If everyone has "their truth," then we have no truth at all. We're left with competing narratives where facts become irrelevant, and power becomes the only arbiter of whose "truth" prevails. It makes actual investigation, evidence, and reasoned debate impossible. You see this a lot, especially from the radical left, but it's everywhere. — Sam26

Wouldnt Wittgenstein treat the phrase ‘my truth’ as staking out a position within a language game? Rather than treating “truth” as a concept with a fixed essence and then indicting “my truth” as a conceptual corruption that smuggles subjectivity into a domain where it doesnt belong, wouldn't he investigate how the phrase “my truth” is actually being used, in what situations it appears, what work it does, and how it functions within particular language-games?

The danger for Wittgenstein of the use of ‘my truth’ is not that “facts become irrelevant,” but that we may lose clarity about what kind of claim is being made and therefore about what sort of response is called for. By contrast, you seem to assume that the philosophical task is to police language against misuse by appeal to hidden semantic rules about what words really mean, as though Wittgenstein thinks there is some kind of ontological essence to the word truth that must be protected from subjective distortion.

I thought he was addressing the analytics. He had grown discontent towards this movement. — L'éléphant

He was also talking to those he was more positively inclined toward, such as Kierkegaard and James.

run it through A.I. to highlight the vantage from which each group critiques a previous group
— Joshs

You're on a roll tonight. — Srap Tasmaner

What does your list look like?

↪Joshs Points, though, for the most-to-least advanced list. That gave me a chuckle. — Srap Tasmaner

Chuckles are more useful if I know what you’re chuckling about. Pay careful attention to the family resemblances within each cluster, then run it through A.I. to highlight the vantage from which each group critiques a previous group.

Read Schopoenhauer, then read the Tractatus. It will become obvious that he's talking directly to Schop. — frank

Who is he talking to in the Philosophical Investigations?

Wittgenstein turns away from certain old ways of doing philosophy, and he seems to point—so tantalizingly!—toward a destination he never really gets near. It's why he is undeniably vague, inconclusive, difficult to interpret, why he goes over the same issues in subtly different ways for years on end. Having cut loose from the mainland of existing philosophy, he was at sea, and never made landfall. Heroic, in his own way, but tragic.

Pretty sure I'm the only one around here who thinks this. — Srap Tasmaner

My question is what you think about Kant, Hegel, Schelling, hermeneutics, phenomenology, enactivism and post-structuralism, because you won’t be able to do much with Wittgenstein without an adequate background in those areas. If David Lewis represents the cutting edge of your thinking then it doesnt look promising. Lewis belongs to a Humean tradition within philosophy. I tend to take a subsuming developmental view of the history of philosophy, and I like to make lists. So here’s my subjective list of philosophers ranked according to a developmental order, with the least advanced on the bottom and the most advanced on the top. Make of it what you will. You’ll notice Lewis and Wittgenstein are light years apart.


Wittgenstein
Gendlin
Joseph Rouse
Karen Barad
Nancy
Merleau-Ponty
De Jaegher
Varela
Gallagher
Thompson
Ratcliffe
Scharff
Donna Haraway
John Shotter
T. Fuchs
Slaby
Zahavi
Alva Noe
Colombetti
Vicky Kirby
Henry
Rorty
Gergen
Feyerabend
Gadamer
Bitbol
Kuhn
Dilthey
Lyotard

Bataille
Connolly
Massumi
Stiegler
Protevi
Zizek
Laclau
Butler
Lacan
Fanon

Sartre
Levinas
Braver
Caputo
Dewey
William James
Charles Taylor
Hannah Arendt
Kierkegaard
Alisdair McIntyre
Piaget
Vervaeke
Delanda
Stuart Kauffman
Adorno
Badiou
Schopenhauer
Byung-Chul Han
Whitehead
Schelling
Peirce
Dreyfus
Terrence Deacon
Althusser
Marx
Hegel

Habermas
McDowell
Ian Hacking
Chalmers
Nagel
P.F. Strawson
Freud
Kant

Darwin
Popper
Dennett
Jesse Prinz
Metzinger
Damasio
Hutto
Mark L Johnson
Lakoff
Andy Clark
Tegmark
Kastrup
Smolin
Searle
David Lewis
Hume

Wittgenstein isn’t mainly explaining “how we understand each other,” and he isn’t doing an inside to outside story from public talk to private thought. He’s doing grammar, how our words for feeling, meaning, and understanding actually function, what counts as correct use, and what pictures mislead us. And while some phenomenologists do emphasize embodied, world-involving experience, that doesn’t capture Wittgenstein’s point. He doesn’t need to say feelings are “world-directed engagements” to reject the inner data picture, his point is that inner feelings aren’t private objects that fix meaning. — Sam26

The relationship between Wittgenstein and phenomenology isn’t one-way, as though his grammatical approach is a corrective to their methods. Phenomenology of perception deals with aspects of experience Wittgenstein fails to address, pre-linguistic embodied sense-making. Both Wittgenstein and phenomenologists reject the inner data picture, but from different vantages and within different contexts.

