from what I understand and experienced the norm is to basically have …very little ethics outside of basic obedience — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now there's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

I'm not saying that my interpretation of his philosophy is correct, I'm just saying that it seems more Postmodern than Pragmatist. — Arcane Sandwich

I think that’s why he added ‘NEO-pragmatist.

What did you think of the book?

How about the "Mirror of Nature"? Sound better? — Arcane Sandwich

It sounds wonderful when used as the foil it represented in Rorty’s book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

We can attend to the world in different ways, paying more attention to certain aspects, configurations, things that seem relevant to us for various reasons and are maximally informative in regard to affording the behavior required to live or do what we want to do. I think all our perception trivially is picking out structures in the world even if it requires some processing to do so (e.g. our ability to sense and engage with 3-dimensional depth in visual space can only be inferred indirectly from 2D visual cues and also information from our bodies). — Apustimelogist

I dont like the metaphor of lens as a depiction of the relation between mind and world. It implies a detached, subjectivist view of how we make sense of the world, as though the information contained in reality is already sitting out there and all we have to do is notice and process it internally. We don’t pick out factual aspects of the world based on relevance for our purposes, we actively do things with the inanimate and social world, and the patterns of our doings forms normative structures of intelligibility and purpose which determine HOW the world appears meaningfully to us, how it ought to be relative to the predictive norms of correctness of fit that are generated from our discursive interactions with it, as well as the pathways by which its intelligibility changes for us over time.

Davidson's point is that the idea of conceptual schemes becomes vacuous once mutual intelligibility is allowed - it is not so troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before into your own conceptual repertoire. I think Kuhn's notion of paradigms was never about some notion of global unintelligibility but about general underdetermination of the kinds of hypothetical metaphysics that can account for empirical evidence, and local misunderstandings that cause scientists to sometimes talk past each other. — Apustimelogist

The idea of mental scheme vs factual content is vacuous. But if we recognize the performative, enactive nature of sense-making, then we can see why it is the case that when it comes to vitally important aspects of our dealings with each other , on matters such as science, politics and ethics, it is indeed enormously troublesome to incorporate a concept you have never heard of before IF that concept gets its sense from a discursive system of practices that is only peripherally shared by you. No need to blame this on a split between scheme and world, since the world is already directly present in our practices.

Then there's the question of who has interpreted Derrida correctly, at least for the most part. Maybe it's you, Joshs. Why not? — Arcane Sandwich

Correctness doesn't go very far. I like Deleuze’s view of truth:

“… what someone says is never wrong, the problem isn't that some things are wrong, but that they're stupid or irrelevant. That they've already been said a thousand times. The notions of relevance, necessity, the point of something, are a thousand times more significant than the
notion of truth. Not as substitutes for truth, but as the measure of the truth of what I'm saying.” (Negotiations)

Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure. Now, this cannot be known before being constructed. We will not say of many books of philosophy that they are false, for that is to say nothing, but rather that they lack importance or interest…Only teachers can write “false" in the margins, perhaps; but readers doubt the importance and interest, that is to say, the novelty of what they are given to read.(WIP)

Nietzsche remains the idol of post-pubescent males. Someone to consider and grow beyond. — Banno

Perhaps it’s not Nietzsche one needs to grow out of but a shallow, post-pubescent reading of his ideas and his character. I’ve recently discovered something in Nietzsche’s work that appears to ‘grow beyond’ the current thinking on the relation between affect (emotion, mood , feeling, becoming, value) and truth (perception , cognition, reason, identity, empiricism). The most sophisticated contemporary accounts , like those of Damasio, Prinz, Haidt and Ratcliffe) treat these as a reciprocally causal interaction. Nietzsche, however, sees identity and truth as derivative of difference, affect and desire. Deleuze, Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida are among those who continued to follow Nietzsche’s thinking on this well past their post-pubescent stage.

Heidegger shows how the common notion of time dates back to Aristotle's derivation of time from motion.

“The thoughts of motion, continuity, extension—and in the case of change of place, place—are interwoven with the experience of time.”(basic problems of phenomenology) “ So far as time is kineseos ti, something connected with motion, this means that in thinking time, motion or rest is always thought along with it. In Aristotelian language, time follows, is in succession to, motion.” “Because the now is transition it always measures a from-to, it measures a how-long, a duration.”

Time is making present according to Aristotle, (the present at hand) and in so doing is a counting of time as now, now, now.

“And thus time shows itself for the vulgar understanding as a succession of constantly "objectively present" nows that pass away and arrive at the same time. Time is understood as a sequence, as the "flux" of nows, as the "course of time.”

“The succession of nows is interpreted as something somehow objectively present; for it itself moves "in time." We say that in every now it is now, in every now it already disappears. The now is now in every now, thus constantly present as the same, even if in every now another may be disappearing as it arrives. Yet it does show at the same time the constant presence of itself as this changing thing.”

