which is worst, false wisdom, false knowledge, or false information? — Ioannis Kritikos

uninformative OP’s

I'm not sure the prisonors in the concentration camps in nazi Germany agreed. The showers they had to take wasn't a real stimulation of personal growth or changing worldview. — Thunderballs

Victor Frankl might have agreed. Some of the central
insights of his existential therapy were gleaned during his concentration camp experience. The notes
for Wittgenstein’s tractatus were written while he was a soldier on the front lines in W War I.

Any and all experiences, no matter how horrendous , are opportunities for personal growth and wisdom. That’s because time does t reverse itself.

It's a well known "fact": economy needs growth. But what's the thought behind t — Thunderballs

What is it we are talking about when we speak of the needs of an economy, and how should we define growth?
Ostensibly, an economy is a proxy for individuals. So what do i docudals need in an economic sense? The need what goods and services provide value to them, including basics like food, clothing, shelter and medical care. Of course, people need other items of value , only some of which can be monetized or directly measured in terms of the standard measures of economic activity. Others, like satisfying relationships , may not be directly measured i. economic terms but nevertheless may be inseparable from economic phenomena.

But let’s say that indices of economic growth are a rise a s i axcueqte way of measuring what we’re really after, which is growth in personal satisfaction.

Many would argue that there is no correlation between
personal happiness and economic growth, and certainly none between the historical evolution of technology and happiness. Romantics would claim that those living simpler economies from the past ( tribal, agricultural) may in fact have led happier lives.

Let me offer a restricted definition of personal growth here and the. relate it to economic growth. This notion of personal growth is about the development of sense-making. According to this way of thinking, all forms of human creativity ( scientific, philosophical , political, arts and music ) undergo historical development in tandem , as aspects of larger worldviews that replace older ones and are overthrown by newer ones.

Even though this is no linear progress , I will call it personal growth. I’m fact , I suggest that it is the most important variable over longer periods of time on which personal growth depends. The question now is what is the connection between economic growth and the evolution of worldviews. I think it’s tru that there can be no evolution of worldviews without technological innovation, but but technological growth doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it implies , and has no priority over , growth in all other aspects of culture.

Some believe that reversals of economic growth automatically imply stagnation or reversal of cultural development , but since the development of worldviews is knowledge-based, can there ever be a reversal in knowledge? Have any large cultures in recent history forgotten the knowledge they were based on, or failed to undergo further cultural development? Certainly some
cultures seem to transform themselves
more rapidly that others, but isn’t there continuous transmission and transformation going on in even the most seemingly stagnant cultures?

This is a particularly significant question because in the era of climate change , there is widespread anticipation
of slowdown in worldwide economic growth.

My claim is that transom is ok and transformation of cultural knowledge does not require economic growth as measured in standard ways. As long as the means remains to transmit extant knowledge , there will be growth of knowledge, because the first presupposes the second. This implies that even in the most stressed economic conditions personal growth will continue as a consequence of the continued change in worldviews.

Enjoy

I definitely would have a problem with this reading of Wittgenstein. — Sam26

This is the ‘postmodern’ reading that authors like Cavell, Cora Diamond and James Conant endorse. Also , Baker, who along with Peter Hacker, produced a series of works on Wittgenstein in the 1980’s which have been taken as authoritative by many academics( and seems to be consistent with your perspective), rejected his earlier Hacker-Baker position by the 1990’s in favor of one consonant with the above writers. This is not to say that one position is right and the other wrong, but that there is a lively ongoing debate.

My understanding of Wittgenstein's grammar is that grammar sets out the rules governing the moves we make in language. — Sam26

I don’t know if you were following the thread below:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/11479/bedrock-rules-the-mathematical-and-the-ordinary-cavell-kripke-on-wittgenstein

It looks like you’re taking the position of Luke, Hacker and Baker on what Wittgenstein means by grammar and rules. Antony and i were, in different ways , arguing for a different reading of Wittgenstein, in which rules and grammar only have existence in radically contextual, situational and personal situations.

Metaphysics Is really just psychology.
And psychology is verbal and emotional language expression.
However,I'm a Linguistic realist,which means our language is a direct reality and we experience objects directly. None of this kantian nonsense. — Ambrosia

Who do you get your ideas about philosophy and psychology from? Who do you read?

To resolve the deeper question takes a much larger conception than that provided by ‘plain language’ philosophy because it has to deal with metaphysics - which is just the subject that plain language philosophy presumes to reject.

See for an example this critique of Lawrence Krauss’ book ‘A Universe from Nothing’, by Neil Ormerod, an academic theologian, in particular the section on Bernard Lonergan’s analysis of the nature of judgement.
3h — Wayfarer

I read that critique as a rejection of naive realism in favor of Kantianism. I’m not sure what this has to do with ordinary language philosophy. If you’re looking for a metaphysics compatible with ordinary language philosophy you’ll find it in Nietzsche and phenomenology

I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth.
— Joshs

Whaaaat? You mean how deep you can stick it in? — Philofile

It’s possible that’s what Foucault meant.

