The fact that it seems immediate does not negate that it is an interpretive act. This interpretive facility must exist for it's failure as Autism to also exist. — hypericin

Yes , it is both immediate and interpretive, as is all perception. What I directly perceive of your feelings and intentions is a version of them, just as you who are experiencing them are also interpreting them
for yourself , and as a result you may also not recognize or understand them, and as they change you will need to reinterpret them. If I experienced your states exactly as you do we would be the same person. My point was that this interpretive act is not the consulting of an inner script.

I don't think Pinter juxtaposes a real, physical world, with a world of appearances. It's not as if the real thing is hiding behind the sensory depiction of it. The first words in the book are:

Imagine that all life has vanished from the universe, but everything else is undisturbed. Matter is scattered about in space in the same way as it is now, there is sunlight, there are stars, planets and galaxies—but all of it is unseen. There is no human or animal eye to cast a glance at objects, hence nothing is discerned, recognized or even noticed. Objects in the unobserved universe have no shape, color or individual appearance, because shape and appearance are created by minds. Nor do they have features, because features correspond to categories of animal sensation.
— Pinter, Charles. Mind and the Cosmic Order p1

He doesn't go on to say much about the world as it is in the absence of any observer, because (I think) in his view, there's nothing to be said about it. — Wayfarer

So the question is, from Pinter’s vantage what is left of reality when we remove color, shape, features and individual appearance? Is a wavelength of light devoid of these properties? I think Pinter believes it is. For instance, he argues “Physical motion is real but altogether different from the moving window we perceive.” How would he know? Different by what standards? I think I have the answer. You were right. Pinter does not posit a real physical world of shapes or colors or gestalt features. The real objective world he posits is based on the simple rules of the Game of Life. He says observer-independent reality is simple , mechanical. not gestalt-based but rule-bound:

“A law involving just two—or a small number—of separate objects is said to be simple. And when a simple law acts on every pair of objects in a swarm, resulting in a complex global pattern of the whole throng, the overall pattern is caused by what is called an addition of simples.”

“Physics would not exist if it were not possible to analyze phenomena of the world by decomposing them in this manner into elementary interactions. We are able to do this because nature itself is constituted that way. It appears that all of the physical world is an addition of
simples.”

“Simple rules, acting over and over on each of a large number of objects, are able to give rise to astonishingly complex collective behavior. In fact, they often generate repetitive patterns having great regularity and symmetry.” “Animal perception isn’t designed to see elementary physical relationships between subatomic particles, and bring these low-level events to awareness.”
“The perplexing intricacy that we see in the world is actually the cumulative result of simple laws that have been operating for billions of years, creating patterns upon patterns.” “The midlevel universe has energy and mass, but does not have “features”” It also has ‘information’.

In mentioning mass, energy and information, I dont believe he is speaking here of observer-dependent features of the natural world but of that world as it is intrinsically. One might ask what an observer-independent rule could possibly mean. How is a rule , mass , energy or information not a gestalt? Pinter wants to claim that the gestalts humans impose on the world in order to create uniform objects, shapes, features and pattens adds a lawfulness not present in the actual material world. Put differently. he takes the Humean approach that gestalts are the result of evolutionary guided causal processes. But he wants to hold on to the idea of a primordial , or ‘simple’ lawfulness in material reality.

I think it is this semantic realism which cause hi
to see a rift between subjective sensation and feeling on the one hand, and objectivity on the other.

“Claims about mental phenomena depend ineliminably on the meanings of terms such as feelings and sensations, and cannot be treated as the objects of physics are treated. One can study the material universe while pretending there is no mind, but one cannot study mind while pretending there is no mind…phenomena which don’t allow themselves to be studied objectively are not material phenomena. This suggests that we may define material phenomena to be exactly those phenomena that are amenable to be studied objectively, as formal systems. Phenomena which are not amenable to being treated objectively are not material. They are phenomena of a different kind, located in a different order of reality.”

Question : If the world is ‘material’ because of the way it responds to our interactions with it, why can’t we study our mind the same way, by reflecting on it ? Isn’t this what phenomenological analysis does? And what is the difference between phenomena such that only some are amenable to objective study while others are not? What makes physics a formal system and science of mind a non-formal system?

As Pinter knows, the reason one can study the material universe while pretending there is no mind is the same reason scientists in the past have studied the mind while pretending there is no mind. Pinter recognizes that in the past accepted notions of scientific objectivity required that we ignore individual differences in the sense of meaning of material concepts. But this is not true for all sciences. Recent biological models accommodate a relentlessly interactively self-transforming impetus within ecosystems, within organisms, within cells and within dna environments. Neurophenomenologists draw from these approaches to understand consciousness and language in naturalistic terms that don’t require ignoring subjective perspective in favor of a formalistic objectivism. The problem isnt that the mind operates differently than other aspects of the world, it is that we have for too long assumed, as Pinter does, that “subjective categories such as sensations and impressions are nothing but
the way they feel to us”. This is precisely the view that phenomenology and enactivism are challenging by showing how feeling arises out of social ecosystems rather than from purely ‘private’ feeling( (Wittgenstein also
showed the primarily expressive and discursive function of feeling. By the same token, if we jettison Pinter’s realist assumption to conceding the simple causal lawfulness of material reality we need no longer see feeling -based subjectivity and what would be called objective nature as belonging to separate realities


His is a one-way interaction. We probe the world and it responds in certain ways based on the nature of our actions and perceptual dispositions. On the basis of these constraints and affordances we build gestalt models of the world , imbuing it with all sorts of features different from its ‘own inherent ‘simple’ lawful objective reality.