Without inner feelings there would be no Form of Life. There would be no social activities such as playing football, no cultural events such as going to the theatre, no language game, no financial systems, no production, distribution and trade of goods and services, no Philosophy Forum.

As our Form of Life would literally not exist without our inner feelings, in this sense, it seems that the ultimate foundation can only be “inner feelings”. — RussellA

Wittgenstein’s focus was on how we understand each other through language , and how we then use that language when we are alone with our thoughts. Phenomenologists focus on how perception is felt bodily. For both Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists, feelings are not inner data but world-directed engagements.

↪Joshs Nice. I don’t think the world in general has caught up to any of this. How long will it take? — Tom Storm

There are promising signs that mainstream neuropsychological approaches are starting to nibble at the edges of phenomenology. The popular free-energy predictive processing branch of neuroscience used to ignore phenomenology-influenced embodied enactive approaches , but lately there has been a rapprochement between the two camps.

But a problem with "naturalism" is that it’s so vague that you can smuggle a lot into it. I think the explanatory gap for intentionality applies to both naturalism and physicalism, because both seem to share the central assumption that everything, including mental states can be explained in terms of physical processes or natural laws. — Tom Storm

The critique of naturalism emanating from phenomenology is, as has been mentioned, quite different from Hart’s objections to it. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argues that empirical accounts of perception succumb to the myth of the given. At the core of the myth of the given is not just the idea of “raw sense data,” but the deeper assumption that perception begins with something already fully determinate, such as neural signals, stimulus features and information, that is then processed or interpreted. Many neurological models describe perception as the transformation of incoming signals into representations: edges, contrasts, motion vectors, object files, predictive hypotheses, and so on.

The “input” to the system is treated as if it were already a perceptual unit, already individuated as visual information, when in lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. What the neuroscientist calls “input” is itself a reconstruction abstracted from an already meaningful encounter with the world. The retina does not receive “edges” or “features”; it is we who later describe neural activity as if it were encoding them. The world is perceived in terms of what it affords, not as a neutral array of data awaiting interpretation. No amount of neural description can recover this level, because it presupposes it.

First, if someone says, “I am in xyz” and there’s no shared life around xyz, no training, no examples, no circumstances where we’d say, “this is when you use that word,” then yes, it’s meaningless. But that’s not because nothing inner matters. It’s because there are no criteria for the word’s — Sam26

But is this absence of criteria for a word ever a thing for Wittgenstein except when we look for causes and explanations? Are criteria a precondition that must be in place before meaningful use can occur, as though criteria were a kind of background rulebook we consult? Do criteria hover behind use, or are they articulated and stabilized in and through use itself? Is there a moment when we first check whether criteria exist and then allow the word to mean something?

Is the mistake the Islanders made that they mistook criteria for causes, or does the mistake lies in assuming that what needs explaining is why the practice works at all, as if intelligibility itself required a causal foundation? Do inner states and causes have meaning once we see how they are governed by criteria, or is Wittgenstein trying to show us that pursuing inner causes’ , even when preceded by establishing criteria, leaves meaning behind?

If a person said “I am in xyz” and did nothing, the word “xyz” would be meaningless to any observer of that person. In practice, the word only has a use within a language game if that word “xyz” refers to what they objectively do, not what they are subjectively thinking.

However, there is a danger in Wittgenstein's practical approach which dismisses any attempt at a deeper philosophical understanding. It could be called “Cargo Cult Thinking”, where an observed behaviour is imitated rather than trying to make any attempt to understand the cause of such behaviour, difficult that might — RussellA

You’re interpreting what Wittgenstein is doing as a behaviorist reduction, which treats outward regularities as suffficient and ignores inner causes. You’re assuming that unless we can point to a hidden causal mechanism behind language use, we’ve settled for a shallow imitation of understanding. But Wittgenstein rejects both the idea of hidden causes and behaviorism.
For Wittgenstein, ‘Xyz” doesn’t refer to a behavior, and it doesn’t refer to a cause. The intelligibility of “xyz” as a mood, a stance, a rule, or a commitment doesnt depend on a single episode of observable behavior, but on its place in a web of possible moves: what counts as evidence for being in xyz, what counts as pretending, what counts as withdrawing the claim, what follows from it, what licenses it. Someone can intelligibly say “I am in pain” or “I am in love” while lying motionless, because the grammar of those expressions doesnt require bodily movement.

Analyzing “I am in xyz” at a psychological or neurological level wont tell you what “xyz” means. It presupposes that you already grasp the concept. A brain scan might explain why someone reports pain, but it doesnt teach you what pain is, or how the word “pain” functions in our lives. To think otherwise is to confuse an explanation within a practice with an explanation of the practice.