It seems that what you are talking about is extending the common meanings of the public language by working imaginatively with possible associations. Poets do it all the time.That is a different matter than creating a wholly novel private language from scratch I would say. — Janus

Isnt this the question of whether there is anything new under the sun, or at least now we are to understand the idea of novelty? If we present a 5 year old child, or a dog, with ‘e=mc2’ , how do we talk about the distance between what they perceive in the image and what those of us familiar with the physics perceive in it? gould we say that , relative to the dog and the 5 year , we are extending the meanings they are encountering by a certain amount? One might want to counter that extending the meaning of a concept is different than extending a language within which concepts are articulated. But I guess my point is that, in theory we should be able to extend the meanings of the words of a language to the point where we can no more call these common than we can my experience of e=mc2 versus a dog or 5 year old.

If two people are understanding the senses of the words of a ‘common’ language in significantly different ways , even if they are able to engage with each other at some level with it, why call the language ‘common’? Why not say there are two somewhat similar languages being used? If I understand the sense of a word in one way and you understand it in a slightly different way, are you and we sharing a common sense , or two distinctly different but related senses? Isnt this true for every aspect of a ‘common’ language that each of us participate in?
We know that new languages evolve from
old ones gradually. But don’t they do this one person at a time? Don’t each of us , whenever we use our ‘common’ language , in some minuscule way already speak our own variant? I could take this even further and suggest that every time I use my language I am reinventing it in some slight way, and thus every moment I am using a different language.

What do you mean? That the earth is sometimes flat, is always flat, is not flat, is flat if you "think" it is and not if you don't? It seems that according to you, whether the earth is flat depends on who is talking. Yes? No? — tim wood

I’m making two points. First, as you know , at one time many believed the earth was flat , that all species descended directly from predecessors , that the Sun revolved around the earth. There are a multitude of competing theories floating around today in science(particularly the social sciences) and philosophy. Eventually , certain of them may become more widely accepted than others.
But I argue that the failure of individuals to embrace the current consensus is not a form of irrationality. Shifting one’s perspective is not simply a matter of being presented with evidence. It requires a gestalt shift and that can take time.

My second point is that many conflicts involving blame are like the above , where it is not a master of the other being irrational, but instead their being in the thrawl of a way of thinking that you have moved beyond , but don’t understand why they can’t see things your way. So you assume they are being stubborn, lazy, irrational. Instead, they simply haven’t made the ‘shift’ that you have.

It's not all about that. It's just a small part of us (or animals). — Philofile

alrighty then

There are different sense-makings. One(wo)man's sense is the other's non-sense. — Philofile

Another’s sense will never be my nonsense if I understand what I described above about the organization of cognitive systems. I may not be able to grasp its internal logic, so I could joke that it’s ‘nonsense
to me’, but I am still recognizing it as ordered.

My original post was about the basis of blame, accusation and hostility. I argued that such an attitude requires that I reject the idea that there is an internal order behind the behavior of the other I accuse. I will not need to blame if I recognize that the other is operating out of a moral worldview , even if I don’t quite understand its details at the moment.

point? Are you saying people aim at the same moral end? — Tom Storm

Yes, the moral end for all of us is anticipation of all possible events in as parsimonious , multidimensional and replicative a way as possible. Social life happens to be the richest source of new events , so making sense of others and establishing the most intimate possible relations of understanding with others is presupposed.

how do you locate this continuum of rationality in the context of intersubjectivity and the potential shared interests of society/groups? — Tom Storm

I like George Kelly's Sociality Corollary, which states
that ‘to the extent that one person construes the construction processes of another, he may play a role in a social process involving the other person”. This spells out the organizational implications of a being-with-others defined and validated by the intimate assimilative processes of replicative anticipation.

We don’t just belong whole-hog to larger linguistic groups and cultures, we have to be able to make sense of their ways from within our own axes of understanding.

One (wo)man's reason is the other's madness or stupidity. Same for rationality. Irrationality can be reasonable. Ratio can be unreasonable. Rationality merely means that you can give reasons. Which can be stupid for some and sane for others. — Philofile

That sounds like a notion of the rational which reduces it to an arbitrary set of relationships with no thematic or
implicative consistency. If this is the only way we can explain ‘rationality’, then what you say about it is true.

But in sense-making creatures like ourselves , reason is guided by normative cogntive-affective aims. We aim to anticipate events in as orderly a fashion as possible. Our ‘reasons’ are our best predictions about events. We only view others’ reasons as irrational when we fail to recognize the nature of sense-making. We don’t necessarily have to be able to translate the others system of anticipations into terms that we can understand, we only have to recognize in principle that this is how cognizing beings organize experience.