But mutationem means that it can change, that it can mutate. It has the potential (as in, capax) to do so. It is capable (capax) of it. What is that, if not the Aristotelian concept of potency as matter-in-motion? And this very capacity necessarily entails the reality of time itself. For how could something have the capacity to change, without ever changing? — Arcane Sandwich

What does motion imply if not spatial displacement of a self-identical object over time?

↪Joshs Why do you think that Heidegger's phrase "remanens capax mutationis" is important? Can you explain that? Because it has to do with both the concept of Being as well as the concept of time. I would more or less translate it like this, focusing on its meaning:

"It (Being) remains capable of changing" — Arcane Sandwich

I understand it to mean "something that persists identically in time". Heidegger is defining what he calls the ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit), which he contrast with the ready-to-hand’, our comportment toward things in terms of how we use them and what we use them for rather than in terms of their properties and appearance.

Time itself doesn't have past present future. It is us who divide time into those categories depending on what point, and what part of time we want to focus on. — Corvus

It is also us who invented the clock, and it is the clock that doesn’t have past, present and future. It sounds like you’re getting your notion of time from that human invention and then applying it back onto the concept of time, in the process concealing the basis of time in past-present-future. Physics made that same mistake for years, claiming that the phases of time were mere human constructs, and that past, present and future were not intrinsic to physical processes, which could be understood backwards as well as forwards without any effect on the fundamental nature of those processes.

…some scientists and philosophers have proposed that there is no ever-changing now. Instead, all change is illusory. In this way, they use theoretical tools from Einstein's relativity theory to echo pre-Socratic philosophers like Parmenides and Zeno. Going by the name of eternalism, the core notion is that just as the diagrams that display the whole of space-time seem to reflect a timeless reality of being, it is our narrow three-dimensional view of reality that brings forth notions of past and future. In the full glory of four dimensions, there is no time flow. This view is often called the block universe theory: all of space-time is an unchanging four-dimensional block.

Accordingly, all cosmic history and the entirety of the future constitute a single block in four-dimensional space-time, and our experience of time's flow is illusory. In the words of mathematical physicist and philosopher Hermann Weyl, “The objective world simply is, it does not happen.

In Bergson's words: “By adding a dimension [time] to the space in which we happen to exist, we can undoubtedly picture a process or a becoming, noted in the old space, as a thing in this new space. But as we have substituted the completely made for what we perceive being made, we have . . . eliminated the becoming inherent in time.”46 The block universe theory confuses a mathematical picture with what is being pictured; it confuses the map with the territory.

Time's flow is palpable, even if relativity theory shows us that the rate of our flow of time is not universal but rather local to us as observers. Thus, if our goal is to offer a map of reality, we have two options: offer a map that invokes an abstraction to discard the flow of time, or one where the flow of time is an inherent part of our experience and of an unbifurcated nature. What would be the purpose of a map that discards the flow of time? Where does it lead us? Does it help us understand time any better or lead to intractable conundrums? One of the lessons from our discussion of Bergson and Einstein is that there cannot be a temporal bird's-eye view of the universe, one that flies outside and above the disparate paths through space-time and the different rhythms of duration. The block universe theory renounces this insight, pushes physics back into a blind-spot worldview, and remains stuck with the intractable conundrum of being unable to account for the temporality of time —time's passage, its flow, and its irreversible directionality. For these reasons, the block universe theory is essentially regressive. It reinstates the Blind Spot instead of helping us get beyond it.(The Blind Spot)

I don't know Thompsons’s work, but there is something odd in what ↪Joshs quoted, since it wrongly claims Davidson was a realist, then sets out an approach that rejects realism and antirealism in much the way Davidson actually does, but then re-introduces conceptual schemes — Banno

Thompson is simply reiterating Davidson's claim that “with a correct epistemology we can be realists in all departments.”

Two interpreters, as unlike in culture, language and point of view as you please, can disagree over whether an utterance is true, but only if they differ on how things are in the world they share, or what the utterance means. I think we can draw two conclusions from these simple reflections. First, truth is correspondence with the way things are. (There is no straightforward and non-misleading way to state this; to get things right, a detour is necessary through the concept of satisfaction in terms of which truth is characterized.' So if a coherence theory of truth is acceptable, it must be consistent with a correspondence theory. Second, a theory of knowledge that allows that we can know the truth must be a non-relativized, non-internal form of realism.

So if a coherence theory of knowledge is acceptable, it must be consistent with such a form of realism. My form of realism seems to be neither Hilary Putnam's internal realism nor his metaphysical realism. It is not internal realism because internal realism makes truth relative to a scheme, and this is an idea I do not think is intelligible.' A major reason, in fact, for accepting a coherence theory is the unintelligibility of the dualism of a conceptual scheme and a 'world' waiting to be coped with. But my realism is certainly not Putnam's metaphysical realism, for it is characterized by being 'radically non-epistemic', which implies that all our best researched and established thoughts and theories may be false. I think the independence of belief and truth requires only that each of our beliefs may be false. But of course a coherence theory cannot allow that all of them can be wrong.
(Davidson, A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge)

As to Thompson re-introducing conceptual schemes, he can’t be doing that since that would imply a representationalist view of the world, which Thompson is rejecting. His approach, like Davidson’s , assumes that language is directly in touch with the world. The key difference between his pragmatism and Davidson’s unconventional realism is expressed in Thompson’s assertion that “the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making.”