“It is nature’s prohibitions that guide our hand as we segment our world and form a model of it. Although there may be alternative ways of segmenting reality
—hence different, non-similar world models may be constructed—few are actually possible: The prohibitions whittle down the possibilities to a very few, or perhaps to just one.”

This sounds like Popper; we asymptotically approximate a final picture of the world.

What’s missing here is a recognition that the we dont just model the world, we continuously rebuild it , and this means that the constraints and affordances that we receive from the world as feedback from our engagements with it change along with our constructions in a reciprocal process. The material world Pinter sees as having certain set simple properties responds to our constructive efforts by changing those properties.

Pinter uses the image of a hollow bust of Caesar. We are inside that bust and want to know the features of the outside of the bust so we infer the outside from our explorations of the inside. I suggest a better image is the at we have created a giant bust of Caesar as a shelter that we live inside of. We have reasons to try and improve the structure in various ways in order to make it more weatherproof as well as aesthetically pleasing. The very process of constructing these improvements through invention of new tools , new means of labor organization and the feedback from the structure itself redefines what is at issue for us in our empirical endeavor. This reciprocal shaping and reshaping taking place between us and the objects of our investigations not only is a better depiction of science than ‘modeling’, it can apply equally well to a pre-living world.

Pinter senses that his minimalist version of causal realism doesn’t quite do justice to the powers of what he calls gestalt perception, but he leaves us with the confusing picture of subjectivity as a wonder that emerges mysteriously out of a mechanistic ground.

“An easy answer might be that the material world of physics is the foundation which is the platform for all reality:
Complex objects are constructed out of the material “stuff” that exists in physical reality. In this perspective, matter and energy provide the foundation: Everything composite, manifold or structured is fashioned out of matter and energy. This is the commonsense solution. It’s not wrong, but it’s simplistic. Like the philosophy of materialism, it disregards Gestalts, which provide a
whole new opening to reality.”

I certainly don’t want to posit physics as ‘normatively determinative ’, and I don’t think Pinter does that, either. — Wayfarer

Let me use Pinter’s own words to make the case that his is a classic neo-Kantian appearance-reality dualism.

To begin with, one of his chapter headings is ‘Do We See the World Realistically?’Does he mean by this that it makes no sense to distinguish between human or animal perceptions of the world, and the world as it supposedly is in some factual naturalistic sense? Or does he mean that there is a real world with intrinsic properties which sensate creatures do not represent accurately? It sounds like the latter to me:

“What an animal experiences seeing may be unlike a high-fidelity reproduction of reality, with all its complexity and inscrutability…. so long as all the experiences a creature has with objects are consistent with one another— with no discrepancies of any kind—the creature is far better off interacting in mind with usefully simplified and schematized replicas.”

“It is no different when you set out to solve a technical problem involving a real-world situation: You don’t want a photograph of the objective situation, but a diagram showing just the necessary information.”

Studies have show that “faithful representation is driven to extinction by non-veridical strategies based on utility rather than objective reality.”

“So long as its segmentation is self-consistent, the animal cannot ever become aware of a difference between its world-model and reality.”

So our accounts are a replica , a non-faithful representation of the ‘physical facts’ of an ‘objective situation’.

“Though our segmentation of reality is partly bound to physical facts, much of it is arbitrary.”

Pinter uses as an example of this arbitrary association between external reality and our conceptions of it the difference between color and wavelengths of light. The former are subjective representations and the latter are the physical facts.

“There is no logical connection between perceived color and the wavelength of light: It is an arbitrary association invented by nature.”

Neo-Kantianism courts skepticism because our representational filters prevent us from seeing the world as it is.

A Gestalt picture does not merely bind separate objects together, but creates an entirely new complex entity which did not exist before. It creates a new world of hierarchically structured new objects—a world which could not exist without Gestalt perception.

Our biologically-designed model of reality is thus superposed on the physical stuff of the world and structures it. It is with this reality that we interact.

It is useful to compare Pinter’s model of gestalt with that of Merleau-Ponty. For Pinter , a gestalt “is a complex of images that we may call the concept of dog. Visually, it includes a fluid composite image of what the most commonly seen dogs look like, viewed in various positions and from different angles. It includes general notions of the temperament and character of dogs, and the knowledge that dogs may be both loving and, in some circumstances, dangerous.”

From MP’s vantage , this definition of gestalt remains embedded in objective naturalism, which explains gestalts a s the result of a causal process of concept formation. For MP, as for the later Wittgenstein, a gestalt is never a move from the particular to the general. It neither involves composition nor decomposition.
A perceived object has its sense in relation to a background gestalt field as its irreducible basis. A gestalt is both subjective and intersubjective, producing perceptual and social fields of action.

Pinter’s contention that gestalts are ‘superimposed on the physical stuff of the world’ is problematic, and suggests that he, like Quine, take the results of physics to be normatively determinative. Only this orientation, I believe, can justify belief in the 'unreasonable effectiveness' of mathematics. We have to begin with a reified notion of the object which transcends the relativity of Pinter’s subjective gestalts in order to see mathematical logic as unreasonably effective. If you’re looking for a transcendental basis for scientific truth you’re better off with Putnam’s valuative realism than with an idealization of the objectivity of natural objects.

Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts
— Joshs

So why would those patterns emerge variable? What causes the variance? — Isaac

Variance cause variance. As Deleuze said, a change is a difference that makes a difference. Laws and patterned regularities are idealizations of continuous
qualitative change.

The atoms do collude together to form a teacup. That's why we can all see them as a teacup. That's why one of the available gestalts is that of a teacup. Because the atoms do indeed form the shape of a teacup. They also form the shape of dozens of other things which we ignore, choosing, instead, to focus on the teacup option. But it's wrong to say they're not in the form of a teacup just because they're also in the form of many other options. — Isaac

It’s not just a matter of shapes that atoms
form , but of the relationship between accounts and the varying senses of concepts like shape, size, space. Of these potentially infinite variety of accounts, are you giving priority to a certain empirical account from physics? Is this a ‘bedrock’ account, as Quine claimed, one which grounds all the others in an irreducibly real beginning?

I think Wayfarer might agree that the way to bedrock is to begin by asking what all possible accounts of any aspect of the world have in common, that is , what is the condition of possibility of empirical account-building?
I think an answer compatible with naturalism is possible, but it requires a naturalism utilizing recent models from biology, centering on niche construction. As the thinking goes ( I draw from Joseph Rouse here), linguistic conceptual accounts of the world are elaborations of practical perceptual interactions that are continuous with the role of niche building in non-linguistic animals under selective evolutionary pressure. I don’t think such models warrant taking an account from physics as normatively determinative. That’s a way of saying that physics is just beginning to take into account the temporal notions that Darwinism has contributed.

Or how humans tend to anthropomorphize the world around us? How we find cartoon characters, puppets and animals to have beliefs and desires like us? Or the belief that natures if full of spirts and gods? — Marchesk

I’m not at all denying that humans understand the world by reference to a system of constructs , channels
of meaning by which we interpret, organize and anticipate events. What I am arguing against is the idea any element of this system is unchanged by moment to moment events. The whole system is in motion at all times like an interwoven tapestry.

Do you damn that they can experience themselves
performing this action, or that this is something they do whether they are aware of it or not?
— Joshs

No, I don't damn. It would be rather extreme. I'm more inclined to bless. But I don't think either is particularly called for. — Cuthbert

Oh shit.. I meant ‘deny’

How does this account for autism, or "mind-blindness"? Or how humans tend to anthropomorphize the world around us? How we find cartoon characters, puppets and animals to have beliefs and desires like us? Or the belief that natures if full of spirts and gods? — Marchesk

A lot of work has been done on autism within the enactivist community.

Take a look at these articles:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3607806/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236792668_Understanding_Interpersonal_Problems_in_Autism_Interaction_Theory_as_An_Alternative_to_Theory_of_Mind

ABSTRACT: I argue that theory theory approaches to autism offer a wholly inadequate explanation of au- tistic symptoms because they offer a wholly inade- quate account of the non-autistic understanding of others. As an alternative I outline interaction theory, which incorporates evidence from both developmen- tal and phenomenological studies to show that hu- mans are endowed with important capacities for in- tersubjective understanding from birth or early infancy. As part of a neurophenomenological analysis of au- tism, interaction theory offers an account of interper- sonal problems that is fully consistent with the variety of social and nonsocial symptoms found in autism.

Regardless of how you look at it, you're still experience an environment that is not in the external world and is not publically available to others. You may not wish to call it subjective or internal, but it sure has the same hallmarks of being subjective/internal. — Marchesk

It is true that whether I watch another dreaming , or listen to them speak , I cannot say that I can accurately anticipate how they will behave next. If I put to the test my expectations concerning what they are dreaming about or their motives and intentions in speaking to me I will sometimes be validated and sometimes not. This tells me that the other person changing in ways to that go beyond my ability to construe in tightly predictive terms. But does this make their functioning private?

If I am attempting to understand an ecosystem are the features of this system that I fail to model well ‘private’?
What makes something private? If we believe that brains make use of stored representations it would seem that we could call such entities private. They are protected from direct expose to an outside world as well as from other representations. But embodied enactivist accounts of cognition see the brain as part of an ecosystem which includes the body and the world. And even when world seems to be minimally involved in cognitive
activity ( deep thought) , we are still dealing with a total system that is in the business of making changes in itself.
That means that even my own thinking isn’t strictly ‘private’ , given that my mind is subtly reinventing itself and its past every moment of its functioning. It is already out in the world every moment , coming back to itself
from an outside.

So how does this account for lying and manipulation? Or someone putting on a front to appear acceptable? How about all the times we wonder to ourselves what someone is really feeling or whether they're telling us the truth? If beliefs and desires are never hidden away in people's minds, then how come we have no accurate way to always tell when someone is lying or what they're feeling? — Marchesk

Good questions. I agree that the way the interactionist position is articulated here gives the impression that we simply read off others’ intentions and thoughts from
their observable behavior. My reading of it is that cognitive processes do not consist of internal representations of an external world. Rather than matching inner with outer, the two are blended in each perception. In other words, while i always bring a history of expectations to my interpretation of a perceptual or conceptual events, those expectations interact with something novel in the event, such that the expectations themselves are adjusted to accommodate the object in very act of perceiving. One’s cognitive system is engaged in a holistic way with the world, and changes itself as a whole( including its ‘stored’ memories) with every experience. This is true even in dreaming and imagination. How else could solitary thought lead to legitimately new insight? Certainly not from a recycling or re-combination of stored representations.

