↪Joshs Moore's papers indicate the opposite. — Sam26

Could you supply some quotes in support of your argument? I just read Moore’s ‘A Defense of Common Sense’ and section 4, where he brings up the example of ‘my hand’, seems to depict it as an empirical truth without need of proof.

hinges are not true or false in the propositional sense but are accepted as true or false as a matter of conviction or for purposes of utility — Sam26

I would say that true or false pertains to whether something is or is not the case, an issue of adequation between the representing and the represented. The kind of certainty pertaining to hinge propositions is not that of adequation , of whether something is the case, but of how something is the case.

Another guy named G.E. Moore tried to say, “I know I have hands,” as if it was a matter to be justified or a matter of proof. Wittgenstein disagreed, saying that it wasn’t a matter of proof. He said that these beliefs were so basic that a proof wouldn’t make sense — Sam26

Seems to me the latter is what Moore was arguing. He believed ‘I know I have hands’ to be certainly true, but not subject to justification or proof. Wittgenstein argued that the proposition ‘I know I have hands’ is not subject to doubt. It is neither a true nor false belief.

Logic itself is objective. Only one universal reasoning could inquire into whether ‘logic is objective or not’, and any conclusion from that inquiry would be built using only logic; basically, you can only use logic to prove whether logic is objective or not, and so you prove ‘you can only use logic to prove’ as an objective experience of things. Some things we experience are universal, and that is an objective truth. — Fire Ologist

Logic is objective because logic depends on an already constituted set of assumptions concerning what an object is. Therefore, logic can’t be used as a means to reveal the psychological genesis of those assumptions, as writers like Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger argued. Derrida summarizes Husserl’s opposition to Frege on this point:

“… only "composed" logical notions can be defined without referring to psychological genesis; these notions are mediate and hence insufficient. They are already constituted, and their originary sense escapes us. They suppose elementary concepts like "quality," "intensity," "place," “time," and so on, whose definition cannot, in Husserl's eyes, remain specifically logical. These concepts are correlative to the act of a subject. The concepts of equality, identity, of whole and of part, of plurality and of unity are not understood., in the last analysis, through terms of formal logic. If these concepts were a priori pure ideal forms, they would not lend themselves to any definition; every definition supposes in fact a concrete determination.

This determination cannot be provided except by the act of actual constitution of this formal logic. Thus, we must turn toward concrete psychological life, toward perception, starting from which, abstraction and formalization take place. An already constituted logical form cannot be rigorously defined without unveiling the whole intentional history of its constitution. If such a history is not implied by all the logical concepts, these become unintelligible in themselves and unusable in concrete operations. Thus, Husserl maintains against Frege that one has no right to reproach a mathematician with describing the historical and psychological journey that leads to the concept of number, One cannot “begin" with a logical definition of number. The very act of this definition and its possibility would be inexplicable. (The Problem of Genesis)

I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism
— Joshs

I'm dying to know what your software misunderstood here — J

Supposed to be ‘I am drawn to the critique of both realism and anti-realism’.

That’s what I get for doing all of my composing on an iphone while hiking.

Reading the debate between Chakravarrty and Poncock on epistemic stances and rationality, I am drawn to the critters of no try realism and anti-realism offered by figures such as Fine, Davidson, Brandom and McDowell. Joseph Rouse explains:

​Arthur Fine has prominently advanced a first challenge to all sides of the realist debates in a series of papers advocating the “Natural Ontological Attitude”, by asking what these debates are about. For example, they might be understood as advocating alternative goals for scientific inquiry (truth, empirical adequacy, instrumental reliability, advancing social interests, and the like). Realists and anti-realists attribute such goals to the sciences as an interpretation that “makes better sense” of scientific practices and achievements. Fine offers a trenchant reply:
Science is not needy [for interpretation] in this way. Its history and current practice constitute a rich and meaningful setting. In that setting, questions of goals or aims or purposes occur spontaneously and locally.
Michael Williams makes a similar argument in epistemology more generally, challenging the belief that “there is a general way of bringing together the genuine cases [of knowledge] into a coherent theoretical kind”, such that one can make a general case for realist or anti-realist interpretations of knowledge claims.

Another way to dissolve the realism question highlights a problematic commitment to the independence of meaning and truth. Anti-realists are evidently committed to such independence, because they endorse the possibility of understanding what scientific claims purport to say about the world, while denying the kind of access to what the world is “really” like needed to determine whether those claims are “literally” true. We can supposedly only discern whether claims are empirically adequate, instrumentally reliable, paradigmatically fruitful, rationally warranted, theoretically coherent, or the like. Realists nevertheless agree that understanding theoretical claims and determining whether they are correct are distinct and independent achievements.