For me, it's not about arguing for system-closure, or for some Archimedean stand-point outside of inquiry. It's about acknowledging that reason can come to understand the conditions of its own operation, and that to do so is itself a rational achievement. — Esse Quam Videri

I suspect that what’s at stake here is, at least in relation to Wittgenstein, is to what extent we treat understanding and reason in terms of adequation and conformity vs creation, enaction and becoming.

I don’t buy your reading of Wittgenstein. It takes his rule following comments and turns them into a kind of norm skepticism, as if Witt were saying there are no binding standards in a practice, only “creative re establishment” in each use case. That’s not what he’s doing.

Wittgenstein’s point isn’t that practices don't have any authority to correct us. His point is that the authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance. It comes from how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together. If you deny that any regularities or shared expectations can bind, you don’t get a deeper Wittgenstein, you get the complete collapse of rule following, which is precisely the kind of picture Wittgenstein is fighting against. — Sam26

It isnt a skepticism. It avoids skepticism by showing that, as you say, ‘authority doesn’t come from some interpretation behind the rule, like rails laid in advance’. But how we’re trained, how we correct, what counts as getting it right, and how we actually go on together can’t then be conceived as behind us either. It comes from the always novel way in which a history of previous practices, regularities and rule following expectations are made meaningful by being changed by current use. What is actually meant in using a word or following a practice occurs into what is implied and expected. What emerges is neither just the same practice as before nor a different practice, but something more intimately tied to context. Norms continue to be the same differently.

A word works when it can guide what comes next and make sense of responses, challenges, and correction. That requires more than fresh enactment. It requires a stable practice for the notions of success and failure to have application — Sam26

A word always already works as long as we don’t treat it as simply referencing a previous meaning. It doesnt require any theoretical or philosophical help from us , and to think it does is to fall back into the desire for an external grounding that Wittgenstein equated with language going on holiday. We dont impose a stable practice on a neutral terrain that is originally lacking it. We already find ourselves thrown into the midst of stable practices and forms of life.

In the actual language-games where we talk about improving inquiry, “improve” is tied to things like learning, avoiding mistakes, tracking error, increasing reliability, making progress, even if the metric shifts from case to case. If someone uses improve while also insisting that nothing could ever count as settling, correcting, or learning anything, then the word is no longer doing the work it normally does — Sam26

Wittgenstein contrasts situations where words are
doing something with those where language goes on holiday, sits idle, like when we look to consult prior criteria to explain the meaning of current word use. You want to contrast situations where words work normally with those where they no longer do the work they ‘normally do’. Wittgenstein would respond that normativity doesn’t function by reference to any prior categories but is re-established creatively in each use.

We can’t appeal to social regularities or collectively presupposed norms within a practice: there are no such things, and if there were they wouldnt thereby legitimately bind us. Any regularities in what practitioners have previously done does not thereby have any authority to bind subsequent performances to the same regularities. Wittgenstein’s paradoxes about rule following block any institution of norms merely by invocation of a rule, since no rule can specify its correct application to future instances.

Wittgenstein’s contrast between words “doing work” and language “going on holiday” isn’t a contrast between normal uses that conform to prior norms and abnormal uses that violate them. It’s a contrast between use that is embedded in an ongoing practice and use that has been detached from any practical bearings and is now being propped up by abstract criteria. The holiday begins when we stop looking at what people are actually doing with words and start asking what must be in place, in general, for those words to count as meaningful.

That’s why Wittgenstein is so suspicious of appeals to prior criteria. When we try to explain the meaning of a present utterance by consulting a pre-existing standard, like “what ‘improve’ really requires,” “what doubt must presuppose,” “what inquiry needs in order to count as inquiry”, we are no longer describing use; we are trying to ground it. And for Wittgenstein, that grounding move is exactly what causes language to lose its grip.

You want to distinguish situations where words do the work they “normally do” from situations where they no longer do that work. But Wittgenstein would ask: normally by reference to what? If “normal use” is fixed by a prior role that the word must continue to play, such as tracking error, preserving right/wrong, or settling questions, then normativity has already been relocated from practice to an abstract template. The grammar has been reified.

For Wittgenstein, normativity is not preserved by fidelity to an inherited function; it’s re-established in each concrete use. A word works when it finds its place in an activity, when it guides what comes next, when it makes sense of responses, corrections, expectations here. When it stops doing that, we don’t discover that it has violated its essence; we notice that it no longer connects to anything fresh that we are in the midst of enacting.

Language goes on holiday not because it fails to meet the standards it “normally” must meet, but because we are asking it to do something without knowing what would count as success or failure in this fresh, actual case. The holiday consists in treating meaning as something backed by criteria rather than something enacted in use.

Outside of situations where language goes on holiday, we always already find ourselves in situations where our language is characterized by being immersed in normative
usefulness. We don’t have worry about having to do anything special in order to gain purchase of normative meaning. For Wittgenstein, outside of the special, strained cases where language “goes on holiday,” we do not first confront a neutral field of sounds and then somehow add normativity to them. We always already find ourselves inside practices where words are at work, where they guide action, invite correction, elicit agreement or disagreement, and make sense without any special philosophical underwriting. Normative usefulness is not something we have to secure; it is the background against which speaking at all is possible.