The way that the concept of stupidity is being used in this thread is not that of lacking an aptitude , knowledge or skill. That’s why there has been no mention here of the stupidity of children or animals. No, stupidity is being used as a moral accusation , a judgement of blame against whoever we deem deserving of the label.
We are angry at, disgusted with , condemning toward the ‘stupid’ one because we believe they knew or should have known better than to do or act or think the way they did. As Time Wood put it , “a person who without reason retreats from reason to some unreasonable position and maintains that position by recourse to irrationality against reason.”

That’s the essence of moral blame , our judgement that the other knew better and succumbed to a base or
irrational’ motive.

The whole edifice of the psychology of blame would crumble if the angry accuser were ever to come
to a realization that there’s is no such thing as irrationality, there are only different forms of rationality, and the blameful finger-pointer is unable to extricate themselves from their own worldview, or even recognize their rationality as a just one of a potentially infinite range of worldviews, each of which aims at the same moral end , but via an often profoundly different construal of empirical circumstance. So they have no choice but to see the one who violates their expectations as morally culpable , irrational, stupid. The irony here is that it would be the accuser who is being stupid here, but I would have to use that word in this context according to its innocent , non-moralistic sense. They don’t want to have to accuse anyone, but they lack the insight into how others think to avoid succumbing to hostility.

Are there deep philosophical problems? Is it a good metaphor, or is there one you find more useful? — Srap Tasmaner

The concept of depth is a no-no to the postmodern ethos. Why is this? Because depth tends to be associated with exactly the kinds of metaphysical meta narratives that this thread is accumulating.

I would suggest intimacy as a preferable metaphor to depth. Philosophy needn’t concern itself with ultimate truths that we are chained to like some giant leaden anchor. Instead, thinking should be about nothing more substantial than being in time and the intimate way that experience changes moment to moment.

My understanding of the PLA is that it would seem to be impossible to construct an idiosyncratic language of my own without translating it into the (public) language I have learned in order to know what my novel words refer to. This is all the more true of non-ostensive words, but is also true of ostensive words it seems to me. — Janus

That’s how I read it too. But I want to quibble with it.
Let’s say that I produce a new philosophy with new concepts. If I write it in English , then it is filled with commonly understood , simple nouns , verbs and adjectives. But the core of the thesis is set of terms that I am trying to introduce to others ( or perhaps I only intend the writing for me to read). I may begin with what I assume are familiar, conventional ways that others are likely to approach the interpretation of my ideas , and then attempt to shift their thinking in a different direction.

But I can very well fail to do this. In such a case , my readers may complain that my terms are incoherent , or they will equally likely say they understand them perfectly well , by which they mean that they are misreading them in the old conventional way.

So have I created a private or a public language? It is public in the sense that the grammatical
structure is conventional ( subject-predicate etc). But this not need be so. I could transform the grammar, as Heidegger does with the word ‘is’. The point is that what I write will be recognizable to others in some form, at some level. At r very least , others will know that I am trying to communicate something. But is this all that is required for a language to be considered public? Isn’t it true that I must be able to translate my idiosyncratic language into the conventional language to understand myself? But how exactly do I understand myself as I go through a long process of transforming my thinking? Is my starting point a ‘public’ language? Is my point of reference a way of understanding words that is common to a community that uses them? Certainly if my aim is to communicate with others, then my assumption is that my word will be understood at some level. But what if I also know that I will not be understood well , because my use of words invokes senses that I find others dont share. It is a poor fit.

I may not initially feel this way about my relation to others via language , but as I progress in my ideas, I find that while I begin by translating my new concepts into what I perceive as public or conventional language, eventually in y writing I am no longer referring back to that public sphere but instead to my own writing of an earlier stage in my progress. In other words, my ‘public’ becomes my own past, and the further and further away from others’ thinking I get in my theorizing , the more and more irrelevant that initial ‘public’ becomes for me. Wittgenstein said if a lion could talk we wouldn’t understand him. That is true of original philosophic work also.

Don't forget that it's parents (or the like, and usually many others) who teach baby to talk in the first place. The boy in the bubble doesn't need excuses, justifications, seductions, outright lies. I don't deny that after years of immersion with others that then a body could wander off into the woods to talk to itself in new and terrible ways. — Zugzwang

I should mention that my approach to language and intersubjectivity is what I call ‘radically temporal’. Other philosophers I’ve found who ground experience in a radical notion of temporality include Heidegger, Derrida and Eugene Gendlin. Striking features of their work include the abandonment of the distinction between affect, cognition-intention and will, and their assertion that everything we ‘absorb from our participation in language and culture has a peculiar ‘ownness’ about it , such that an ongoing thematic self-consistency characterizes all our engenders with others.
From this vantage , what is is interesting about the fact that a baby must first learn language from its social world before it can talk to itself is the nature of the way what it learns is organized with respect to its history.