For realists, it is a significant achievement to determine, for some scientific theory or hypothesis, that this claim, with its semantic content independently fixed, is true. If the determination of the truth or falsity of a claim were entangled with the interpretation of its content, however, such that what the claim says was not determinable apart from those interactions with the world through which we assess its truth, then realists would be unable to specify the claims (i.e., the contents of those claims) about which they want to be realists. Anti-realists in turn could not pick out their preferred proximate intermediary (perceptual appearances, instrumental reliability, social practices or norms) without invoking the worldly access they deny.

​Donald Davidson (1984) developed a classic criticism of this assumption and the realist and anti-realist positions that presuppose it. Davidson argued that the only way to justify an interpretation of what a claim says is to show that this interpretation maximizes the truthfulness and rationality of the entire set of beliefs and desires attributed to a speaker in conjunction with that interpretation. Otherwise, any attribution of false beliefs to the speaker would be justifiably open to a response that attributes the error to the interpretation rather than to the claims interpreted. Only against the background of extensive understanding of what is true can we also understand the objective purport and content of beliefs and utterances. Davidson rightly concluded that “Nothing, no thing, makes our sentences or theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world...”

Its from ‘The Will to Know’

Nietzsche utilizes the awkwardness of the summation of these ideas in the saying "There are not facts." But fact is, Nietzsche details facts about many things, and utilizes the term fact to point out truths across different eras of time. Nietzsche was a philologists, first and foremost, who studied the evolution of ideas throughout time by examing our language. — DifferentiatingEgg

According to Foucault, Nietzsche details two kinds of truth, connaissance and savoir.

“…the Aristotelian model appeared to characterize classical philosophy. This model entails that the Will to know ( savoir ) is nothing other than curiosity, that knowledge (connaissance ) is always already marked in the form of sensation, and finally that there was an inherent relation between knowledge and life. The Nietzschean model, on the other hand, claims that the Will to know ( savoir ) refers not to knowledge ( connaissance ) but to something altogether different, that behind the Will to know there is not a sort of preexisting knowledge that is something like sensation, but instinct, struggle, the Will to power. The Nietzschean model, moreover, claims that the Will to know is not originally linked to the Truth: it claims that the Will to know composes illusions, fabricates lies, accumulates errors, and is deployed in a space of fiction where the truth itself is only an effect. It claims, furthermore, that the Will to know is not given in the form of subjectivity and that the subject is only a kind of product of the Will to know, in the double game of the Will to power and to truth. Finally, for Nietzsche, the Will to know does not assume the preexistence of a knowledge already there; truth is not given in advance; it is produced as an event.

This model of a fundamentally interested knowledge, produced as an event of the will and determining the effect of truth through falsification, is undoubtedly at the furthest remove from the postulates of classical metaphysics.

Goodness, as I understand it, certainly does not mean humankindness and responsible conduct! It is just fully allowing the uncontrived condition of the inborn nature and allotment of life to play itself out — Chuang Tzu

What do you suppose ‘uncontrived condition of the inborn human nature’ means? Do we have an inborn nature? Or do we contrive our nature through our interactions with others? If the latter, then perhaps goodness is to be made as much as found?

A critique of Frege's theory of sense and reference by Wittgenstein isn't possible, because Frege never provided an explicit theory or definition of sense. Frege only demonstrated his semantic category of sense (i.e. modes of presentation) through examples. And he was at pains to point out that sense referred to communicable information that leads from proposition to referent - information that is therefore neither subjective nor psychological — sime

If not subjective nor psychological, then what? Grounded in empirical objectivity? You think Wittgenstein understands sense to be grounded by reference to facts that transcend the normativity of language-games?

The important point is that when we develop/invent rules and make decisions about how to apply them, we are not totally "in charge". Put it this way - our agreements can lead to undesired consequjences and disagreements, which need to be resolved. We don't invent those - we would much rather they didn't happen, so we don't invent them. We do resolve them. That's not a problem, in itself; it's just part of our practice. — Ludwig V

In what way is the invention of a mathematical rule different from the creation of a language game/form of life? When Moore says ‘this is my hand’, Wittgenstein argues that he confuses an empirical assertion with a grammatical proposition. Moore’s gesture is pointing to the grammar , the rules, of a language game that Moore ‘inherited’ from his entanglement with his culture, but which rules are invisible to him. Moore ‘discovers’ that this is his hand, but doesn’t realize that his discovery only makes sense within the language game. Isnt this form of life an invention, but one that Moore was not ‘in charge of’? Couldn’t we say that scientific paradigms are invented , and the facts that show up within them are discovered?

Many of Wittgenstein's contemporaries said it better than Wittgenstein by formally distinguishing assertions from propositions. In particular, Frege introduced turnstile notation to make the distinction between propositions on the one hand, and assertions about propositions that he called judgements on the other. — sime

I consider the most important and radical implication of Wittgenstein’s later work to be his critique of Frege’s theory of sense as reference. Frege remained mired in a formalistic metaphysics centered on logic, without ever grasping f Wittgenstein’s distinction between the epistemic and the grammatical.