Davidson rejects the view, held by both metaphysical realists and anti-realists that persons represent the world (scheme vs content) to themselves. Hilary Putnam argues that we all share a single scheme, but, as As Evan Thompson explains

Davidson's conclusion is not that we all share a scheme, but that, since we have been unable to give adequate content to the scheme idea, the idea has no application. As he concludes in another essay, “there can never be a situation in which we can intelligibly compare or contrast divergent schemes, and in that case we do better not to say that there is one scheme, as if we understood what it would be like for there to be more.”

I find Thompsons’s pragmatist pluralism an appealing alternative to Davidson’s non-representationalist direct realism, so I’ll quote his argument here:

We can accept the idea that there is no such thing as a scheme or representational medium interposed between us and the world while making merely the inference that we should not explicate incommensurability by appealing to the dualism of scheme and content. The problem of incommensurability is primarily empirical: it arises in the work of historians, anthropologists, and literary theorists when they attempt to make sense of what seem to be widely divergent systems of belief. We can give up the difference between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world, and yet hold with Whorf that the Hopi way in the world and ours cannot be “calibrated.” Davidson is right to insist that we must assume an overall agreement to make sense of differences in belief. We must concur about all sorts of things, such as that cows eat grass, that snow is white, that people must eat to survive. But Davidson is, in Hacking's words, a “superholist.”~~ (Remember that a Davidsonian theory is meant to interpret all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker.)

Thus he seems to think that these mundane agreements are enough to preclude incommensurability. I am suspicious of superholism. Feyerabend might have been mistaken in thinking that “there is still human experience, as an actually existing process independent of all schemes”, but he was right, I think, to insist that theories and practices proliferate, and that the connections among them are often loose and chaotic. These loose connections indicate that our everyday, superficial agreements with another may not help all that much in resolving our differences. That possibility is all that is needed, I think, to warrant occasional talk of incommensurability, where incommensurability simply means that one language may have a range of expressions that cannot be translated into another language without remainder. In such a situation, one may have no choice but to learn the foreign range of expressions and incorporate it directly into one's language. (Isn't this all that Kuhn ever really claimed?) What we learn from Davidson is that we need not, and indeed should not, support such an appeal to incom- mensurability with the metaphysical idea of scheme and content. We should instead make the case directly in anthropology, literary theory, and the history of science.

Davidson does seem to think that he has vindicated realism, but I suggest that he has shown us a way of continuing to do philosophy after representation (pace Rorty) and beyond the realist/anti-realist debate. Recall that the philosophical device of the field linguist abstracts not only from cultural conditions in general, but also from the detail of local, pragmatic situations (e.g., problems of understanding within and among the paradigms, disciplinary matrices, and research programmes of a given science). But these conditions and situations are precisely those in which substantial epistemological and hermeneutical issues arise. Davidson's realism cannot address, then, the realistlanti-realist disputes that arise within these situations. Davidson grounds the claim “that knowledge is of an objective world independent of our thought or language” by trying to show that most of our beliefs must be true.

But these true beliefs are the commonsense, everyday beliefs that most people share; they are not, for example, beliefs about particle physics, selection in biology, authorial intention in literature, or representation in painting, Recent anti-realism, however, has not arisen as a challenge to commonsense; it has arisen in cognitive domains of perplexing complexity, such as particle physics and literary theory. Only if one accepts a superholist view of belief and meaning will one suppose that Davidson's defense of commonsense realism is also a gobal vindication of realism. I suggest, therefore, that by adopting the stance of the radical interpreter to achieve a global perspective on belief and meaning, Davidson has shown us how local issues about realism and anti-realism must ultimately be.

I would give up both realism and anti-realism, then, in favour of what could be called a pluralist pragmatism. What the pluralist insists on is that there is no foundational version, one which anchors all the rest or to which all others can be reduced. The pragmatist insists that the world is both found and made: it is made in the finding and found in the making. To erase the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way in the world gives us a fresh appreciation of the world. That world, however, is not given, waiting to be represented. We find the world, but only in the many incommensurable cognitive domains we devise in our attempt to know our way around. The task of the philosopher is not to extract a common conceptual scheme from these myriad domains and to determine its faithfulness to some uncorrupted reality; it is, rather, to learn to navigate among the domains, and so to clarify their concerns in relation to each other.

https://evanthompson.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/j-1467-9973-1991-tb00717-x.pdf

I'd sort of agree, although Marxist materialism is a different kettle of fish. — Wayfarer

As is new materialism.
https://www.academia.edu/40986241/WHAT_IS_NEW_MATERIALISM

To me this fits into the American pragmatism of Dewey and so on. Only in transcendental terms
— JuanZu

To me it sounds like that, and it also sounds like Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Augustine.

Heidegger was an intellectual thief. — Arcane Sandwich

Are you saying that his work is more derivative
than these other thinkers?