That is, everything I assimilate from my world , either perceptually or in terms of formal
language, can only be understood by me via dimensions of similarity with respect to my current outlook. I own everything I learn in a way that makes it impossible or to claim that I simply ‘share’ the senses of words and concepts with others in my culture. Even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.

Im going to borrow from a paper I wrote to elaborate here:

Rather than a retreat from a thoroughgoing notion of sociality, radically temporal approaches achieve a re-situating of the site of the social as a more originary and primordial grounding than that of the over-determined abstractions represented by discursive intersubjectivities. Those larger patterns of human belonging abstracted from local joint activity, which Merleau-Ponty's intercorporeal approach discerns in terms of cultural language practices, hide within themselves a more primary patterning. While our experience as individuals is characterized by stable relations of relative belonging or alienation with respect to other individuals and groups, the site of this interactivity, whether we find ourselves in greater or lesser agreement with a world within which we are enmeshed, has a character of peculiar within-person continuity. It also has a character of relentless creative activity that undermines and overflows attempts to understand human action based on between-person configurations or fields. We may identify to a greater or lesser extent with various larger paradigmatic communities, delicately united by intertwining values. But the contribution of each member of a community to the whole would not originate at the level of spoken or bodily language interchange among voices; such constructs repress as much as they reveal. Even in a community of five individuals in a room, I, as participant, can perceive a locus of integrity undergirding the participation of each of the others to the responsive conversation. To find common ground in a polarized political environment is not to find an intersect among combatants, a centrifugal ground of commonality, but to find as many intersects as there are participants. Each person perceives the basis of the commonality in the terms of their own construct system.

In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my construct system; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.”

Well, I’m sold. Where do I sign up?

You gotta use words when you talk to me, words you didn't define (if you define your own new jargon, it's in terms of the one we were thrown into.) — Zugzwang

I don’t define my own words de novo, but they are not simply introjected from a culture either. There is no such thing as culture as a monolithic structure , at any level , even at the level of a language game with two participants. Each word that is ‘shared’ between us is a different sense of the word for you than it is for me. It must be in order for there to be an ‘us’. I am already an other to myself when I talk or think to myself. The words I ‘use’ to think to myself come back to me in the instant I use them as if they came from another. I am changed in using my own words. You are a further other to my other that is myself.
Wittgenstein begins culture between you and me , but culture begins most primordially between me and myself, as I find myself always changed from moment to moment via temporality. The shifts in context ushered in by my temporally unfolding self-talk already move me through a multitude of language games , prior to my engagement with others.

Personally I find all this in implied/suggested by Wittgenstein. If meaning is outside, part of the world, then the 'internal monologue' is not longer either internal or a monologue in a strong sense. — Zugzwang

I find the resonances between Wittgenstein and phenomenology fascinating. I also find the differences important. For instance , Nietzsche’s influence
cured Heidegger of the temptation toward a religious moralism. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Wittgenstein, and I think this moralism is implied in his work.
It also seems to me that language games are vulnerable to Heidegger’s depiction of Das Man; this would be discourse as a flattened sharing rather than Heidegger’s account of authentic discourse as oriented toward one’s ownmost possibilities.

hidden variables can rescue determinism and even offer a way for God to interact with his creation. — DanLager

Do you think God interacts with his creation?

What work does "I know" do? — Ennui Elucidator

There is a shared context here of agreed access to remembered dreams. Their question “Why do you think you were dreaming “? almost certainly suggests to you that they also remember their dreams , or at least know when they have dreamt, and is questioning you on that basis. So your claim to ‘know’ implies your preparedness to share your method of ascertaining that knowledge with them , via recollection of a dream. Your claim to know anticipates his potential interest in probing your ability to demonstrate to them the reasons for your confidence that you were dreaming it.

My reaction to this, is that the word social, as you're using it, is not a normal use of the word. Social contexts require other people, we don't refer to the "I and myself," as something social. Besides what's the difference between the "I' and "myself," it seems to me you're describing the same person, viz., you. — Sam26

My understanding of self here comes from phenomenological philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty( also Derrida). For them self is not an entity, it is a constantly transforming interaction with world. They abandon the idea of outer and inner. The self is always outside of itself , coming back to itself from the world. To the extent that my use of social isn’t ‘normal’ it is not because it denies immediate expose use to an outside , an alterity , the foreign and the empirical, but because it is claiming such an exposure isnt restricted to interaction with other ‘persons’.