When we attempt to understand others , we neither consult an inner ‘canned’ script , nor veridically read off their inner thoughts from their behavior. Instead , our expectations are exposed to what we observe in interaction with others, and as a result we directly perceive ( without simulation) a version of the other’s intentions , which subsequent experience with the other may validate or invalidate.

The way I've begun to integrate these ideas is in line with a kind of analytical idealsm, in which maths and what the medievals called universals are uniform structures of reason. That is they're not material in nature, nor derived from or supervening on the physical. but they're real as the constituents of rational thought. — Wayfarer

In doing so , haven’t you swapped out intrinsic features of an external world for intrinsic features of an internal conceptual world? Why not go all the way and make both the natural world as we experience it and our mathematical concepts relational, contextual and contestable? Isn’t math a form of logic, and isnt logic a pragmatic construction?

And also, hamsters can sit. And they have no concepts. That is because sitting is one thing; and referring is another. — Cuthbert

Do you damn that they can experience themselves
performing this action, or that this is something they do whether they are aware of it or not? If the latter, we’re back to the original problem, which is that it is we who are conceptually defining what the anima is doing. If the former, hamsters have no linguistic concepts, but they have sensori-motor pattens that make up body schemas. These body schemas act like concepts in the sense that they produce a perceived world for the animal which is defined by the animal’s particular needs. Actions ( like sitting) and objects may take on very different meaning to a hamster than to a human.

How can there be any pattern of relationship (continually changing or not) without intrinsic properties? If the hidden states are absent of any properties at all then there'd be no pattern. All would be one homogeneous mass.

Patterns (even ephemeral ones) require variation and variation requires properties over which there can be variance. — Isaac

Patterns emerge and are reinforced or altered in actual
contexts of interaction, rather than in rules or properties that supposedly exist before or outside of actual contexts. What is at issue for an organism with regard to any aspect of its behavior must re-establish itself in actual material interactions.

I don't see how dreams fit with this approach. Your body is normally paralyzed during dreams, and your dream content is usually imaginary. You're not typically perceiving the world. How is that not internal to the brain? There's quite a lot to consciousness which is more than just perceiving or interacting with the world. Like imagination, memory and inner dialog. Even perception carries some anticipation of what one is going to perceive. And when we interact with others, we do a sort of simulation or estimation of their internal states. We guess at what they're thinking and feeling. — Marchesk

The question is whether we should
look at such experiences as imagination
and dreaming as merely a re-arrangement of what was already there, the accessing of inert memories in place of contact with fresh, external novelty. Why not look at such experiences as forms of self-transformation? To do this would be to re-think the meaning of internal vs external.

As far as simulating others’ states of mind, simulation theory is o w of three competing f approaches in cognitive science, along with theory theory and interaction theory. Theory theory says that when we try to understand others we consult an internal script.

“Theory theory (TT) and simulation theory (ST), the standard and dominant approaches to social cognition, share the important supposition that when we attempt to understand the actions of others, we do so by making sense of them in terms of their mental processes to which we have no direct access. That is, we attempt to “mind read” their beliefs, desires, and intentions, and such mind reading or mentalizing is our primary and pervasive way of understanding their behavior. Furthermore, both TT and ST characterize social cognition as a process of explaining or predicting what another person has done or will do. TT claims that we explain another person's behavior by appealing to an either innate or acquired “theory” of how people behave in general; a theory that is framed in terms of mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) causing or motivating behavior. ST claims that we have no need for a theory like this, because we have a model, namely, our own mind, that we can use to simulate the other person's mental states. We model others' beliefs and desires as if we were in their situation.”

“In most intersubjective situations, that is, in situations of social interaction, we have a direct perceptual understanding of another person's intentions because their intentions are explicitly expressed in their embodied actions and their expressive behaviors. This understanding does not require us to postulate or infer a belief or a desire hidden away in the other person's mind.”(Shaun Gallagher)

I would argue with Putnam , who is a semantic relativist , that the world has no intrinsic properties
— Joshs

Does that imply homogeneity of the external world? If so, then what causes the heterogeneity we experience? — Isaac

I think the opposite is the case. There are no intrinsic properties because the heterogeneity the world produces is not based on static facts of the matter but continually changing patterns of relationship.

Can you give an example of something which isn't inherently/intrinsically real and say what features deny it that status? — Isaac

I would argue with Putnam , who is a semantic relativist , that the world has no intrinsic properties or attributes. What is real is internal to accounts of the world.

“…the metaphysical assumption that there is a fundamental dichotomy between "intrinsic" properties of things and "relational" properties of things makes no sense.”( The Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy). This would seem to rule out Wayfarer’s mathematical objects.

From theories of gravity, something which I'm more familiar with, I'd say that scientific theories seem to progress in such a way that the older ones are special cases of newer ones.

To illustrate, the calculation of relative velocity involves the use of the Lorentz factor, but at nonrelativistic speeds, it tends to zero and can be ignored completely. — Agent Smith

Hilary Putnam makes a distinction between scientific equations and worldviews:

“Theories in a mature science typically include earlier theories as limiting cases. But it is important to notice that what they include as limiting cases are the equations of the earlier theories, not the world-views of these theories. There is no sense in which the world-view of Newtonian physics is a "limiting case" of the world-view of general relativity, or a "limiting case" of the world-view of quantum mechanics. There is no more evidence that science converges to one final world-view than there is that literature or morality converge to one final world-view.”