Is there a Dasien/being-in-the-world binary in Heidegger's philosophy? If there is, then it's just a historicized version of the good old subject-object binary from The Good Old Days. — Arcane Sandwich

For Heidegger , subject implies self-consciousness, S=S. Dasein is neither subject nor world, but the in-between. The self does not pre-exist its world, but is reflected back from what it is involved with.

Heidegger’s notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Dasein’s being in the world.
— Joshs

But would he agree that time is inseparable from lived experience? — Wayfarer

Absolutely

Thanks to Heidegger's analysis of Kant's work we have to say that the time we say is subjective is in fact constitutive of subjectivity itself, which determines it as objective or trascendental. This form of time I would say is more fundamental than the one provided by physics (because of the problems that arise when we think of time as a series of discontinuous points that follow one another). — JuanZu

This may be true of Kant’s work on time, but Heidegger’s notion of temporality deconstructs both subjectivity and objectivity, replacing the subject-object binary with Dasein’s being in the world.

The intuition that a phenomenon flows is in conflict with the intuition that the phenomenon is comprised of a sequence of states, as per Zeno's Paradox. So if talk about experience deflates to talk about phenomena, and if the nature of phenomena is relative to how it is attended and phenomena doesn't always flow, then must the existence of phenomena necessitate the a priori existence of a psychological time series? — sime

It isn’t necessary to use a notion of flow to address the necessity of the inclusion of past in the experience of the punctual now. Regardless of whether we attend to a discrete ‘state’ vs a flowing continuum, in either case the ‘now’ we experience includes within it the just past.

↪Joshs I see you're lookong for an education... accepted I was trying to save it for the June 6th thing... but alas those who don't read need to be read to apparently.

Oh, on, second thought, I realize what error your having... because you understand that Nietzsche doesn't believe things exist solely in black and white dualism, that you think opposite ends of the spectrum don't exists. Hehe cute, though it's pretty poor logic to assume spectrums don't have opposite ends. And you have to also understand Nietzsche's use of the term "opposite" when he uses it means "the other end of the spectrum." Not a black and white 180... — DifferentiatingEgg

I want to distinguish two uses of the word ‘opposite’. The first use includes both binary ‘black vs white’ oppositions and differences of degree within a spectrum. What both of these have in common is that they derive the opposition between two things from their mutual belonging to a shared superordinate category, like color. The second use of ‘opposite’ is the one that Nietzsche develops alongside his notion of the Eternal Return. This concept of opposition refers to qualitative differences among things which belong to no shared binary category or spectrum. He embraces this use and rejects the first use of opposition.

Time doesn't exist. Only space and objects exist — Corvus

The experience of any thing is the consciousness of time. When we think or perceive an object , we are synthesizing the ‘now’ of its existence for us as a three-part structure of retention (immediate past), present and protention (anticipation). Without awareness of time there is no awareness of the continuity of the flow of experience. It would be impossible to understand music, for instance, or the spacing of space.

↪ChatteringMonkey He does indeed believe in opposites — DifferentiatingEgg

The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in oppositions of values. It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it is actually needed the most – even though they had vowed to themselves “de omnibus dubitandum.”? But we can doubt, first, whether opposites even exist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositions that have earned the metaphysicians' seal of approval might not only be foreground appraisals. (Beyond Good and Evil)

If anything signifies our humanisation, a true and actual progress, then the fact that we no longer need any excessive oppositions, any oppositions at all . . .

In sum: morality is precisely as 'immoral' as every other thing on earth; morality itself is a form of immorality. The great liberation this insight brings, the opposition is removed from things, the homogeneity of all that happens is rescued - - ( The Last Notebooks)

Freddy seems to me 'an absurdist skeptic of European modernity' (both heir to Epicurus, Spinoza & Voltaire and predecessor of Zapffe, Camus & Rosset). "Some are born posthumously" ... yet, apparently, his protean works have been coopted – mis/appropriated :mask: – by both existentialists and postmodernists (as well as nazi / fascist propagandists). Just my two shekels. — 180 Proof

I recommend Klossowski’s ‘Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle’ for insights into his thinking that may be new to you. You might also enjoy Daniel Smith’s comments on Klossowski’s book.

https://philarchive.org/archive/SMIKRO

And others view him as the father of postmodernism
— Joshs

Yeah, but that's like saying Nietzsche's responsible for Nazi Germany too. Just a poor interpretation of Nietzsche, regardless of N sprouting the idea in someone's mind... thats due to their incipient reification with his ideas making it their own. — DifferentiatingEgg

I view Nietzsche as the father of postmodernism, and as a critic of existentialism. I am not alone in that assessment. Some of Nietzsche’s most notable interpreters ( Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Bataille, Heidegger , Derrida) see his work as an attack on existentialist humanism from a postmodern vantage.

What do we make of Nietzsche today? Considered by some as the father of existentialism, it seems that others hold Nietzsche in contempt, as representing the hazards of philosophy, of going too far, by going mad in the end — Nemo2124

And others view him as the father of postmodernism.