My question is whether or not these concepts are discovered or enforced, because they never really seem to cleanly translate — khaled

Are psychologists making models based on what they observe? Or are the models self fulfilling prophecies? Or a mix? And what does that say about the validity of the models and which we should use? — khaled

I think that all scientific theories are simultaneously inventions and discoveries. That is, they are responses to real influences from the empirical world , but that empirical world is already shaped for each of us by our prior ways of modeling it. So the relation between world and self is reciprocal. It produces constraints and affordances that correct , validate and invalidate our suppositions, but only within the bounds of the constraints that our existing body of knowledge imposes on the world.

Are they really explaining behavior, or are the creating certain behavior in adherents? — khaled

More and more social scientists are coming to believe that knowledge is not the mind’s representation of an independent outside. Instead , to know something is to make a certain kind of change in it. New knowledge in physics implies new measuring tools, and those tools are inseparable from the new discoveries they make possible.
A psychological theory or therapy invites the adherent to try on a way of organizing events. Each approach organizes those events in different ways , some more pleasing , useful or clarifying than others. We will allow our behavior to be changed by an approach that is introduced to us if we find it is more advantageous to us in some way with respect to our current outlook. The mere fact of its being presented to us will not in and of itself force us to adopt it , any more than our exposure to a new political viewpoint or religious doctrine will automatically lead to our adopting it uncritically.

The bottom line is that different psychological systems are useful in different ways, which is why it is possible to incorporate more than one system, and many therapists do just that.

Examining the physical makeup of a brain will not yield results that contradict the biology, and you could always reduce the biology to the physics. But in psychology and philosophy, different models produce different, sometimes contradictory explanations. — khaled

You can’t reduce the biology to the physics without losing much of value of the biology. Both are useful but for different purposes. And there are conflicting accounts within physics and cosmology.

[

others are justified in their knowledge of your pain, but you’re not. You don’t justify to yourself that you’re in pain. This is senseless. — Sam26

We could be feeling a vague , ambiguous sensation that at times seems like pain and at other times like a tickle or distraction. The context (bodily-cognitive-affective-social) determines what exactly it is we think we are feeling. And when we determine a sensation to be pain, we are not simply consulting an already extent fact, but construing a fresh variant , a new contextual use of ‘pain’. Wittgenstein is right that the pointing to a feeling and construing it as ‘pain’ is not the consulting of an inner domain. In making this argument , he always uses interpersonal situations as examples of the social , the language game. But the social begins even prior to the interpersonal understood this way. Between I and myself there is a social , an other that intervenes the moment I point to an experience. This sociality doesnt require the presence of other ‘persons’ to participate in the game. The game is already underfoot between ‘I’ and myself. It is not public in the sense of a between-person interaction , but neither is it private in the sense of an inner repository of referents.

Kant stands in relation to his predecessors as a complete and utter paradigm shift, as his successors did not stand to him — Mww

Do you mean to say that if we trace a history of philosophy, figure by figure , leading from the ancient Greeks to today, the only ‘paradigm shift’ to be found would be from Kant’s predecessors to him? I do agree that within the lineage of Western philosophy , certain figures achieved greater leaps of thought than others, but I certainly don’t think that what Kant accomplished in relation to what preceded him was any more profound that what Descartes achieved in relation to medieval thinkers( or Nietzsche or Heidegger, for that matter). He almost single-handedly launched us into the modern world.

Now, even granting that every recognized philosopher after Kant accepted this paradigm shift in general, didn’t prevent a few of them from attempting to expand on it, because there existed a feeling Kant didn’t complete some task or other with respect to it. — Mww

What would it look like to inaugurate a paradigm shift away from Kant?

Kant believed , along with his predecessors, that there was a world whose existence was independent of the subject , despite the fact that we only have access to that world via innate categories( even Berkeley’s idealism ends up supporting such a split). Nietzsche rejected the idea of a world independent of the subject’s valuations. He was among the first to upend the idea that scientific truth is correspondence between thought and an independent reality.
Whether you agree with this or not, would you say this constitutes a new paradigm?

Nietzsche also dumped Kant’s moral imperative , denying that there is any universal moral truth, only culturally contingent value systems ceaselessly changing. Is this not also a paradigm shift?

Why would you expect to see paradigm shifts in the sciences on a regular basis but not in philosophy? How could it be that a 240 year old philosophy could still be deemed the cutting edge of thinking in 2021 while in the past 240 years the sciences have experienced a multitude of major paradigm shifts?
Perhaps it’s because in order to understand what Kuhn meant by the term ‘paradigm shift’ one needs to move beyond a Kantian understanding of empirical and metaphysical truth

May I ask where you got your understanding of Kant? I assure you it's upside down and backwards. — tim wood

These were my main points:

1) Kant asserts ideal categories of mind that make it possible to experience space , time ,causality and other features.
Hegel and those after Hegel agreed that the participation of subjective form is necessary for the possibility of what we call empirical objectivity, but Kant’s categories are not metaphysical a priori as he thought, but empirical psychological phenomena.