We couldn't use the concept 'sitting' if we had no concepts. But we could sit if we had no concepts (hamster example). And we do have concepts. So what is left is (a) sitting and (b) concepts. And the difference between them. And the OP still contains the identified mistake. And it still contains some things of value, despite that mistake. — Cuthbert

No, we can not use the word ‘sit’ to refer to a doing without concepts, or without some other organized framework of interrelationality ( sensori-motor schemas of movement and perception). All we can legitimately say is that we are always exposed to an outside that provides affordances and constraints relative to the direction of our functioning. Yes, there is an outside , but we cannot associate any intrinsic features with it , because what these features are is always relative to some other features , which are always in a state of reciprocal transformation, independent of our subjectivity. I dont agree with Quine that the relativist entanglement of fact and value finally reaches bedrock with physics.

Behaviorally, its absence makes little difference, apart for a few subtle impairments. But internally, the consequences are profound: those who lack this structure have no internal lives at all. — hypericin

This description is not that far removed from how enactivist cognitive science understands consciousness.
That is, they dispense with the internal-external, subjective-objective divide and argue that awareness is embodied , which means that it is an interaction , either with other persons or other aspects of one’s environment, which can include one’s bodily( affective) environment.
In this view consciousness is not some mysterious inner substance or module, it is an elaboration of organizational and functional characteristics of all living systems.

Wherever we would be sitting, it would not be on a concept. If we had no concepts we might still have somewhere to sit - as a hamster might sit somewhere, for example. Earthquakes can throw chairs around and they don't have the concept of a chair. The post you quoted has some interesting thoughts in it. I pointed out one of the things that is not quite in order. You suspected there was at least one. So there it is, for what it's worth. — Cuthbert

To get to ‘what a thing is’ non-conceptually , we would have to remove all words that conceptually determine what it is that is being done or seen ( and not just words. Conceptually is richer than just linguistic expression). So we can’t use ‘sitting’, ‘throwing’, a spatial ‘somewhere’ or temporal ‘some thing’, words like ‘hamster’ and ‘earthquake’. So what is left?

The concept of a chair is a concept. It does not follow that a chair is a concept. And in fact a chair is not a concept. We can do things with chairs that we cannot do with concepts. We can't sit on a concept, for example. That is a crucial difference between chairs and concepts — Cuthbert

Perception is conceptually saturated. So doing things with chairs is informed by this tacit background intelligibility. We throw chairs, or sit on them , or move them around. These performances presuppose an interpretation of what we are doing.

A philosophical understanding is possible if we try to conceive it as provisional, limited, conditioned, imperfect, rather than ultimate.
— Angelo Cannata

I think most philosophers believe that. — Jackson

Yep.

But by that logic we can never understand society - because we are a part of it. We can’t understand natural selection because we aren’t removed from it. Nor could we understand genetics, medicine, psychology etc because it all applies intrinsically to our being.

Yet we do have a good understanding of these things as they have lead to a knowledge database that reflects what seems to occur in each case. — Benj96

Recent approaches in cognitive psychology base knowledge on biological models of niche construction. According to this thinking, scientific and other kinds of knowledge are not representations of the world, they are constructed interactions. To know is to change one’s schematized interactions with one’s environment in accord with one’s needs and purposes. What we call
consciousness is merely a more complexly integrated form of organism-environment interactions that enact biological niches. So in knowing the world we are not ‘capturing’ or mirroring something pre-existing, we are changing it in complex ways. The role of memory in human conceptualization is not that of access to an unaltered past. Memory is always a reconstruction of the past.

Memory doest retrieve a pristine past , but it reveals a continuity between the past. and the present. My larger point is that the general functions of human conscious knowledge creation are only elaborations of the normative sense-making that all organisms achieve in the form of niche construction. Even for the simplest creatures , the world appears and matters to
them in a certain way relative to their needs and aims. The fact that cosmological history evinces a development from simple particles and interactions to more andmore complex relationships allows us to link human cogntive and organismic niche construction back to self-organizing processes characterizing pre-life history also. The evolution of the inorganic realm thus presupposes a kind of memory. In order to speak of regions of a universe that become more complex over time, we have to assume that something remains to be referred back to as development takes place.

Once we abandon the idea that knowledge is a representing or capturing of the world , we can begin to dissolve the gap we have created between what a natural world does and what human conceptualization does.

Currently art is considered subjective. Finding an objective explanation for art is one of the challenges philosophy has to yet solve. — Philosophim

Unless of course both art and science are intersubjective, but in different ways, as Thomas Kuhn argues. That’s why he concludes that if the idea of progress in the arts is ambiguous, then it is in science also:

“The most persuasive case for the concept of cumulativeness is made by the familiar contrast between the development of science and that of art. Both disciplines display continuity of historical development –
neither could have reached its present state without its past – yet the relation of present to past in these two fields is clearly distinct.
Einstein or Heisenberg could, we feel sure, have persuaded Newton that twentieth-century science has surpassed the science of the seventeenth century, but we anticipate no remotely similar conclusion from a debate between, say, Rembrandt and Picasso.
In the arts successive developmental stages are autonomous and self-complete: no obvious external standard is available for comparisons between them.