↪Joshs Seems we pretty much agree, except that I don't think calling this an "intuition" is at all helpful, since it hints at private mental phenomena. It's not about intuition, it's about action - following a rule is something we do, not a "special sense — Banno

I agree. Intuition isn’t really what I was after. Wittgenstein said it better.

213. "But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation."—Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt. (There is something to be said, which is connected with this, about the psychological 'atmosphere' of a process.) So it must have been intuition that removed this doubt?—If intuition is an inner voice—how do I know how I am to obey it? And how do I know that it doesn't mislead me? For if it can guide me right, it can also guide me wrong. ((Intuition an unnecessary shuffle.))

… It would almost be more correct to say, not that an intuition was needed at every stage, but that a new decision was needed at every stage.

You state the problem nicely, but don't mention Wittgenstein's solution.
The Private Language argument indicates that there's no way for you to know what rules you've been following up till now. Check out Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language by Saul Kripke.
— frank
The PLA (insofar as it is an argument) establishes, IMO, that there is no way for you to know what rules you have been following up to now, if they are private rules. "Private" means that your say-so determines what is correct and what is not. So "correct" and "incorrect" have no application - no meaning. — Ludwig V

What gives meaning to rules is human agreement in the context of human life. Think of how the fact that we agree on how to use words is enough to make them words. (This fact is, perhaps, not a fact of the matter, but it is a fact nonetheless.) What often gets left out of this is that we sometimes find that we don't agree on how to apply our rules; so we have to make a decision about how to go on. — Ludwig V

It’s not human agreement , as though each individual voices their opinion and then the group arrives at a consensus. Socially normative meanings function prior to and already within individual experiences of rules and criteria of action. At the same time that such social norms allow us to make sense of our own perspective within them, we can differ among one another within shared language games as to how to proceed. And whether or not we agree on how to apply our rules, those rules never are enough to tell us how to go on. It is only within the actual context of the situation that we ‘intuit’ the specific sense and use of a rule. This intuitive knowing is the solution, not waiting for a consensus from a group.

If the rules of a language game make rational numbers intelligible, then isnt it a new set of rules that make irrationals intelligible?
— Joshs

It's a fiction that meaning arises from rule-following. There's no fact of the matter regarding what rules you've followed up til now. — frank

If we’re talking about Wittgenstein on rule-following here, then there is no intelligible meaning without rules, criteria, forms of life. But at the same time, in applying those concepts, criteria and rules, we don’t simply refer to them as a picture determining in advance how to go on. The rules underdetermine what to do in each new situation. There is an element of invention in following rules.

But I don't think that "invent" is the appropriate description. The story of the irrationals shows that when we set up the rules of a language-game (and that description of numbers is also an idealization), we may find that there are situations (applications of the rules) that surprise us. Hence it is more appropriate to say that we discover these — Ludwig V

If the rules of a language game make rational numbers intelligible, then isnt it a new set of rules that make irrationals intelligible? In other words, don’t we have to invent irrationals as well as rationals?

What I found interesting in that article is not so much the evolutionary psychology behind it, (but in this case it is nice it supports the point as many in this forum do seem to embrace it) what I found interesting is the correlation between perceived attractiveness as a dating partner and delinquency. I think the answer for it lies more in the concept I explained as 'subterranean values', social values that are presented but seldom 'officially' articulated, then in some evolutionary psychology — Tobias

I would like to hear more about how you understand the relation between the social construct of masculinity you are associating with the right, and conservative populist thinking in its wider scope. Do you think the former explains the latter, the reverse, or is there some more complex relation between the two? And if you agree that ‘masculinity’ is an outdated social construct that is lingering among men, why are you labeling the construction that’s taking its place as ‘feminine’? Don’t masculine and feminine go together as the two poles of an outdated binary social conception? Aren’t they in the process of being replaced by a new binary, in which both what had been understood as masculine and what was seen as feminine are redefined? Or perhaps the binary itself is on the way to being replaced by a spectrum or non-linear plurality or fluidity?

, I hold a social constructivist view myself. — Tobias

Then why did you write this?

delinquency does not appear to increase dating by increasing the delinquent's desire for dates. Instead, they suggest that delinquency increases dating outcomes by making the delinquent more attractive to prospective mates. This finding supports evolutionary psychology's implicit prediction that adolescents may, knowingly or unknowingly (see Berry & Broadbent, 1984; Claxton, 1999; Lewicki et al., 1992; Massey, 2002), perceive delinquency as one type of risk-taking behavior that reflects such qualities as nerve, daring, and bravado. 5 From an evolutionary perspective, such qualities may be highly beneficial to a prospective mate's social status, physical well-being, and/or genetic lineage" — Tobias

What do we mean by masculinity and femininity? I think in the previous thread it was left implicit. Here I take a broad and theoretical view of masculinity and femininity, derived from the sociologist Hofstede. He ranked societies as feminine and masculine based on a number of characteristics. O — Tobias