2)Kant believed that even thought the thing-in-itself was out of reach , empirical reality could be understood progressively more effectively through trial and error. Popper was greatly influenced by Kant when he proposed his falsificationism, the asymptotic achievement of complete understanding of empirical reality. This model of science has been rejected by those who follow Kuhn, who was greatly influenced by Hegel. They reject it because it implies that even though Kant said we only have indirect access to reality through our categories of understanding, nevertheless he believed that our models are an attempt to correspond with an external world whose particulars are not affected by our efforts at understanding. In this sense, it is a static world in a formal sense.

Am I getting these points wrong?

some have simply taken a different path from a different starting point. Hegel an example of that. — tim wood

By that reasoning , Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger were also simply taking a different path from a different starting point. But all of them offered direct
critiques of Kant, so I would have to say that their different starting points were, by their own acknowledgement, built upon Kant while leaving him behind at a certain point.

no one has either displaced or replaced him. Or even, far as I know, thought any of his thoughts better than him. But many, not understanding him, have straw-manned their ideas of his ideas and claiming to have negated his, have only negated their own, his not even present for the battle. — tim wood

For the philosophers I mentioned , and certainly for those following after Nietzsche , it’s not a question of ‘negating’ Kant’s thoughts, but of burrowing beneath their presuppositions to unearth a more primordial
ground. This bot leaves intact his claims and makes them derivative of something more originary that he couldn’t articulate.
Have they thought his thoughts better than he? Why should they? They were his thoughts. These philosophers stand i. the same relation to Kant as Kant did to Descartes, Aquinas Aristotle and Plato. They stand on his shoulders. As for displacing him, I would simply say that the most exciting things I see happening in psychology today would not have been possible without his groundbreaking thinking, but they also would not have been possible if they had remained strictly within the orbit of his thinking, any more than Kant’s groundbreaking ideas would have been possible if he had remained within the orbit of Descartes.

An engineer, piqued at being told that 2+2=4, responded that 2+2 could approach six, for large values of two. — tim wood

You won’t find any postmodern philosopher worth their salt denying that 2+2=4. They would instead point out that mathematical facts are empty without the qualitative relationships they apply to. The way we understand the genesis and nature of these relationships is the determinant of what reason is , how it functiona, and what it’s limits are. This was Kant’s argument also , and so in this sense all philosophers alter Kant are Kantians.

Kant was content to show that particular facts get their meaning only in relation to larger wholes, and these in relation to even larger wholes. The rationality of the details of the empirical world can only be grounded absolutely by knowledge of the total frame, which must be approached as an asymptotic limit. Hegel agreed with Kant that the rationality of particulars only emerge from knowledge of their role in larger relational schemes, but wondered why Kant settled for a static total frame rather than setting that frame into motion. Is the world of reality something that statically IS ( exemplified by physicists making time superfluous to physical
processes) or is its essence it’s being-in-transformation?
Why not rationality as the logic of a dialectical evolution of becoming rather than a single schematic Being?

Nietzsche pushed Hegel’s took of being as becoming even farther by asking why a single dialectic logic had to be assumed. Why couldn’t there be a becoming of dialectical logic, an evolution not totalized in advance by some declared scheme of development?

The interesting thing is that as philosophy moved farther and farther away from Kant’s one-dimensional
model of rationality , it was able to reveal more and more intricate orders of relationships hidden within the confines of Kant’s schematics.

For instance, do you buy lock stock and barrel Kant’s metaphysics of moral reasoning?
— Joshs

I do, though I make no claim in the direction of complete or entire understanding. Where exactly would you fault me for my purchase? — tim wood

What I dont like about Kant’s moral imperative is that it makes a problem of something that isnt one. Specifically, he presumes goals of the self are split off from the greater good and require a method to transcend selfish desire in the direction of moral duty to selfless social goals. But much of recent philosophy and psychology points toward an inability to tease out the selfish from the selfless , due to the fact that personal
desire is inextricably associated with, shaped by and dependent on social aims. The problems with our culture are not the result of selfishness and narcissism , but selflessness oriented around social goals that fail to grasp the ways of thinking of outsiders within and outside of that culture. This failure is tied up with a notion of the rational that is tone deaf to changes in senses of meaning.

the only possible way to do that, is by means of pure practical reason. — Mww

Do you ever critique any aspect of Kantianism from the vantage of more recent philosophers, like Hegel, Kierkegaard or Schopenhauer? For instance, do you buy lock stock and barrel Kant’s metaphysics of moral reasoning?