I wonder, though, whether he believes our animal nature to be conceptual owing to it being shaped by our acculturation and language acquisition (and he is stressing the continuity of the process and substrate) or if he believes other animals and human infants to also have conceptual abilities (and he is stressing the similarities between linguistically informed and non-linguistically shaped conceptuality). If it's the former, then he would seem to be closely aligned with McDowell in that regard. — Pierre-Normand

Rouse believes both animals and infants have conceptuality. The distinction he makes between humans and animals is between what he calls one-dimensional and two-dimensional intentionality. Only humans possess the latter, which not only allows our practical perceptual activities to be guided by conceptual normativity as is the case with other animals, but we can put into question those norms, in terms of what is at stake and at issue for us.

Not only did we start out with nonlinguistic cognitive and expressive capa­cities alongside the emergence of language, but those capacities have also proliferated and further developed. I think that Dreyfus’s own recognition
of this important point, coupled with a mistaken inclination to equate conceptual articulation with explicit expression in language, has been an important motivation for his resistance to McDowell’s claim that conceptual
normativity is pervasive in human engagement with the world.
We can recognize why it would be a mistake to equate conceptual articulation with linguistic expression when we acknowledge that language is not a self-contained practical–perceptual domain. Our linguistic dis­cursive practices open onto and “incorporate” other sensory/cognitive/ performative capacities, via recognitive, demonstrative, anaphoric, and indexical locutions, even while they are themselves only intelligible as an integral part of our biological capacities for practical–perceptual interaction with our surroundings.

Conceptual understanding is not something external to our practical– perceptual involvement in the world, that would then have to become “operative” in perception. Conceptually articulated discursive practice is a
distinctive way in which practical–perceptual bodily skills can develop through an extended process of niche construction and coevolution of lan­guages and language users.

Rouse treats

conceptual understanding not only as pervasive within
perception and practical coping with the world, but as practically–percep­tually constituted. In doing so, we would follow McDowell in providing a normative account of conceptual understanding (while acknowledging
Dreyfus’s insistence that this understanding can be deployed “mindlessly” and non-thematically). Yet we would also extend Dreyfus’s account of practical–perceptual skillfulness to incorporate the capacities for con­ceptual articulation that accompany the acquisition of a language. We would only challenge as mistaken Dreyfus’s separation of discursive and non-discursive practical–perceptual skills as coextensive with conceptual and non-conceptual domains.

Regarding the intelligibility of placing individuals in different worlds, this may also be a matter of stressing the overlaps, following Davidson's ideas about the principle of charity, or stressing the differences owing to the (conceptually informed) empirical content being impotent to serve as a neutral arbiter for resolving the disputes (or islands of mutual unintelligibility) at the boundary. But both stances seem to be consistent with the thesis apparently shared by Rouse and McDowell, that empirical content doesn't reside outside of the sphere of the conceptual. — Pierre-Normand

What is key here is that Rouse understands conceptuality in a fundamentally different way than does McDowell. From Rouse’s vantage, Mcdowell treats conceptuality, and language, in a detached and over-intellectualized manner , while Rouse sees both linguistic and pre-linguistic conceptuality as contextually-dependent and purpose-driven.

Roise does seem to charge McDowell with too often or too closely assimilating the intelligibility of the order of first nature (i.e. our pre-conceptual animal nature as opposed to our linguistically informed and acculturated second-nature) with the realm of laws (physics, chemistry, etc.) And I am sympathetic to this criticism.

I've had Rouse's book 'How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism' sitting on my shelves for many years and haven't read it yet just because there only are twenty-four hours in a day. But I greatly enjoyed the book ‘Yo!’ and ‘Lo!’: The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons that he co-authored with Rebecca Kukla. — Pierre-Normand

I would add that a central point of Rouse’s is that our animal nature is not pre-conceptual at all. Also, the Yo and Lo book was by Kukla and Mark Lance.

Tying this back to the OP, Rouse replaces the concept of conceptual scheme with that of normative discursive practices. Would Rouse respond differently than McDowell and Davidson to the question of whether it makes sense to talk of individuals or communities as living in ‘different worlds’? I think he would. I think Rouse’s treatment of material circumstances as already intertwined with normative practices makes the data of perceptual experience internal to social practices in a way that it is not for either Davidson or McDowell.

I am trying to remember who wrote something along the lines that, man always seek to control other men, and avoids being controlled by others. — Jamesk

Sounds like Nietzsche — Vera Mont

Or a bad reading of Nietzsche.