I consider masculinity, femininity, homosexuality and all other gendered concepts to be social constructs which interpret biological features in ways that vary from era to era and culture to culture. What you seem to be doing is turning one such era-specific construct , the masculine-feminine binary, into a biologically essentialized universal and then using it to explain traditionalist thinking on the political right in the West today. I argue instead that what you understand as masculinity and femininity are not only culturally relative constructs, but do not explain right wing populism. Rather, they are themselves subordinate elements of a larger traditionalist worldview which is about much more than gendered behavior. Do MAGA supporters embrace guns, authoritarianism, oppose abortion, immigrants, climate science, Transgender rights and feminism because of masculine thinking, or are the very concepts of masculinity and femininity they espouse reflections of a traditionalist worldview?

although I wouldn't use "predetermined"
— wonderer1

I mean, maybe you should.. — DifferentiatingEgg

I read Nietzsche as critiquing both freedom of the will
and the determinism of cause and effect.

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has ever been conceived, a type of logical rape and abomination. But humanity's excessive pride has got itself profoundly and horribly entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. The longing for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense (which, unfortunately, still rules in the heads of the half educated), the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Munchhausen's, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. Suppose someone sees through the boorish naivete of this famous concept of “free will” and manages to get it out of his mind; I would then ask him to carry his “enlightenment” a step further and to rid his mind of the reversal of this misconceived concept of “free will”: I mean the “un-free will,” which is basically an abuse of cause and effect.

We should not erroneously objectify “cause” and “effect” like the natural scientists do (and whoever else thinks naturalistically these days –) in accordance with the dominant mechanistic stupidity which would have the cause push and shove until it “effects” something; we should use “cause” and “effect” only as pure concepts, which is to say as conventional fictions for the purpose of description and communication, not explanation. In the “in-itself ” there is nothing like “causal association,” “necessity,” or “psychological un-freedom.” There, the “effect” does not follow “from the cause,” there is no rule of “law.” We are the ones who invented causation, succession, for-each-other, relativity, compulsion, numbers, law, freedom, grounds, purpose; and if we project and inscribe this symbol world onto things as an “in-itself,” then this is the way we have always done things, namely mythologically. The “un-free will” is mythology; in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills. It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in a thinker when he senses some compulsion, need, having-to-follow, pressure, unfreedom in every “causal connection” and “psychological necessity”. (Beyond Good and Evil)

I follow Deleuze’s reading of the Eternal Return as non-deterministic and unconditioned.

…the eternal return and the Overman are at the crossing of two genealogies, of two unequal genetic lines. On the one hand they relate to Zarathustra as to the conditioning
principle which "posits" them in merely hypothetical manner. On the other hand, they relate to Dionysus as the unconditioned principle which is the basis of their apodictic and absolute character. Thus in Zarathustra's exposition it is always the entanglement of causes or the connection of moments, the synthetic relation of moments to each other, which determines the hypothesis of the return of the same moment. But, from Dionysus' perspective by contrast, it is the synthetic relation of the moment to itself, as past, present and to come, which absolutely determines its relations with all other moments. The return is not the passion of one moment pushed by others, but the activity of the moment which determined the others in being itself determined through what it affirms. Zarathustra's constellation is the constellation of the lion, but that of Dionysus is the constellation of being: the yes of the child-player is more profound than the holy no of the lion. The whole of Zarathustra is affirmative: even when he who knows how to say no, says no. But Zarathustra is not the whole of affirmation, nor what is most profound in it.

ll affirmation finds its condition in Zarathustra but its unconditioned principle in Dionysus. Zarathustra determines the eternal return, moreover he determines it to produce its effect, the Overman. But this determination is the same as the series of conditions which finds its final term in the lion, in the man who wants to be overcome, in the destroyer of all known values. Dionysus' determination is of another kind, identical to the absolute principle without which the conditions would themselves remain powerless. And this is Dionysus' supreme disguise — to subject his products to conditions which are themselves subject to him, condi-tions that these products themselves surpass. The lion becomes a child, the destruction of known values makes possible a creation of new values. But the creation of values, the yes of the child-player, would not be formed under these conditions if they were not, at the same time, subject to a deeper genealogy.

Do we in fact know that the dream precedes, or grounds, the kicking? Might it not be the case that my legs kick for some independent, strictly neurological reason, which then causes me to dream about kicking, in the same way that a full bladder causes me to dream about urination? — J

My guess is if one kicks without volition while asleep, one’s dream will not likely incorporate the kicking into a narrative where one has chosen to kick. Instead, the dream might consist of one’s legs being manipulated by someone or some thing. This argument assumes the dream state knows the difference between passive sensory impingement and sensory feedback from intentional acts.

I don't understand how you can construe the post-phenomenological heritage a minor paradigm when it's quite hegemonic. It isn't hegemonic everywhere it touches, but it's a pernicious orthodoxy in social studies.

It's also a heritage that lets people do discourse analysis with no fieldwork while still getting papers published. People write 30 page papers whose principal argument is based on homophones {both meanings of site, cite...} and it gets through peer review because it apparently cleverly references the differential nature of the signifying chain.