Your worry is ‘what if justification, as traditionally understood, leaves out something essential, namely, the practical grasp of standards that makes justification possible at all?’ And your proposed remedy is: make that implicit understanding explicit, so that our epistemology rests on firmer ground. But for Wittgenstein, this is exactly the kind of move that creates philosophical problems rather than resolving them.

The reason is that nothing is missing. There is no gap between justification and the practical grasp of standards that needs to be filled, named, or strengthened. That grasp is not an ingredient inside justification; it is the background condition of our being able to speak of justification at all. Trying to “add” it, even under the banner of explication rather than supplementation, reintroduces the picture that something was absent or unsecured.

I’m not saying, “it never makes sense to ask whether our practices can improve.” I’m saying: improvement talk is meaningful when it still leaves room for correction. But when the improvement proposal is really “nothing can ever settle anything,” then it’s not meaningful, it’s self-defeating. — Sam26

But is this comparable to saying “improvement talk is meaningful when we notice how the word is actually being used in a current context. A word loses its meaning when we move from noticing its use to nailing down its definition as ‘correction’ or ‘self-defeating’”?
From Wittgenstein’s vantage, improvement talk is meaningful when we can see how the word “improve” is actually doing work in a particular practice. That work might involve correction, but it need not be defined in advance as correction. Sometimes “improvement” means greater reliability, sometimes greater elegance, sometimes broader applicability, sometimes simply “this now goes on more smoothly.” What makes it meaningful is not that it satisfies a condition like “leaves room for correction,” but that we can recognize the role it plays in what people are actually doing.

The problem with defining improvement as correction and “nothing can ever settle anything,” as self-defeating is that nailing down the meaning of a word by offering a general criterion for its legitimate use isnt ‘wrong’ or self-defeating. Rather, it freezes a flexible, practice-bound grammar into an empty phrase drained of connection to actual use . It’s like repeating the same word over and over again. until it loses its original context-based sense.

The question “can our justificatory practices be improved?” is not only coherent, it’s exactly what I’m doing when I make standards explicit and introduce guardrails. That’s improvement inside an epistemic practice - refining what counts as evidence, tightening defeater sensitivity, clarifying error-signals. But hinge talk is aimed at a narrower point. It’s about what must remain in place for any practice of error and correction to be intelligible. If someone proposes a redesign that still preserves the possibility of settling anything, fine. But if the proposal is effectively: “treat every check as suspect in principle, and every standard as illegitimate unless justified by a further standard,” then the redesign isn’t more reflective, it removes the very success conditions of epistemic inquiry. That’s not a prohibition. It’s a diagnosis of self-undermining.

So I’m not saying the extra-game question “could we improve this?” is meaningless. I’m saying: some hinges are revisable and are exactly where improvement debates live, while bedrock hinges are what make the debate possible in the first place — Sam26

I agree with the overall direction of your response, but it seems to over-intellectualize in places, explaining where it only needs to describe. Rather than having to decide which questions are “allowed” or “forbidden,” to map hinges once and for all, to discard a bad analogy in favor of the right one, we need only look at how words like reason, doubt, improvement, and justification are actually used in our lives. There is no answer in advance to whether the question “Could our epistemic practices be improved?” is coherent. Sometimes it is coherent, sometimes it is idle, sometimes it is revolutionary, sometimes it is nonsense, and which it is depends entirely on the language-game being played. In actual life, rules are sometimes followed blindly, sometimes revised, sometimes ignored, sometimes negotiated. There is no sharp line between playing a game and redesigning it; there are just different activities with different criteria.

At that point, I think we’ve identified a genuine philosophical fork rather than a confusion: whether rational practice just *is* the empirical game with its hinges, or whether the empirical game is one expression of a broader rational capacity that can also reflect on its own conditions — Esse Quam Videri

I'd love to hear from Sam26 at this point. It's a somewhat complex question and surely one that Wittgensteinians have asked, and perhaps answered, before. I know similar questions have been raised in the context of scientific practice — J

Yes, this is where Sam26 can choose to collapse Wittgenstein’s project into a meta-rational ‘space of reasons’ framework like that offered by John Mcdowell, or show such a move to amount to a grammatical confusion from Wittgenstein’s vantage.

Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside. — Wayfarer

Yes, what is structurally necessary can only be revealed
though acts, because this ground is itself the temporality of action. It is what returns to itself again and again identically through repetition; namely, the horizontal structure of time consciousness.

As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.

This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.) — Wayfarer

The specter of platonism isn’t vanquished simply by denying number the status of object. The question is whether mathematical truths are true independently of any constituting act whatsoever. The question isnt whether idealities are “independent of your or my mind”, its whether they are independent of intentionality as such. Husserl’s answer is no. They are an effect of the projective noetic gesture of intentional synthesis.