The relation of force to force is called "will:' That is why we must avoid at aIl costs the misinterpretations of the Nietzschean principle of the will to power. This principle doesn't mean that the will wants power or wishes to dominate. As long as the will to power is interpreted in terms of a "desire to dominate," we inevitably make it depend on established values, the only ones able to determine, in any given case or conflict, who must be "recognized" as the most powerful. We then cannot recognize the nature of the will to power as an elastic principle of aIl of our evaluations, as a hidden principle for the creation of new values not yet recognized. The will to power, says Nietzsche, consists not in coveting or even in taking but in creating and giving. Power, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will (Dionysus himself). The will to power is the differential element from which derive the forces at work, as weIl as their respective quality in a complex whole. (Deleuze on Nietzsche)

, there are all sorts of neurological disorders whose affects seem largely contained to concept recollection or word recall. Yet such disorders are not the same thing as being deaf or blind. As far as can be ascertained, it seems possible for the visual field to be largely unaffected (e.g. people can draw what they see, and navigate the world) even as a person losses the ability to attach concepts (e.g. "what a thing is and is used for") to what they experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that neurological damage can manifest itself at different levels of perceptual processing doesn’t mean that the ‘lower’ levels of processing of the visual field arent as conceptually saturated as the higher levels. The effects of lsd and optical illusions both reveal how at the lowest level conceptual expectations organize the appearance of the seen world.

I think the most obvious reason to suppose that man has the capacity for picking out plants from rocks, a branch above from the sky, or a tiger from the jungle background, is that these things exist, and that it is very important for us to recognize them directly in sensation. So, while "what is experienced" might be, in some sense, the interaction of the sense organ and ambient environment (that latter of which mediates through its interactions with the objects sensed), this does not preclude a strong "sense realism," since this sort of mediation is hardly unique in physical interactions. Indeed, all physical interactions might be said to involve some sort of mediation, yet "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," does not presuppose "everything is received as representation." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Most contributors to the Philosophy Forum share, to one extent or other, your belief that the meaning of the truth of the world is ultimately bound up with the way things are outside of , and pre-existing, our interactions with them or our schematic constructions of them, even if we never have direct acces to such a reality. The philosophical positions I endorse, however, insist that our contact with the world is neither that of indirect representation nor direct seeing of an independent reality. Instead, to perceive a world is to enact it or produce it. Let me make it clear that enaction is not the imaginative act of a mind. In interacting with our environment, we don’t internally model an outside world, we produce an actual world. More precisely , an absolutely new, never before existing aspect of world is produced through our practical engagement with our physical and social surrounds. It is neither from inside a mind nor from the world that this production of the new proceeds, but in-between the two.

The reason is that world is not a flat space of pre-existing objects for us to encounter, is that it is continually changing itself nature, and human -world interaction is just one manifestation of this. Since for the realist meaning and truth require an anchoring in a nature composed of pre-existing objects, the idea of what sounds like a chaos of Heraclitus flux would seem to destroy the very possibility of meaningful truth and replace it with nihilism. But meaning isn’t the product of fixed, pre-existing facts, it is a function of the experience of patterns of familiarity, relevance and consistency within the always changing flow of events that we enact in our inter-affecting with world. Nihilism and meaninglessness is only a possibility to the extent that we try to freeze the flow of events into fixed , pre-existing objective facts. And even when we think this way, we are still enacting a new world implicitly while we explicitly hold to our belief in the objective independence of the facts of reality for our engagement with the world.

That the enacted world of continual becoming is not a chaotic, senseless flux is demonstrated by the fact that it allows us to theorize it in realist terms as directly perceived or indirectly represented. To abandon realism for enactivism doesn’t at all mean that we have to abandon the security and stability provided by belief in independently existing ‘facts’ of nature. It instead allows us to replace the arbitrariness and duality of such models with a way of thinking which sees our relation to the world as more intimate, connected and relevantly meaningful.

This also highlights why Davidson's purely causal account is insufficient. While Davidson acknowledges that beliefs are caused by the world, he doesn't give experience itself a rational role in justification. For McDowell, following Sellars, experience is not just a causal intermediary; it's a non-inferential but conceptually structured encounter with the world that provides reasons for our beliefs — Pierre-Normand

Joseph Rouse entered into the debate involving Davidson, Brandom and McDowell, concluding that while McDowell was right to accuse Davidson’s approach of treating conceptual thought as a “frictionless spinning in a void”, McDowell’s attempt to ground conceptually-mediated perception in the nature of objects of the world ends up in the same quagmire.

Each view develops its own model of conceptual understanding as a Sellarsian “space of reasons”: Davidsonian radical interpretation, McDowell's second-nature acculturation as rational animals, Brandom's game of giving and asking for reasons, or Haugeland's account of constitutive skills, standards, and commitments. Each then tries to show how performances within this space of reasons are genuinely constrained externally, by objects, experience, or the world. Their critics, myself included, respond that only the semblance of constraint has been demonstrated: we are left with a “frictionless spinning in a void,” a second nature disconnected from any explicable relation to first nature, a self-contained game of intralinguistic moves in which perception and action always remain “external,” or a self-binding commitment with no greater normative authority and force than New Year's resolutions.