The creative idiom of a Rembrandt, Bach, or Shakespeare resolves all its aesthetic problems and prohibits the consideration of others. Fundamentally new modes of aesthetic expression emerge only in intimate conjunction with a new perception of the aesthetic problem that the new modes must aim to resolve. Except in the realm of technique, the transition between one stage of artistic development and the next is a transition between incommensurables. In science, on the other hand, problems seem to be set by nature and in advance, without reference to the idiom or taste of the scientific community. Apparently, therefore, successive stages of scientific development can be evaluated as successively better approximations to a full solution. That is why the present state of science always seems to embrace its past stages as parts, which is what the concept of cumulativeness means. Guided by that concept, we see in the development of science no equivalents for the total shift of artistic vision – the shift from one integrated set of problems, images, techniques, and tastes to another.”

Kuhn disagrees with this cumulate e model of science:

If we are to preserve any part of the metaphor which makes inventions and discoveries new bricks for the scientific edifice, and if we are simultaneously to give resistance and controversy an essential place in the development of science, then we may have to recognize that the addition of new bricks demands at least partial demolition of the existing structure, and that the new edifice erected to include the new brick is not just the old one plus, but a new building. We may, that is, be forced to recognize that new discoveries and new theories do not simply add to the stock of pre-existing scientific knowledge. They change it. (Kuhn M2, p. 7)19

Often a decision to embrace a new theory turns out to involve an implicit redefinition of the corresponding science. Old problems may be relegated to another science or may be declared entirely “unscientific.” Problems that, on the old theory, were non-existent
or trivial may, with a new theory, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And, as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. It follows that, to a significant extent, the science that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible, but often actually incommensurable, with that which has gone before. Only as this is realized, can we grasp the full sense in which scientific revolutions are like those in the arts. (Kuhn M1, pp. 17)

Yes, exactly. That is what I was referring to. — Jackson

I think it was in Monk’s biography of Witt

[

↪Joshs So, would you say the Logical Positivists, and the Analytics whose main concern is with propositional and modal logic, are the odd ones out (are there others?) islands cut off from the diverse mainland of philosophy? — Janus

I would say that any school of philosophy that understands its inquiry in isolation from the biological and cultural niches that produce it will erect arbitrary walls between it and other schools of philosophy.

Philosophy today is much more comprehensive overall than in the past, but it is fragmented into myriad schools, each of which in their main focus and central concerns seem to have little understanding of, or interest in, the others. — Janus

There is indeed much fragmentation, but let’s see which schools of thought are capable of mutual interchange, based on successful efforts in the past. I can think of such linkages connecting hermeneutics, Wittgensteinian ordinary language philosophy, Existentialism, phenomenology, deconstruction, social constructionism, poststructuralism , critical theory , Marxism,philosophy of mind, cultural studies and philosophy of science.

quote="Janus;717114"]The idea of progress is the idea of movement towards something ever better. In the context of knowledge this means.more detailed, more comprehensive, more accurate.I think it is arguable that we see progress in this sense in science.[/quote]

It may be better to say that most scientists
today still buy into a notion of a cumulative progress in science, but that may be changing.

Philosophy is very different from science. In science people do not talk about past science. In philosophy, people still talk about Plato and Aristotle as live topics. — Jackson

And some regard it as nothing more than quaint and misguided ideas that are primitive and from which he have progressed.

I think Heidegger was on the right track when he said that in the movement of thought some things are occluded. Hence the importance of retrieval. — Fooloso4

I think the words of physicist Lee Smolen are relevant here.

“… fundamental physics has been in a crisis, due to the evident need for new revolutionary ideas-which becomes more evident with each failure of experiment to confirm fashionable theories, and the inability of those trained in a pragmatic, anti- philosophical style of research to free themselves from fashion and invent those new ideas. To aspire to be a revolutionary in physics, I would claim, it is helpful to make contact with the tradition of past revolutionaries. But the lessons of that tradition are maintained not in the communities of fashionable science, with their narrow education and outlook, but in the philosophical community and tradition.”

Sometime in the ealy 20th century, the art world fell victim to slave morality. — Merkwurdichliebe

You mean Christianity?

hilosophy often serves as a kind of creative ground for the creation of new sciences -- it's called philosophy when no one agrees and it sounds absurd (Galileo), and it's called science after someone shows how clever they are (by hook or by crook, but people are often persuaded by accurate predictions or things which satisfy their desires so those are frequently focused upon -- but note it's not the truth of propositions, but rather there persuasiveness that's being put forward here)

I don't think there's really an essence between the disciplines -- rather, more like a continuum that as things become uncontroversial scientists begin to step in and expand while holding some fundamentals constant. — Moliere

Excellent points :100:

The scientific method is much stricter than any methodology philosophy has to offer, and for that reason its progress is more apparent. Moreover, philosophy challenges its own methods and becomes mired in its own complexities, often leading to mind twisting paradoxes, whereas science takes its method and moves forward, achieving concrete results. — Merkwurdichliebe

This is an old view of what science and philosophy do, harking back to Kant. Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of science is a representation of this modernist idea of scientific progress. With Putnam , Kuhn and Rorty we see a shift in thinking away from Kant toward a conceptual relativism that forms the basis of newer work in psychology. You are reading Nietzsche
as a modernist, but these days he tends to be read as a postmodernist.