“The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

For Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory because forms are grounded in esse, ultimately in divine intellect. Participation presupposes a metaphysics of being in which intelligibility is ontologically prior to cognition, even if not objectified as a “thing.” Husserl, by contrast, explicitly suspends any such metaphysical grounding. His idealities are constituted within intentional life without appeal to being-as-such. One cannot simply slide from Husserl to Aquinas by appealing to “anti-reification” without confronting that Husserl rejects exactly the metaphysical realism Aquinas presupposes.

For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. Intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality independently of those conditions.

Joshs Yes, I knew people like this in the late 1970s (I was a kid). They were Christian socialists who located their ideas in teh pre-enlightenment period. There are folk like these left in the Catholic Church in Melbourne where I live. They dislike Rome and find the conservative tradition of the church today to be anathema.

Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive? — Tom Storm

I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:


Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.

↪Joshs Possibly. I think he takes the Gospels as a proto-radical Marxism. — Tom Storm

I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.

Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.

So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.

Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.

Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostolgia). He can be quite a bitch — Tom Storm

Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.

There is a post-critical position that preserves what is valuable in the classical tradition—the claim that intelligibility belongs to reality itself—without lapsing into naïve realism or reducing intelligibility to historically contingent sense-making practices.

So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:

What must reality be like for beings like us to be normatively bound by truth, necessity, and correctness at all?

Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments. — Esse Quam Videri

Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position?

If Schelling , then the gap between Schelling and Hart should be mentioned. From a post-Kantian perspective, Schelling shows how intelligibility emerges from being’s own inner dynamics, rather than presupposing a fully luminous order guaranteed by divine intellect. He accepts the Kantian critique of dogmatism but tries to move through it, not around it. Hart, by contrast, largely refuses the transcendental demand altogether, treating it as a historical detour rather than a philosophical necessity.
For Hart, intelligibility is grounded theologically and metaphysically in actus purus: being is intelligible because it proceeds from divine intellect and goodness. Participation explains how finite minds can know truth, but the structure of intelligibility itself is already complete and perfect in God. Mediation occurs, but it occurs within a fully determinate metaphysical order.

Hart and Schelling both reject Kant’s subjectivization of intelligibility, but Schelling does so by internalizing critique into ontology, whereas Hart largely bypasses it by appeal to classical metaphysics. Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding.

The post-liberal politics of Victor Orban, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio draw from the classical metaphysical thinking of John Millbank and David Bentley Hart, which completely rejects Kantianism and all of the subsequent developments of philosophy which have flowed from it, including the phenomenological work of Bitbol and the Hegelian-Piagetian ideas of Vervaeke. If Kant was a correction of the limitations of Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes and Spinoza to Hume, the post liberalism of Hart turns its back on this whole era and retreats to pre-Enlightenment theological sources. If phenomenology opens up to the postmodern, Hart’s approach is decidedly pre-modern.

I am confident your thinking does not ally in any substantive way with this radically conservative turn. But I wonder if you have sympathies with the pre-Kantian mathematical neo platonism of figures like Michael Levin, Kastrup or Tegmark. I say this because you write:

science does not explain logical or mathematical necessity; it presupposes it. In securing its proofs and models, science relies on principles that stand to reason: inference, consistency, implication, and mathematical structure. Although science introduces new mathematical formalisms, these are not confirmed or disconfirmed empirically in the same sense as empirical claims. Yet they are among the constituents of scientific discovery. — Wayfarer

For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. On this view, the fact that mathematical principles are not empirically confirmed is not a weakness but a clue to their status: they are discovered, not invented, and they constrain reality precisely because they are reality’s form. Science presupposes logic and mathematics because logic and mathematics are more fundamental than empirical facts. They are part of the furniture of reality, not merely the rules of our engagement with it.

By contrast, Kantian and post-Kantian thinkers read the same situation in almost the opposite direction. Kant fully agrees that science cannot explain logical or mathematical necessity empirically, but he denies that this licenses Platonism. The reason science presupposes these necessities is that they arise from the conditions under which objects can be experienced at all. Mathematics and logic are not discovered features of a mind-independent realm; they are expressions of the a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding. Their necessity is transcendental, not ontological in the Platonist sense. They bind all possible experience because they are the rules by which experience is constituted.

On Kant’s view, mathematical formalisms are indeed constituents of scientific discovery, but not because nature is secretly mathematical in itself. Rather, nature as an object of possible science is necessarily mathematizable because our cognition imposes spatiotemporal and logical structure on whatever appears to us. Science presupposes mathematics because without those forms, there would be no objects, no laws, no empirical regularities to investigate in the first place.

Post-Kantian thinkers deepen and fracture this picture in different ways, but they retain the basic reversal of Platonism. Hegel internalizes necessity still further: logical and mathematical structures are not static abstract truths but moments in the self-unfolding of rationality itself. Scientific concepts presuppose logical necessity because they are expressions of reason coming to know itself in nature, not because they mirror an external mathematical realm. Neo-Kantians recast mathematics as a regulative framework internal to scientific practice.

