism, but Heidegger brings phenomenology into a romantic (while protesting this description) relationship with ideas.

The general thrust I get from Adorno on Heidegger: He is one who became what phenomenology set out to be against. In transcending the categories, he turns the pursuit of being into a mystical quest which is so beyond definition, judgment, reason, and so forth, that its attempts at reaching "the things themselves" makes "being" even more obscure than the ding an sich.

EDIT: To continue the thought-- Husserl wanted to overcome epistemology by returning to the things themselves. Heidegger takes up that mantle and establishes a sort of priesthood of Being. One must list their begats to demonstrate they have the authentic understanding of Heidegger.

Adorno has an interesting claim about Heidegger that I don't understand going on here, that he claims to be beyond metaphysics while obviously doing metaphysics. I'm wondering if this is a jab at the ontic/ontological distinction? Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding Adorno's description too. The relationship between Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger he describes is terse and basically assuming lots of knowledge on the part of the reader which, while I've read lots of these texts, still causes confusion on my part while reading.

A phenomenological space is all possible variations in a single experiential quality, not in a single experience.

That being said, the "overall experience" you refer to can be understood as a phenomenological space whose components are all of the experiential qualities making up that space.

So, in your video example: vision is one space, sound is another. The "overall experience" exists in a phenomenal space with vision and sound as axes. Those two spaces can, in turn, be analyzed into more basic axes. — Pneumenon

M'kay. I think I'm tracking well enough: "overall experience" is the synthesis of experiential qualities into a whole.

Would the experiential axes all relate to the senses, or are there others? (EDIT: or is that exactly all you're asking for? references? if so sorry I was just thinking out loud)

Ethics are taught in family and society. — Copernicus

If we agree that just because the majority says something doesn't make it right (in most cases, which can be mobocracy), why have we codified societal rulings on ethics and morals in our lives? — Copernicus

Because it was good enough for Moses and it was Good enough for Paw Paw so it's good enough for me.

Moral codes aren't really agreed upon as much as enforced. The insight of Freud is that we have a prohibition against incest because our id's desire is to have sex with our mother or father: extending this we should look at moral codes as signifiers of human desire. We prohibit these things because we are horrified by the desire people have. It's a sense of disgust which justifies punishing even your children harshly. (and most certainly the adults who know better)

When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is ritual.
Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos. — Tao te Ching 38

:up:

8. Although Hegel claims to derive the non-identical from the identical he never gives an accounting such that the question is simply answered in his greater Logic. Rather the answers are implied through the manner of setting out the question.

I've tried retyping this one out and I'm still scratching my head to give it this closer rendition I'm attempting:
While he sharpened the critique of analytical judgement to the thesis of
its “falsehood”, everything is an analytical judgement for him, the
turning to and fro of the thought without the citation of anything
extraneous to it. That the new and the different would be the old and
familiar, is a moment of dialectics. So evident its context with the
identity-thesis, so little is it circumscribed by this

But the rest: As our philosophical thoughts yield more to experience the philosophical thought becomes closer to an analytic judgment. Becoming aware of a part of cognition is itself cognition: the subject prepetually producing judgments as the Idealist mind perpetually created existence. But by relying upon experience, these close-to-analytic judgments, we let go of the absolute that the new ontologists and positivists have given chase to in their rejection of (and eventual inevitable return to) Hegel.



Honestly still scratching my head on paragraph 8 now, but wanted to revisit this and give it a more proper attempt. — Moliere

Revisited this section today after reading Adorno: A Very Short Introduction. Thanks @Banno.

I think the paragraph is speaking about Hegel in particular, actually, and not the new philosophers that he addresses later(and earlier). Hegel comes close to the non-identical like Adorno wants to, but does so in a manner where the new is the old. But instead of this method of Idealistic proof of the union of subject with object Adorno wants to address the ontological need through the style of a pregnant question which contains its answer or begins the journey towards its answer in a non-scientific (i.e. the question isn't meant to be dissolved by the answer) manner. But this means that philosophy is giving up on proof and positive knowledge of the absolute.



That I feel good about, now. Onto Disempowerment of the Subject.