You are incredibly well read, surely you've seen even worse excesses. — fdrake

I’m disconnected from these institutional structures. What you say may be true; I have no way of knowing. I have found that there tends to be a substantial distance between the work of the ‘oracles’ of post-phenomenological thought and the interpretation and application of it by legions lesser lights, to the point where it is often almost unrecognizable. You may wonder if I apply my own thinking to real world situations. The answer is yes , every day, as both an ethical and psychological guide. It maintains its validity for me through its effectiveness at making of sense of my world.

↪sime I would regard the presumption that other beings are like myself as apodictic. I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to believe otherwise. And real life is not a hypothetical exercise. — Wayfarer

For Husserl such recognition requires a constituting synthesis , an analogizing transfer of sense from what has already been constituted as my immediate sphere of own-ness ( my self-reflecting ego, and my sensing and sensing body) to that of another subject.

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection.

7k
Not all of this vitriol is aimed at you Joshs, I've just been reading this for over a decade and I'm sick of having it explained to me like I've never read post-phenomenological — fdrake

Sokal read post-phenomenological work, as did Jordan Peterson. Reading and understanding are not the same thing. Understanding a philosophical approach means being capable of summarizing its fundamental concepts in a way that is recognizable to those who support it. If you were to ask me to sum up the positions of your favorite philosophers, I am confident that I would be able to do it to your satisfaction. Before you can adequately critique a set of ideas, you have to accomplish that first step. You have mentioned Deleuze seemingly approvingly in other posts. Do you think he would consider my depiction of postmodern thinking ‘utterly stultifying and totalizing’? How would you summarize the key aspects of his work?

It's utterly stultifying. The particularising nature of the methodology, in practice, just reminds you to do mediation analysis, then tells you you can't isolate causal variables in the wild. Everyone knows this — fdrake

Does everyone know that there are alternative ways of thinking about motivation than what is implied in concepts like ‘causal variables’? Can you list any of these alternatives and the nature of their critique of causation as it is utilized by your favorite philosophies?

The proof is in the pudding, the stranglehold these soft realisms {really, discursive irrealisms} have on academic perspectives in social sciences makes it prohibitively difficult to do research requiring methodological innovation. It ends up totally isolating the disciplines that use this methodology and creating fiefdoms. People default back to broadly structuralist flavoured constructivism when they actually need to get shit done policy wise, because you can actually interpret operational variables and talk about causes {yes, unqualified causes, not mediated causes} with caveats in that framework. — fdrake

It seems to me that you’re advocating for conventional standards for ‘getting shit done’. Methodological innovation in applied fields will mean something different than in purely speculative philosophy and psychology. What areas do you work in such that ‘policy’ that ‘everyone can understand’ and ‘getting shit done’ are key goals for you, and do you think it is reasonable to expect cutting edge thinking in philosophy to be instantly translatable into practical ‘policy’ without an intermediate period of innovators who bridge the divide between the purely theoretical and the applied, and a wider culture which has had time to catch up with the new thinking?

Isnt it this gap between the widely accepted and the bleeding edge that causes the isolated fiefdoms in the social sciences? Wasn’t cognitive science an isolated fiefdom in the early 1960’s when behaviorism still had an ironclad grip on academic research in psychology? Is 4EA enactivism now beginning to transition from isolated fiefdom to a more widely shared method of ‘getting shit done’, a method which seems to be starting to absorb its largest rival, active inference) into its framework? And who is working at the leading edge of enactivism? Have you followed the work of Evan Thompson and Hanne De Jaegher? Stick around for another 20 years and you may be surprised to find that what appears to you as isolated , stultifying and no -operationalizable is developed into the new standard methodology for getting things done policy -wise.

But frankly I think your expressed desire for widely shared standards is a red herring. Your main gripe isn't about application but theory. If you were enthusiastic about the fundamental concepts of what you call discursive irrealisms and their ethical implications you would be among those calling for patience in operationalizing those approaches. Years after cognitive science developed firmly established research methods , B.F. Skinner continued to accuse the program of resting on illegitimate methods. It wasn't its applicability that prevented him from embracing cognitive psychology, it was his inability to grasp its concepts.

There is no meta-interpretation.
— Joshs

Speaking of convictions.. — Wayfarer

Not a meta-conviction, a contingent enactment of sense that must be reproduced continually if it is to apply beyond the moment of its utterance. At this moment I anticipate no meta-interpretation that can coherent be applied to anyone. Put differently, I am aware in the moment that i proclaim ‘no meta-interpretations’ that my own thought produces a slightly new sense of what I already meant to say. i can then apply this thought to other persons in other times and come up with a similar but not identical conclusion. As long as a I continue to affirm my conviction (the same differently each time ) concerning everyone everywhere, from my situated contextual vantage , I will repeat that conviction. Do you see the distinction between this process of repeated contextual variation and re-verification , and a meta-proclamation of context-independent truth? The latter doesnt take actual, lived time and history seriously, but tries to subordinate them to a supra-temporal abstraction.