Our primate ancestors bequeathed to us both the physically bound emotions (the limbic system) and the capacity to think--about the physical, the abstract, the past, the future... The emotions are not reasonable, but they motivate reasoning. Of the two, the emotions usually have the upper hand. — Bitter Crank

“… we humans have long believed that rationality makes us special in the animal kingdom. This origin myth reflects one of the most cherished narratives in Western thought, that the human mind is a battlefield where cognition and emotion struggle for control of behavior. Even the adjective we use to describe our-selves as insensitive or stupid in the heat of the moment — “thoughtless” — connotes a lack of cognitive control, of failing to channel our inner Mr. Spock. This origin myth is so strongly held that scientists even created a model of the brain based on it. The model begins with ancient subcortical circuits for basic survival, which we allegedly inherited from reptiles. Sitting atop those circuits is an alleged emotion system, known as the “limbic system, ” that we supposedly inherited from early mammals. And wrapped around the so-called limbic system, like icing on an already-baked cake, is our allegedly rational and uniquely human cortex. This illusory arrangement of layers, which is sometimes called the “triune brain, ” remains one of the most successful misconceptions in human biology. Carl Sagan popularized it in The Dragons of Eden, his bestselling (some would say largely fictional) account of how human intelligence evolved. Daniel Goleman employed it in his best-seller Emotional Intelligence. Nevertheless, humans don't have an animal brain gift-wrapped in cognition, as any expert in brain evolution knows. “Mapping emotion onto just the middle part of the brain, and reason and logic onto the cortex, is just plain silly, ” says neuroscientist Barbara L. Finlay, editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences. “All brain divisions are present in all vertebrates. ” So how do brains evolve? They reorganize as they expand, like companies do, to keep themselves efficient and nimble.”

“ Antonio Damasio, in his bestseller Descartes’ Error, observes that a mind requires passion (what we would call affect) for wisdom. He documents that people with damage to their interoceptive network, particularly in one key body-budgeting region, have impaired decision-making. Robbed of the ca­pacity to generate interoceptive predictions, Damasio’s patients were rud­derless. Our new knowledge of brain anatomy now compels us to go one step further. Affect is not just necessary for wisdom; it’s also irrevocably wo­ven into the fabric of every decision.”

(Lisa Barrett, How Emotions are Made)

That's quite appealing, but terribly abstract. There are constraints on or expectations about what sorts of resemblance you generate, and the generating itself, and the agreement — Srap Tasmaner

It is abstract, and no substitute for great secondary literature from the likes of Cora Diamond , James Conant and Phil Huirchinson fleshing out this position.

There are indeed constraints on our expectations, but I dont think we can assume that such constraints operate behind the scenes. The best way I can put it is that the situation co-produces the constraints along with the new sense. Put differently, the past is changed by what occurs into it.

I would say that there must be something in common in all particular cases of following a rule correctly, otherwise there could be no such thing as following a rule correctly. — Luke

This is the crux of the matter. I claim that Wittgenstein is giving us a way to treat a notion like ‘correctness’ that doesn’t depend on the reproductive representation of an alleged ‘essense’( the essense of what cases have in common). Correctness would not be conformity to a categorical essense, but the fresh generating of a resemblance that produces the possibility of agreement, among other things.

. Family resemblance may (or may not) be concerned with the concept “rule”, but I don’t believe that family resemblance relates to particular applications of, or the following of, a rule. — Luke

If one treats a rule as a logical inclusion structure, a category to which particular applications belong, then it seems perfectly reasonable to make a distinction between the idea that different senses of a word relate to each other via family resemblance, and the idea that a categorical, normative concept like rule , being that essense common to a family of resemblances , cannot itself be dissolved into an infinity of related senses.

But I imagine Wittgenstein asking, is not ‘rule’ also a word? And if so, are only some words situational senses tied to other situational senses by resemblance? Are there other , special words, like ‘rule’, that exist in some metaphysical , empirical or theoretical space that resists the situational contingency of sense? Such that while its applications would always differ in sense, it in itself would remain ideally self-identical in its own sense whenever and wherever we speak the phrase ‘this rule’?

I am inclined to construe actual situational sense as the precondition for the understanding of what would
otherwise be considered ideal structure( an essense common to its particulars) , rather than the other way around.

I recognize that the ideality that Hacker imparts to norms, rules and grammars is far removed from approaches to language based on naive realism. Rather than assuming pure relations between sign and referent, Hacker treats rules as contingent , pragmatically based guideposts. He nevertheless retains a restricted notion of ideality.

I’ll repeat my Hutchinson quote because I think it captures so well what I think Hacker is unable to let go of from Kantian idealism.