If your position is remotely correct, you should easily be able to name at least one significant contribution made by eight world class philosophers. — Merkwurdichliebe

In case that quote by Thompson’s wasn't enough, I will organize contributions by contemporary philosophers in the form of a developmental hierarchy, beginning with the least advanced and ending with the most advanced thinkers. You focused on the past 100 years. Only one of the names on this list, Nietzsche, is disqualified.

Quine
Sellars
Putnam
Sartre
Wittgenstein
Kuhn
Rorty
Gergen
Nietzsche
Foucault
Deleuze
Husserl
Heidegger
Merleau-Ponty
Derrida

Let’s begin with Quine, Sellars and Putnam. They dissolved the fact-value distinction by showing how all statements of fact about any aspect of the empirical
world presuppose a valuative account within which they are intelligible. This has important implications for the understanding of the relation between our concepts and the world. Based on this. Putnam argues that all concepts are relative, and there is no fact of the matter that has intrinsic existence independent of all accounts.

Kuhn , Rorty and Gergen take us into the postmodern realm, not only arguing for conceptual relativism , but ethical and valuative relativism. Phenomenologists like Sartre showed psychologists how to integrate cognition and emotion, which under positivism, behaviorism
and cognitivism had been treated separately , with emotions treated as secondary phenomena in relation to cognition. Phenomenology also contributed to self-organizing approaches within the biological sciences, and to embodied cognitive models of perception.
There is much more to be said here , but this is a starting point.

In sum, ideas from the last 100 of philosophical work have made possible entirely new approaches within psychology and to some extent biology.

I was there at that time. I missed knowing Fine, but I did go climbing with Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who later wrote extensively about a subject I discussed occasionally with him: "flow" in human activities. In particular, in gymnastics and climbing. — jgill

Did you ever cross paths with Eugene Gendlin, who arrived at U. of C. in 1963?

If your position is remotely correct, you should easily be able to name at least one significant contribution made by eight world class philosophers. — Merkwurdichliebe

I thought I did.

this from Evan Thompson’s book, Mind in Life:

“One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

in the appropriate branch of philosophy being priviledged here. Do we wait until this complex material filters down to the rest (assuming we have time for this process) or do we have to recognize that this is a 'boutique' interest with certain subcultures within academe? — Tom Storm

Client-centered therapy is very accessible to the public, and it is compatible with what Thompson is doing.

we can discuss technically about the problem if reality exists: this is one side, the rational side. Or we can discuss how the existence or non existence of reality involves our emotions: this is the emotional side. So far, they have been treated still as divorced fields — Angelo Cannata

you’ve been reading the wrong philosophy. Try this from Evan Thompson. (Mind in Life(

“In recent years, however, it has become increasingly clear to many researchers that cognitive science is incomplete. Cognitive science has focused on cognition while neglecting emotion, affect, and motivation . One common thread running through the following chapters is a re-liance on the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and developed in various directions by numerous others, most notably for my purposes by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Moran 2000; Sokolowski 2000; Spiegelberg 1994). 1 ( ) My aim, however, is not to repeat this tradition's analyses, as they are found in this or that author or text, but to present them anew in light of present-day con-cerns in the sciences of mind. Thus this book can be seen as con-tributing to the work of a new generation of phenomenologists who strive to "naturalize" phenomenology (Petitot et al. 1999). The project of naturalizing phenomenology can be understood in different ways, and my own way of thinking about it will emerge later in this book. The basic idea for the moment is that it is not enough for phenomenology simply to describe and philosophically analyze lived experience; phe-nomenology needs to be able to understand and interpret its investiga-tions in relation to those of biology and mind science.

Yet mind science has much to learn from the analyses of lived expe-rience accomplished by phenomenologists. Indeed, once science turns its attention to subjectivity and consciousness, to experience as it is lived, then it cannot do without phenomenology, which thus needs to be recognized and cultivated as an indispensable partner to the ex-perimental sciences of mind and life. As we will see, this scientific turn to phenomenology leads as much to a renewed understanding of na-ture, life, and mind as to a naturalization of phenomenology (Zahavi 2004b).”

scientific criteria features intersubjective agreement and predictability, while emotions can be messy and in conflict with other's emotions. Science is the same in Australia as it is in Germany, but emotions may vary from person to person — Tom Storm

One could adjust this to read:Because scientific criteria of intersubjective agreement and predictability are designed to be so generic, general and abstract , they cause us to overlook the fact that our individual interpretations of the ‘same’ agreed upon scientific meanings are messy and differ from others’ interpretations. We simply assume as obvious that Science is the ‘same’ in Australia as it is in Germany, and that it is only the emotions that vary from person to person, as if affective relevance were somehow separable from the intricate sense of the agreed upon meanings.

So how do we reconcile this? By looking beyond and within the generic abstractions we call ‘agreed-upon facts’ to the actual affectively relevant way that each of us contextually forms and uses the sense of an agreed-upon fact.

Does philosophy of science require a considerable depth of knowledge in that scientific discipline? — jgill

I suppose it depends on who is doing the philosophizing. I am very impressed with the work of Joseph Rouse. I can assure you his grasp of the physical and biological
sciences is quite substantial. I also like the work of Arthur Fine:

“Distinguished philosopher of science esteemed for work on the foundations of physics (particularly quantum mechanics) and for his studies of Einstein.”