When you see a mirage in a desert that looks like a body of water, and then you arrive at where you thought the water was and it's just a pit of more sand, is it merely another "interpretation" that there isn't really water there? — flannel jesus

And where how do you arrive at your identification of a
scene as a ‘sand desert’? Is this not also an interpretation? The way we recognize a scene depends on incorporating the meager input from what is in the immediate surroundings and filling it in with expectations from memory. Those expectations organize the scene in particular ways , which is why we can be ‘fooled’ by an illusion. But if I interpret what someone says to me one way at one point in time, and then think back to what I heard and realize I heard what I expected to hear and not what they ‘actually’ said, was this mistaken interpretation an illusion? if so, then the fact that I interpret a film or novel in changing ways as I return to it over the course of my life a matter of clearing up an ‘illusion’?

Every single thing which is said has those caveats! There's no extra information in the post-phenomenological gloss you provided. You've either got that you can generalise truths about all speech acts - which you're doing, and in terms of invariant deep contextual structures may I add - or you can't, and what you're saying is false — fdrake

The basis of phenomenological and post-phenomenological thinking is that the starting and ending point of factual and and ethical analysis is the present , and the present of time is a complex structure which includes within the immediate ‘now’ a historical past and anticipatory future in which the past arrives already remade. The problem realists have with this thinking is that they place the identity of the ‘now’ before difference, Existence is self-identity to them, and change is also conceived in this basis. As a result, any utterance about there beyond nothing outside local contexts of meaning creation is read as a statement of identity, an in-itself fact about change that appears self-refuting on the face of it. It is inconceivable that a meaning can in itself expresss itself own transformation, an event of transit, being the same differently. The worst of it is that the implications of post-realism appear horrifyingly nihilistic because all that is glimpsed is contradiction, incommensurability, arbitrariness, skepticism and anything goes relativism. What is colossally missed is the fact that the positions which are being so completely misread do not attempt to deny the achievements of the sciences, don’t attempt to refute them , but leave them i n place and burrow beneath them to reveal their underpinnings. In so doing, they dont leave us with skepticism , relativism and arbitrariness , but with a profoundly intricate, intimate and enriching ‘ground’ for understanding how meaninful relations to our world
works.

You said you admire Matthew Ratcliffe’s work. He is not necessarily in the ‘postmodernist’ camp, but his thinking is not far removed from it, and doesn’t seem to be compatible with yours on the issue of the relation between truth and interpretation. I could demonstrate this with a close focus on where he is going with his
project, and what it borrows from phenomenology and Heidegger.

no, that translates into a thing which was said within a giventime within a given context within a given normative sense of meaning. I can indulge the fantasy that I could make a claim that which will stand outside of any local discursive context, but I can also anticipate that any such utterance will change its sense for me when I reflect back on it later. That is to say, that I make use of a hypothesis that my belief in the subtle transformation over time of senses of meaning will validate itself for me. But it will only validate itself through my repeated testing of it. Such validation must then be self reflexively repeated endlessly.

Except for that claim. — fdrake

It isnt a meta claim, it’s an enactment, an awareness of being ensconced within a discursive set of practices

Yes. The same goes for any claim, do you mean to suggest no claim can have its correctness judged? How can you possibly be correct — fdrake

Sure, correctness can be determined within the framework of intelligibility provided by an interpretation. But all interpretations ( language games) change, and there is not way to determine which language game is more correct. There is no meta-interpretation.

e. In effect, the reinterpretation is a way of seeing the same world another way, like whether a Necker Cube goes into or out of a page. Though it's odd to give faith in the divine a privileged, prior status with respect to reasons for that, as other such aspect shifts are declaratives and can in principle be refuted.

eg "The Necker cube goes into the page" is a statement of the form "The cube is on the page", you could refute the former by showing that the latter holds true. I thus don't think carving out a unique space for faith based on divine revelation is particularly coherent. It undermines its own phenomenology, as a reconfiguration of belief based upon perception. — fdrake

I think a better example is the duck-rabbit drawing. Is there a way to refute the correctness of the perception of one or the other figures? Doesn’t the basis for determining whether a particular interpretation of an image is an illusion itself rely on an interpretation?

144. The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically
obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
145. One wants to say "All my experiences show that it is so". But how do they do that? For that proposition to which they point itself belongs to a particular interpretation of them.( On Certainty)

Yes. But even if the chip is only put to a "good" use, Burgess' novel asks, "What have we done to a human being if we remove the choice to be good -- freedom, in other words?" — J

I would love to see how that would play out in reality. Thinking it through rigorously is more likely to expose the errors in the assumptions underlying the coherence of the idea of externally manipulating another’s ability to choose the good.