For Bitbol, mathematics and logic are indispensable not because they are universally binding in all possible worlds, but because abandoning them would amount to abandoning the very project of sense-making we currently inhabit. Their necessity is pragmatic-transcendental rather than apodictic.

Husserl locates mathematical logic in acts of idealization, abstraction, and meaning-bestowal. Mathematical objects are neither empirical nor merely subjective; they are ideal objects, constituted through conscious acts but valid independently of any particular act once constituted.

Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts.

For Vervaeke, mathematics and formal logic emerge from ongoing processes of sense-making and relevance realization in embodied, situated agents. They are not grounded in pure intuition, transcendental structures, or ideal acts, but in adaptive cognitive dynamics that stabilize over time into normative constraints. Logic and mathematics are late achievements of a self-correcting ecology of practices aimed at reducing error, increasing coherence, and enhancing problem-solving power.

From this vantage, necessity is not metaphysical or transcendental but ecological and functional. Mathematical and logical norms bind us because they have proven indispensable for navigating complex problem spaces, not because they legislate the form of all possible experience. Vervaeke would say that Kant over-intellectualizes the origin of necessity: what really grounds it is the way certain patterns of inference and formalization reliably track affordances and constraints in the agent–world coupling. Mathematics is powerful because it sharpens relevance realization to an extreme degree, not because it reflects a priori forms of intuition.

Hart seems to argue that the problem with naturalism is that even if the universe produces conscious beings, it doesn’t explain why they can understand the world. Physical processes create neurons and behavior, but not meaning, truth, or reference. That our minds can grasp concepts and form true beliefs points, Hart argues, beyond mere material causes.

I was hoping someone could unpack this and elaborate. — Tom Storm

Hart is a metaphysical realist of a classical persuasion. That means that he thinks reality is objectively real, intrinsically intelligible, value-laden, purposive, and metaphysically grounded in God. Human reason isn’t a matter of trial and error representations we place over things, reason is formed by the world’s own intelligible structures acting directly on the mind. In other words, the mind is inclined naturally to grasp the truth of the world. This is a very different from Kant, who argued that categories of human reason are purely subjective in origin, not given to us directly by way by the truths of a divinely ordered purposeful world. Postmodernists
believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world.

Patterner’s approach is pre-Kantian but post-Hart. He allows for a direct apprehension of the real through empirical investigation, which ignores Kant’s argument that empirical causality is not a direct property of the world but is already built into our reasoning about the world as a subjective condition of possibility. But Patterner’s view also requires humans to figure out what is true about the world through total and error, which Hart believes is not necessary because we are naturally inclined to directly see such divine truths.

Plainly, Buddhism, like the Vedic tradition from which it broke away, is embedded in a very different conception of the nature of existence, than is the Judeo-Christian tradition. — Wayfarer

One can be ‘very different’ in a number of respects. One
can be so by arising independently of Western trajectories of thought, such that Westerners must access them by abandoning their own assumptions or evolving towards them. Or one can do so by being more ancient, such that it takes skilled investigation to recognize how forms of thought not unlike Buddhism and Hinduism hide deep within the foundations of judeo-christian traditions.

All of which is premised on the assumption that Buddhism cannot be what it describes itself to be, which is, a way to the total ending of suffering. Not amelioration or adjustment.
— Wayfarer
@Joshs What do you have to say to this?
Do you agree with Wayfarer's assessment of your stance? — baker

I am confident Buddhism is exactly what it takes itself to be, a way to end suffering. The issue for me is what framework of understanding it uses to define suffering and its alleviation. There are those who see suffering through a very different lens, such that ending it is not only not desirable but also an incoherent notion.

Yes and this is, as you probably know, one of Nietzsches main issues with a purely utilitarian view on morality. We need some adversity to be able to grow. The quest to reduce all suffering would ultimately also reduce what we can be as human beings — ChatteringMonkey

Not only that, it would eliminate pleasure itself.

“…the satisfaction of the will is not the cause of pleasure: I particularly want to combat this most superficial of theories. The absurd psychological counterfeiting of the nearest things . . . instead, that the will wants to move forwards, and again and again becomes master of what stands in its way: the feeling of pleasure lies precisely in the unsatisfaction of the will, in the way it is not yet satiated unless it has boundaries and resistances . . .

The normal unsatisfaction of our drives, e.g., of hunger, the sexual drive, the drive to move, does not in itself imply something dispiriting; instead, it has a piquing effect on the feeling of life, just as every rhythm of small painful stimuli strengthens that feeling, whatever the pessimists would have us believe. This unsatisfaction, far from blighting life, is life's great stimulus. - Perhaps one could even describe pleasure in general as a rhythm of small unpleasurable stimuli . . .
(Nietzsche’s Last Notebooks)

So I'm skeptical it's even possible to "understand Buddhism better" without looking into the issue of (kamma and) rebirth, if this is something that one finds particularly stumbling. — baker

I’ve always thought that modern Western readers supplement ancient Eastern wisdom with ideas that are strictly modern, and in so doing are taking what I call a nostalgic position.