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker’s thought that what is prob­lematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-V relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words’ belonging to a ‘type of use.’It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture’ which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”

Shared behavioural propensities (looking in the direction pointed at) and common responses to teaching and training (learning the sequence of natural numbers) are presuppositions for the possibility of having such shared rules at all; not the bedrock of justification but the framework for its very possibility. The bedrock is the point at which justifications terminate, and the question ‘why?’ is answered simply by ‘Well, that is what we call “...”.’
— Baker and Hacker, exegesis of PI 217

Wittgenstein is pointing here to "extremely general facts of nature" (PI 142) - such as our shared form of life and our natural human reactions - as the "framework for the very possibility" of having shared rules. You and Cavell have it backward in reading Wittgenstein as talking about the end of justification. Witt is not talking about the end of justification, but its beginning; its possibility. — Luke

Shared propensities, common responses , cultural norms, categorical patterns of word meanings, are only the presuppositions for the possibility of having shared rules if we recognize that what is common to a group, what is shared, what is associated with a rule, a norm, a category is nothing that strictly belongs to , is encompassed by any framework. There is nothing common to all language games or particular applications of a rule. Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” shows the difference between language use as applications of pre-existing categorical , normative and rule-governed frames and language use as a subtle or not-so-subtle re-invention of the sense of norms, rules and categories.
Family resemblance is the continuous overlapping of fibers altering previous patterns of language use via fresh contexts of use, rather than the churning out of a new instance of a superordinate theme or rule.

If the precondition for the sharing, commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents language use from being captured within such frameworks, then one could say that the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.

65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.—For someone might object against me:
"You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language ­games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."

And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,— but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language".

If the precondition for the sharing , commonality and normativity of language is the very thing that prevents
language usage from ever becoming captured by any framework, then one could say the end of justification brings us back to its beginning.

67.” I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way.—
And I shall say: 'games' form a family. And for instance the kinds of number form a family in the same way.
Why do we call something a "number"? Well, perhaps because it has a—direct—relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relation­ship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our con­cept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of all their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words.
One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread— namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres.”

having worked with those afflicted with prodigious narcissism - to the point where others suffer greatly - I have to accept it contains truth of a sort — Tom Storm

Let’s take Trump as an example, since to many he seems to evince an excessive self-infatuation and self-obsession. You may perhaps agree that his ‘narcissism’ is not likely motivated by high self-esteem, but rather a profound insecurity and self-doubt. Every time he boasts ‘I can’ and I did’ he is countering a mocking voice in his head(his father’s ?) disdainfully intoning ‘you can’t’ and ‘you didn’t’. If what we think of as self-concept isn’t about a solipsistic island of meness but a center of integration of experience of the world , then the fragmented , insecure self that Trump obsesses about is less a walled off preserve than a a process trying desperately to integrate the world coherently in a self-consistent manner. Without this self-consistency , our experience unravels into chaos. Thus , Trump finds himself constantly on the precipice of internal incoherence.

I’ve always thought that the modern psychological diagnostic concept of narcissism was not only unhelpful but dangerous. It belongs to a long line of moralistic personality attributions ( selfish, greedy, lazy, evil) that blames or pathologizes the other for our own failure to see the world from their vantage. To embrace the notion of narcissism is to ignore a host of approaches within psychology and philosophy that show why the separation between self and world that it presupposes is incoherent.

We navigate, interpret, improvise...always against a background of personal and social habit. — Zugzwang

This sounds like Hacker’s reading of Wittgenstein.

So whose characterisation of Hacker and of the orthodox interpretation should I believe? — Luke

It seems to me the introductory summary from Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela that you cited is in general agreement with Hacker’s approach and that of Oxford types like Strawson and Ryle.

I’ve picked out passages from it that I think would be considered problematic from the later Baker’s perspective, and are problematic for me as well.

“… the book propounds an explicit anti-metaphysical view: philosophy is not taken to consist in the pursuit of the sempiternal and hidden structure of language and the world. Language can still be said to have essential features, but they lie in plain view and need only to be made perspicuous by way of describing the uses of words or by tabulating the rules by which language is governed (see PI § 92).”

“The logical syntax of language does not mirror the hidden structure of the world, but is simply a means of representing the world.”


“...the later Wittgenstein is taken to argue that since language is a rule-governed practice (positive result), the idea of a private language is incoherent (negative result). Reading Wittgenstein as providing an overview of grammatical rules that will dissolve philosophical problems and confusions, …” — Luke

The introduction is rejecting metaphysical realism and substituting in its place an empirical , representational realism , also known as neo-Kantianism. But the later Baker would protest that rules and grammar are not ‘essential features’ in the sense of being linguistic facts or classes of representations. Language is not the interpreting of the world via contextually applied rule-based schemes.

How do you view the clarificatory/therapeutic dispute as being relevant to the current discussion regarding morality, the putative distinction between mathematical and ordinary rules, the exhaustion of justifications in following the rule "in the way I do", and the other matters raised in the OP? Do you find the OP to be consistent with your own reading of the Philosophical Investigations? — Luke

I think that as long as one continues to hold onto the need for a clarifying role for language, one is still caught up in a representationalist thinking, and from such a vantage it may be difficult to see the coherence of Antony’s position on morality and the other issues you mentioned, since the sense of all of these is inextricably linked to the former.