↪Joshs
And if normal people cannot identify with pathologically destructive people? I doubt pathologically or calculatedly destructive people identify with their victims either. Some bridges cannot be built — Vera Mont

You can’t build a bridge where you have already defined the terrain as unbridgeable. Construing people via dichotomies like normal vs pathologically destructive pre-decides the outcome. Why not go back and re-phrase the issue as ‘ I cannot identity with people whose motives and thinking are alien to me’. That will open up alternatives to the conclusion that they are objectively ‘pathologically destructive.’ You can always retreat to that position if no other workable ways of construing the other come to you.

I have in mind Deleuze’s reading of the transition from the death of god to the last man:

The reactive life strives for a long time to secrete its own values, the reactive man takes the place of God: adaptation, evolution, progress, happiness for all and the good of the community; the God-man, the moral man, the truthful man and the social man. These are the new values that are recommended in place of higher values, these are the new characters proposed in place of God. The last men still say: "We have invented happiness" (Z Prologue 5). Why would man have killed God, if not to take his still warm seat?

Heidegger remarks, commenting on Nietzsche, "if God . . . has disappeared from his authoritative position in the suprasensory world, then this authoritative place itself is still always preserved, even though as that which has become empty. The now-empty authoritative realm of the suprasensory and the ideal world can still be adhered to. What is more, the empty place demands to be occupied anew and to have the god now vanished from it replaced by something else".

Moreover it is always the same type of life which benefits from the depreciation of the whole of life in the first place, the type of life which took advantage of the will to nothingness in order to obtain its victory, the type of life which triumphed in the temples of God, in the shadow of higher values. Then, secondly, the type of life which puts itself in God's place, which turns against the principle of its own triumph and no longer recognises values other than its own. Finally, the exhausted life which prefers to not will, to fade away passively, rather than being animated by a will which goes beyond it.

This still is and always remains the same type of life; life depreciated, reduced to its reactive form. Values can change, be renewed or even disappear. What does not change and does not disappear is the nihilistic perspective which governs this history from beginning to end and from which all these values (as well as their absence) arise. This is why Nietzsche can think that nihilism is not an event in history but the motor of the history of man as universal history. Negative, reactive and passive nihilism: for Nietzsche one and the same history is marked out by Judaism, Christianity, the reformation, free thought, democratic and socialist ideology etc. Up until the last man.

Nietzsche became Zarathustra's Opposite to act as a saoshyant. This was part of his chosen purpose in life. To become the Anti-Saoshyant aka the "Anti-Christ."

And certainly not because he hated Christ, he modeled the Ubermensch based off his psychological evaluation of the account of the life of Christ based off the Gospels. (AC 33 & 39) — DifferentiatingEgg

Deleuze interprets Nietzsche as viewing Christ as offering a passive nihilism comparable to Buddhism.

He gave passive nihilism a certain nobility where men were still at the stage of negative nihilism, when reactive nihilism had hardly begun. Beyond bad conscience and ressentiment Jesus gave the reactive man a lesson: he taught him to die. He was the gentlest of the decadents, the most interesting (AC 31). Christ was neither Jew nor Christian but Buddhist; nearer the Dalai Lama than the Pope.

Nietzsche worked towards giving the purest form and psychology of Christ(ianity) back to the people, in a secularized format, in a world after the "death of God."

Fyi that's not a literal claim either. The death of God is a metaphor... — DifferentiatingEgg

The death of god was just the preview. The death of man was what Nietzsche was after, a post-humanist world beyond a morality of blame.

The one who actually treat that killer - assuming he's eligible for therapy rather than the needle - may have to identify (very likely at some risk to his own mental health). The ones who study the etiology of the illness - if indeed, it's considered an illness rather than evildoing or heroism in the particular society, who study, describe and classify the behaviour need no more emotional bridges with their subject than those who study, describe and classify the pathogens that cause epidemics. — Vera Mont

If one believes that the model of medical illness is adequate to understand the behavior of serial killers, sociopaths, etc, then one has already succumbed to the kind of thinking that splits off emotion from cognition they you seem to buy into. It’s not that you can’t come up with useful results by taking a reductionistic , objectively casual stance, but applying models derived from the hard sciences is woefully inadequate to make sense of how people think and feel. Having said that, it isn’t as though such researchers haven’t first done their damnest to emphatically figure out the people they slap these labels on. It’s that their objectivist stance covers over the valuable insights that could be gained by finding a way to integrate thought and feeling, cognition and emotion, fact and value, motive and cause. As a result, an ‘emotional bridge’ between psychologist and research subject is treated as a hinderance to scientific objectivity.

I suspect it comes from the brain, which like every other part of the person comes to be through the evolutionary process. By definition, if caring offered no survival advantage, we wouldn't care about others. — Hanover

The evolutionary goal of any particular organism is not simply survival, but the maintenance of a normatively stable way of interacting with the environment in the face of changing circumstances. Evolutionary constraints are not a one-way direction from environment to organism, but a reciprocal shaping in which the direction of functioning of an organism co-defines what constitutes an evolutionary pressure on it. In other words , what matters to the functioning of a creature, what it cares about , what is relevant to it, belongs to the very core of the the nature of evolutionary pressure , rather than caring being a potentially dispensable product of it.