Common to these accounts is an understanding of us as thinking and knowing subjects (whether as individuals or as discursive communities) who “have” conceptions of things in the form of mental representations or intralinguistic dis-cursive commitments. “Objects” “stand against” these conceptions as external normative constraints upon what we (should) think, say, and do, via their experiential or causal impingements upon us from “outside.” In each case, their externality to the conceptual or epistemic domain (ascribed in order to provide the needed constraint or “friction”) blocks any effective engagement with epistemic justification or conceptual understanding. My account begins differently. We are not subjects confronting external objects but organisms living in active interchange with an environment. An organism is not a self-contained entity but a dynamic pattern of interaction with its surroundings (which include other conspecific organisms). The boundary that separates the organism proper from its surrounding environment is not the border of an entity but a component of a larger pattern of interaction that is the organism/environment complex.

The basic idea in Davidson's paper is fairly straight forward. That folk have different points of view can make sense only if there is some common framework from which we might notice the difference. But if we have such a common framework, then by that very fact, aren't we working in the same conceptual scheme? Doesn't the difference now become that of a disagreement within a conceptual scheme, and not between conceptual schemes? — Banno

The schemes dont have to be identical , they can be similar. And they can be alike when it comes to superficial aspects of behavior that don’t matter deeply to us, but differ profoundly concerning matters of great personal significance. One person can subsume another’s conceptual scheme as a variant of their own, thereby recognizing both the points of similarity and of difference. One person can understand another person’s conceptual scheme better than the other person can understand the first person. I dont have to understand you to know that your way of thinking about a certain matter is different from my own.

Enjoy.

https://independent.academia.edu/JoshSoffer

For as I have insisted already, though Dao has sometimes been depicted as some kind of vague or partial equivalent of the idea of God, it is better described as the most extreme possible antithesis of that idea.

I have Ziporyn's translation of the Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) and I like it. I certainly don't put myself up against him as an expert, but I understand the place of god in Taoism differently. Taoism isn't atheistic in the sense we normally mean it. It doesn't deny god's existence, it just (mostly) doesn't address it. It's non-theistic not anti-theistic. — T Clark

Ziporyn’s claim is that what monotheisms and the atheisms of the ‘three horsemen’ (Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris) have in common is belief in a single purpose behind existence. For theists that purpose is God and the laws of morality he intends, and for Dawkins et al it is the sole authority of reason. Ziporyn argues that Daoism believes in no ultimate purpose, intention, principle, morality.

Objectivity in the metaphysical sense is an unwarranted absolutizing or sedimentation of half of a two-step process. The philosophical worldview of objectivism is read off from an aspect of this process and made into a doctrine about metaphysics, when in fact it’s just one of many tools in the hands of a hungry animal. So even though it may be the case that, to the extent that we are admitting reasoning at all, the monotheist God can be disproved, there will always be Tertullian, that fascinatingly volatile and wickedly histrionic Church Father, who blurted out the unsurpassable final word on this issue way back in the early third century: I believe because it is absurd, said Tertullian. And no amount of reasoning will be of any use in convincing someone who has declined to accept the ultimate authority of reason.

It is no use saying, “Look, Tertullian, you’re already using reason, you tacitly admit it, so how can you exempt this one issue from application of the same standard you use when you cross the street?” Why must he have only one standard? Should he do it because it’s reasonable? But he’s already shown he’s willing to eschew reason when he feels like it. If we think of beliefs as tools, this sort of move becomes unremarkable: why should I have only one tool that I use on every kind of material? A hammer
for pounding nails, a nail-clipper for clipping nails—for not all nails are the same.

We call all things “things,” but not all things are the same or require the same type of treatment. The illegitimate step lies in assuming that there must be a single standard applied at all times, for all types of situations, regarding every type of subject matter. Why assume that there is any unity of this kind applying to the world, that all existence must form one single system with a single set of laws and rules applying to all of it? That too is part of the circular assumption of the sole universal authority of Reason—an assumption that, I would argue, ironically has deep roots precisely in the idea of God.

The Latin (axio + arche) means Value/Principle & Ruling/Primary. The article says It's “a novel view that pictures the creative power . . . . as a non-personal force that creates the best world . . . but not for us.” {my bold} Also, “Axiarchists argue that only a non-causal force or principle can ultimately explain why things exist”. As an abstract, impersonal, natural, acausal creative principle it seems quite similar to Lao Tse's Tao. Yet, in terms of the value-based “path” or “flow” of the universe, it may be analogous to an algorithm-crunching computer program. — Gnomon

For an alternate atheistic take on Taoism , especially the thinking of Zhuangzi, I highly recommend the recently published book by Brook Ziporyn, one of the top translators of ancient Chinese texts. It is called ‘Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond‘.

If there is any tradition that is really marked by its consistent and thoroughgoing atheism in the sense that matters, it is the Chinese philosophical tradition. This is true of all three of the main classical traditions, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. The clearest and most paradigmatic anti-God resource in the Chinese tradition is the conception of Dao, as the term comes to be developed in what are later known as “philosophical Daoist” texts such as the Laozi (Daodejing) and the Zhuangzi. For as I have insisted already, though Dao has sometimes been depicted as some kind of vague or partial equivalent of the idea of God, it is better described as the most extreme possible antithesis of that idea. Indeed, classical Daoist thought can very well be described as one long polemic against the idea of purpose—the idea of conscious design, of intentional valuation as a source of existence, of deliberate creation, of control, of God.