The nostalgic position asserts that some individual or culture in our distant past ‘got it right' by arriving at a way of understanding the nature of things that we drifted away from for many centuries and are just now coming back to. So the latest and most advanced philosophical thinking of the West today is just a belated return to what was already discovered long ago. I dont buy the nostalgic position. I think it is only when we interpret ancient thought in a superficial way that it appears their ideas were consonant with modern phenomenology and related approaches. Why are we so prone to misreading the ancients this way? I believe this comes from emphasizing only the aspect of their thought which appears familiar to we postmoderns (recursive becoming) and ignoring the crucial hidden dimension (a pre-Platonic , pre-Christian universalism).

Western philosophy after Hegel shifted its attention away from unchanging foundations and towards a discourse of evolution, revolution and becoming in which foundations become relative, contingent and impermanent. The primacy of the self-knowing ego and the purposefulness of the grasping will were put into question. Some of these philosophers took note of the fact that Buddhist scholars also talked about egolessness and non-willing.

But I want to argue that the most valuable consequence of the modern turn toward becoming was that it represented a further step in the evolution of Western thinking toward ways of understanding the world in terms of intricate relationships, harmonies, interconnections and correlations. This process necessarily had to start out with the belief in fixed objects and universal laws as a ground for seeing consistencies and stabilities in the world, before it could go on to deconstruct thes foundations. My contention is that ancient buddhist thought is not post-Western but pre-Western. The metaphysics behind Indra's web, the Tao Te Ching and related teachings as they were intended two thousand years ago are so profoundly alien to contemporary Western philosophical thinking that they run the risk of being mistaken as profoundly similar and compatible.

Whereas Postmodern views of change and becoming originate from a radically self-subverting groundless ground, Buddhist becoming rests on a cosmology of universalistic , sovereign normative grounds (what it is that unifies the infinite relational changes within Indra's web). Unlike Platonic and Christian metaphysics, this sovereign ground is not made explicit. The ancients were not able to articulate this ground in the universalistic language of a philosophy. But it authorizes and justifies conformist, repressive social ethics and political practices which have persisted for two millennia in Buddhist cultures. Postmodernism emerges from a self-undermining, groundless critique of Western metaphysics, whereas Buddhism often presupposes a cosmic order (e.g., karma, Dharma, Indra's net) that is anything but contingent. Many ancient philosophies, including Buddhism, Taoism, and Vedic thought, operate within a framework of normative cosmology: an ordered, purposeful universe with implicit or explicit ethical imperatives. This is starkly different from postmodernism's rejection of fixed foundations.

Buddhist metaphysics (e.g., dependent origination, Indra's net) was not a proto-deconstruction but a cosmological model of interdependence, often tied to hierarchical, tradition-bound societies. The ethical and political dimensions of Buddhism (e.g., monastic conformity, merit-based hierarchies) reflect this embedded universalism, which contrasts sharply with postmodernism's anti-foundationalism. The Taoist wu-wei or Buddhist anatta (no-self) are not mere parallels to postmodern fluidity but are situated within teleological or soteriological frameworks that postmodernism explicitly rejects. Buddhist societies, like all traditional cultures, have often enforced conformity, hierarchy, and static social orders, precisely because their metaphysics assumes a normative cosmic blueprint. This is a far cry from the emancipatory aims of much postmodern thought, even if both might critique the "ego" or "fixed identity.

If there are affinities with pragmatism or with later analytic work on normativity and practice, I’m happy to acknowledge them. But I’m not trying to force Wittgenstein into Hegelian inferentialism. I’m using later Wittgenstein to keep JTB anchored in how our practices actually operate, and to keep the discussion aimed at epistemic certainty, not Cartesian absolute certainty. — Sam26

Post-Sellarsianism is defined by where one locates normativity, which seems to be the same site you situate it, in public justificatory standing governed by mistake-conditions, defeaters, and correction. Like the post-Sellarsians, you treat JTB as a legitimate starting grammar, whereas Wittgenstein aims to dissolve this starting point. Wittgenstein uses hinges to stop explanation, not to underwrite it. Once hinges are recruited to keep JTB “anchored,” they have been absorbed into a normative architecture. That architecture is Sellarsian in spirit even if it is anti-foundational in tone.

In looking at the snippets of the paper you have been slowly unleashing, I’ve been trying to place its core method and approach with respect to the philosophical communities I am familiar with. What is its relation to poststructuralism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, Criitical theory, American pragmatism, and figures like Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Dilthey, Dewey and Peirce? It seems to me your perspective aligns most closely with the work of post-Sellarsians like Robert Brandom, John Mcdowell and Donald Davidson, who draw centrally from Kant and Hegel, and all but ignore the post-Hegelian approaches to reason, justification and ground offered by these other communities.