All living things are sense-makers. Rocks merely survive, living systems maintain ongoing patterns of actions. For humans, this is not a static pattern of behavior but one which is continually evolving.

Conversely, I don't believe that it is necessary for a surgeon to experience the suffering of his patients or a psychotherapist to identify with the glee of a serial killer — Vera Mont

It depends on what the surgeon’s goals are, doesn’t it? If knowing too much about the patient would distract from performing the surgery, then it could be a liability. On the other hand, if remembering that you’re not a car mechanic fixing a broken machine can help you to talk to the anesthetized patient, play their favorite music, reassure them before and after the surgery and generally convey to them that you know how terrifying and dehumanizing it can be to be on their side of the doctor-patient relationship, it could be a plus.

The psychotherapist may not ‘identity’ with the glee of a serial killer in the sense of being tempted to become a serial killer themselves, but if the therapist cannot see not only how the glee is morally justified from the serial killer’s perspective, but build a bridge between that perspective and that of the therapist, then they will not be of much help to the client.

Sociopathy doesn't relate to someone's ability to calculate outcomes. It relates to whether they care how it impacts others — Hanover

Where do you think ‘caring’ comes from, a mysterious substance of ‘fellow feeling’? I like the enactivist definition of caring:

Sense-making is “the active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. [It is t]he basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring”…Whether we act or we perceive, whether we emote or we cognize, a structure of caring is at play in all forms of sense-making.

How do we differentiate between ourselves and others in the first place such that we are a position to decide whether or not to care about them ? The ‘self’ is already a society of interacting bits of interests, which is why it’s not that hard to find ourselves in relations with persons ( our parents, our children, a loved one), where our societies of self and that of the other become so intertwined that I can no longer tell the difference between acting selfishly and selflessly. A baby may not initially believe there is any differences. how they feel and how other feel, because they haven’t learned to decenter their own perspective. The whole concept that other have their perspective must be learned.

But research shows that from a very early age infants do distinguish their mother’s feelings from their own and respond to emotions like sadness with empathic responses. Animals that play know not to cause hurt to their playmates, else the play stop. Sociopaths care very much how others think and feel, and do their best to make sense of others. But the results of their assessments leads them to the conclusion that the thinking and feeling of others is unrelatable , without significant meaning. There are conditions where others appear to us as walking automations, alive but strangely inanimate. We want to empathize with them but we see nothing in their behavior which makes it possible to do so.

I also think it is not in our best interests to treat everyone with empathy. This is where, as a pretty clear lefty in terms of box-ticking, i get off the train. the "Be kind" crowd have fucked everything up in my view. — AmadeusD

How about “be insightful” or “be a good psychological investigator”? I think all of us always want to be kind, to the extent that others appear to be deserving of that kindness. So the problem is not in our ethical motive and intent, but in our ability to to keep going in our assessment of the thinking of others just at that point where it would appear that they are undeserving of our kindness.

I take empathy to mean that I don't burn down your house because I know what it would feel like to have my own house burned down. It's a cognitive function that places me in your shoes so that I don't treat the other as the other, but I treat him as my own. Whether a dog actually empathizes is doubtful. It is more likely she cares for her puppy out of an innate desire to protect, not out of thinking what pain her poor puppy must be in and that she wouldn't such pain on herself. But I could be wrong, not being a dog and all.

The ability to empathize is heightened and lessened in different people, and some actually lack the ability entirely (sociopaths — Hanover

We can’t function in society without an ability to anticipate to at least a minimal extent the behavior of others. We also must anticipate our own behavior, and when our ability to ‘know our own mind ’ crumbles we find ourselves in crisis. Our ability to empathize with others is entirely a function of a basic , clinical skill at glimpsing their perspective , how it differs from ours and how to assess the nature of the gap. ‘Sociopaths ‘ don’t have a deficit in something called empathy seen as a a mechanism separable from the skill of modeling the other’s outlook. It’s not some adjustable thermostat of caring, independent of the raw ability to make sense of others. The weakness of the sociopath is in the anticipatory modeling , not in a mysterious deficit of ‘fellow feeling’.

We don’t want to treat the other as other. It doesn’t occur to us to do so unless a barrier rises preventing us from being able to assimilate their actions in a way that is recognizable to us and that doesn’t seem threatening and chaotic. We arent born as fortress selves who have to be taught to care about others, or rely on some instinctual
module in the brain to do so. The basic fact is that relating to the perspectives of others is extremely hard work, and each of us is trying the best we can to accomplish this. When we fail at this task , we end up calling for empathy chips in others’ brains , or calling for more religious education, or blaming irrational bias, medicalized pathology in the form of sociopathy, or evolutionary predispositions.