“Having studied physics, philosophy, and mathematics, Fine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1958 with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics. He then, in 1960, earned a Master of Science in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a thesis supervised by Karl Menger,[1]

Fine earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1963 under the direction of Henry Mehlberg.[2] Before moving to the University of Washington, Fine taught for many years at Northwestern University and, before that, at Cornell University and the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a past president of the American Philosophical Association and the Philosophy of Science Association and has for many years been on the editorial board of the journal Philosophy of Science, one of the leading publications in the field.In 2014, Fine was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.”

I also recommend Michel Bitbol:

“ His research interests are mainly focused on the influence of quantum physics on philosophy. He first worked on Erwin Schrödinger's metaphysics and philosophy of physics.[3]

Using theorems demonstrated by Jean-Louis Destouches, Paulette Destouches-Février, and R.I.G. Hughes, he pointed out that the structure of quantum mechanics may be derived to a large extent from the assumption that microscopic phenomena cannot be dissociated from their experimental context.[4] His views on quantum mechanics converge with ideas developed by Julian Schwinger[5] and Asher Peres,[6] according to whom quantum mechanics is a "symbolism of atomic measurements", rather than a description of atomic objects. He also defends ideas close to Anton Zeilinger's, by claiming that quantum laws do not express the nature of physical objects, but only the bounds of experimental information.

Along with this view, quantum mechanics is no longer considered as a physical theory in the ordinary sense, but rather as a background framework for physical theories, since it goes back to the most elementary conditions which allow us to formulate any physical theory whatsoever. Some reviewers suggested half-seriously to call this view of physics "Kantum physics". Indeed, Michel Bitbol often refers to the philosophy of I. Kant, according to whom one can understand the contents of knowledge only by analyzing the (sensorial, instrumental, and rational) conditions of possibility of such knowledge.[7]

He was granted an award by the French "Académie des sciences morales et politiques" in 1997, for his work in the philosophy of quantum mechanics.

Later on, he concentrated on the philosophy of mind and consciousness,[8] defending a strongly anti-reductionist[9] and neo-Wittgensteinian view.[10] He collaborated with Francisco Varela on this subject.”

. Although neuroscience is in this grouping, the models relating to it are not biologically compatible. — jgill

I disagree. Phenomenologically informed enactivist models of neural functioning complement what Michael James Bennett calls “ a veritable sea change in the study of life. Over the past several decades evolutionary biology was shaken with a series of shockwaves that would culminate in what theorists today are starting to call an ‘Extended' and even ‘Postmodern' Evolutionary Synthesis in order to mark it off from the Modern Synthesis still dominant in the 1980s (Laland et al. 2015; Brucker and Bordenstein 2014). The hologenome theory of evolution – which posits that the organism and its micro-biome form a single, multifaceted unit of selection – signals perhaps better than any other theoretical development the advent of a new evolutionary synthesis. This is a synthesis founded in the increasingly important role afforded to symbiosis in explanations of the evolution of cells and species, from the endosymbiotic relationships responsible for the genesis of mitochondria from out of ancient bacterial alli-ances to the phylosymbiotic relationships between host species and their associated microbial communities constitutive of speciation as such (Brooks et al. 2017). One important consequence of these developments is a newfound appreciation for horizontal gene transfer and aparallel evolution in microorganisms, as well as cytoplasmic, environmental, behavioural and symbolic forms of transmission in almost everything else (Rosenberg and Zilber-Rosenberg 2016). These ‘new directions' work to disrupt and disperse two distinctions long taken to be self-evident and indispensable to evolutionary theory: between the organism and its genes, and between the organism and its environment. The critique and complication of each finds its positive complement in a new set of developments as well. Criticisms of genetic reductionism and the pan-adaptationist programme correspond to the elaboration of decentralised accounts of causality and transmission in Developmental Systems Theory and ‘Evo/Devo' (Oyama 2000); and criticisms of autonomous biological individuals, distinct genetic lineages and strictly vertical models of inheritance have developed alongside a newfound appreciation for the ubiquity of symbiosis, microbial alliances and horizontal gene transfer both as features of constituted organisms and as a source for variation and evolutionary discontinuities in the history of life as well (Gilbert et al. 2012).”

I should mention that one of the key figures in enactivist approaches to cogntivie science was Francisco Varela, who introduced the model of neurophenomenology:

“ Varela was trained as a biologist, mathematician and philosopher through the influence of different teachers, Humberto Maturana and Torsten Wiesel.

He wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles in biology, neurology, cognitive science, mathematics, and philosophy. He founded, with others, the Integral Institute, a thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines.

Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. These comprise the body (as a biological system and as personally experienced) and the physical world which it enacts.[5]

Varela's work popularized within the field of neuroscience the concept of neurophenomenology. This concept combined the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with "first-person science." Neurophenomenology requires observers to examine their own conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods.

In the 1996 popular book The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, physicist Fritjof Capra makes extensive reference to Varela and Maturana's theory of autopoiesis as part of a new, systems-based scientific approach for describing the interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social, and cultural phenomena.[6] Written for a general audience, The Web of Life helped popularize the work of Varela and Maturana, as well as that of Ilya Prigogine and Gregory Bateson.[7]

Varela's 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach.[8] A revised edition of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.”

. I would go so far as to argue that philosophy and art have declined over the past century, all while scientific advances have increased extensively. — Merkwurdichliebe

I believe that the root of our disagreement is that you and I are not reading the same philosophers or scientists. Tell me what you think constitutes the last significant innovation in philosophy, and the most important recent advances in the sciences (not technology, but basic theoretical models like Relativity or Darwinian evolution).