You make frequent mention of the later Wittgenstein, but you force him into the post-Sellarsian ‘space of reasons’ box occupied by Brandom, Pippin, MacDowell and other Pittsburgh school Hegelians, and strip away the hermeuneutic and phenomenological elements which make his work so different from the Hegelians. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but If you haven’t read Brandon, you might find his approach to be a better fit for what you’re going after than the later Wittgenstein.

Surely there are convergences with Terrence Deacon. The forms can also be understood as constraints or 'forms of possibility'. I mostly have taken in Levin listening to his youtube talks and dialogues. — Wayfarer

If there are convergences, they are not over Levin’s platonism. Deacon is doing almost the opposite. He is trying to show how what looks Platonic; mathematical or mental forms that are ontologically basic and existing prior to, or independently of, physical instantiation, arise only through specific kinds of physical–biological processes. They are not “there anyway,” waiting to be instantiated; they are generated historically.

murder is bad in itself — Fire Ologist

That’s right. Killing isnt bad in itself, murder is. The sentence ‘murder is wrong’ is a truism, since the word already means ‘wrongful killing’. The fact we have a litany of words expressing judgements of blame and immorality doesn’t guarantee we will all agree on what situations justify assessments of wrongfulness, even though we can all agree that the words connote things which are designated ‘bad in themselves’.

Shouldn’t the atheist answer be, they are thinking like a fantasy, fictional novel writer? They make up contexts, make up players in that context, make up actions, throw in biology and psychology to claim some semblance of “science” or actual knowledge, pretend rules and laws and human speech can direct physics and human choices (as if we are not mechanistic followers of biological necessity), and call this “morality” until the next time when all variables may be thrown back up in the air where they belong and never actually left.

To the atheist, like Nietzsche, isn’t having a morality itself maybe the only possible immoral act? Because it’s an utter lie? To the atheist, shouldn’t the one moral choice we make be the choice to resist all moral judgment, particularly of our own impulses and actions? I think so. That is coherent — Fire Ologist

Atheism is a spectrum of philosophical perspectives with a historical lineage in the modern West going back at least 400 years. These perspectives have nothing necessarily in common with each other beside the fact that they remove the name of theos. My particular version of atheism assumes the following:

1) What we call immorality are practices by others which we aren’t able to understand in terms that allow us to justify them according to our own values. As a result, we blame them for our own puzzlement.
2) Cultural history takes the form of a slow development of interpersonal understanding such that we progressively improve our ability to make sense of the motivations of others in ways that don’t require our condemning them, precisely because we see their limitations as having to do with social understanding rather than arbitrary malicious intent. Advances in the social sciences in tandem with philosophy and the arts contribute to this development.

The proof is in the pudding. Either our social bets pay off and our models of behavior are validated by the actions of others, or they are invalidated and we have to start over with a modified scheme. We all try our best to make sense of others without having to condemn them, but for most the task becomes too overwhelming and they find they have no choice but to fall back on something like god-given moral foundations (or the empirical version : socio and neuropathology).

The transpersonal subject is not solipsistic - it is not 'the individual consciousness creating reality'. Rather, it's the shared structures of rationality, perception, and measurement that together constitute the conditions for any subject. Accordingly, the 'veiled subject' is transcendental/transpersonal, not psychological — Wayfarer

In writers like Ken Wilber transpersonal psychology has specific connotations pointing to mystical experiences and expanded consciousness. Do you subscribe to this vein of thought, and are you imputing it to Bitbol’s work?

I because an atheist because post-theistic philosophical and psychological models appeared to me to offer more powerful insights into how to understand and get along with others. It wasn't a matter of whether God exists, but of whether that hypothesis was as useful in becoming an empathetic and caring person in comparison to the secular alternatives I discovered. I don’t see my atheism as a reaction of the noble ethical goals of theism, but as a better way of achieving those goals. The key challenge for theists and atheists is to answer the following question :
What are people thinking when they do things we consider wrong, and why are they doing them? I’ll go with whichever approach answers this question more effectively.

I think the more likely explanation is that we evolved something called biological altruism. — Questioner

You think altruism is a brain mechanism? You dont feel that it is in your best ‘selfish’ interest to help people you care about and need in your life? In that case altruism wouldn’t be a matter of choosing others over the self but being motivated to expand and enrich the boundaries of the self. We would also need to clarify that the self isn’t a static thing but a system of integration assimilating the world into itself while accommodating itself to the novel aspects of the world. Altruism can be seen in this light as belonging to this enrichment of the self’s capabilities.

It seems very odd to need a proof that god exists in order to do the right thing. — Banno

It would be a shame to waste a good sin.

This is because any degree of restriction whatsoever on abortion -- even a careful one on completely secular grounds -- carries with it the cultural implication that somebody, somewhere should be able to pass moral judgements on sexual activity, which is something they just will not countenance. It undoes the whole reason they wanted to get rid of God. It's a core dogma and it's not just immoral but blatantly anti-moral. (opposed to morality as a category) — BenMcLean

This reminds me of the kind of angry manifesto someone writes before they burn down an abortion clinic.