↪Joshs Could you elucidate the bearing this has on the OP? For example how this might provide a basis for ethical normativity? — Wayfarer

The awareness of the incessantly changing nature of experience is not a hinderance to, but the route of access into a robustly ethical involvement in the world. Dynamical changing life doesnt unfold as arbitrary disconnected moments but as a mesh of intertwined social practices. Currently, I’m enjoying that work of Hanne De Jaegher, who clarifies the relation between ethics and enactivism.

“Humanity is shorthand for humanity-partly-produced-by-nature and Nature shorthand for nature-humans-participate-in. Networks of biological processes interlace with regional practices in what Haraway (2016) calls sympoietic (“making-with”) webs.”

Sense-making is “the active adaptive engagement of an autonomous system with its environment in terms of the differential virtual implications for its ongoing form of life. [It is t]he basic, most general form of all cognitive and affective activity manifested experientially as a structure of caring” (Di Paolo et al. 2018, 332)…Whether we act or we perceive, whether we emote or we cognize, a structure of caring is at play in all forms of sense-making

Individuating systems in relation open the possibility of new metastable states to which they can transit. These transitions are not in themselves normative because they are open; they follow no “algorithm”. But they have or express values, the relation between current and potential states…to act ethically must involve forms of knowing (incorporated in practices of behaviour, emotion, and reflection) about values in configurations of becoming, i.e., about the good expressed not in the maintenance of a current configuration but in its future (and inevitable) transformation.”

“At its fundamental, engaged knowing requires a particular attitude to flourish, the attitude of letting-be; otherwise, it degrades. Limited knowing can either take the form of overdetermination, i.e., a knower who attempts to force the known into an obstinate epistemic frame, or it can take the form of underdetermination, i.e., disengagement, a “respect” for the known that forgoes any serious relation with it, letting-be degrading into letting-go. Both are fundamentally attitudes of not-caring, situations in which participation is thwarted, leading to epistemic injustices (Fricker 2007). Both can also be resisted or contested, making knowing an open arena for struggle. Engaged/engaging epistemology is both descriptive and prescriptive; it tells us what lies at the basis of a knowing relation, and it tells us also that there are better and worse ways of knowing. If a knowing relation is to flourish it should not be dominated by either end of the relation, which means inevitably that to engage in knowing is to engage in a mutual transformation, a co-becoming of knower and known.”

“ To care ethically is to be morally attuned to differences in becoming and to act in ways that cultivate, nurture, protect, and/ or repair configurations of becoming according to values. Caring for the sick and vulnerable is to help them revert a narrowing in their world. Caring for growth is to promote the value of openness and expansion in possibilities of becoming. Caring for the oppressed is to act so as to destroy patterns of blocking and neglect towards actors whose becoming is systematically thwarted.”(2021)

“While there is not one truth to how or what something is, the example shows that there are also not infinite ways in which we can know things. As Maclaren says, “[w]e can do injustices in the way we take things up”. In our knowing of things, we never fully know them. But the real problem is that we can “know” them quite wrongly.”

Arbitrary doesn't imply 'unconditioned' so your point, sir, is a red herring / strawman. My point: a 'consistent relativist' forfeits all standards for deciding between competing or incommensurable truth-claims, ergo her preference is arbitrary. — 180 Proof

There are always standards to be consulted in matters of competing arguments, but these standards get their intelligibility from within some discursive system, rather than being external to all systems. Paradigm shifts in the sciences are neither arbitrary nor do they take place under the control of some extra-discursive standard of correctness.

Well said, I say. But foundational ethics is, alas, lost. — Astrophel

One can only hope. Henry never struck me as an ethical foundationalist.

That sounds complicated and a lot like hard work. Is this exhausting to live by?

As a non-philosopher I find this hard to grasp or at least accept. Is it making too much out of too little change? — Tom Storm

Every moment we are conscious our perceptual system translates a constantly changing kaleidoscope of sensations into stable meanings, and the way we tend to think about language accomplishes the same thing by ignoring the fact that every use of a word involves a subtle reinvention of its meaning . So if we typically normalize and stabilize our world without effort , what advantage is there in noticing the underlying variations?

Whenever you suffer negative emotions, you are presented with an opportunity to examine your taken-for-granted assumptions about the world, assumptions which failed to prepare you to anticipate the changes in your world which triggered your anxiety, fear , anger or guilt. My point is that the kinds of thinking which assume a world composed of sold, unchanging physical object, principles or laws is a world of violent polarization, because arbitrary, violent change goes along with such assumptions That’s why fundamentalisms of all kinds are inherently cruel and unforgiving. The price you pay for a world of fixed and nailed down concepts is capricious oppositions and contradictions

By contrast, the incessantly changing universe I described in my earlier post is at the same time a flow of extraordinary self-intimacy and intricacy. Abandoning fixed truths, objects, concepts, laws and principles at the same time significantly reduces the perceived arbitrariness, violence and polarization of change, and allows for a more peaceful anticipation of what is to come.

Quine stabilized the world with his naturalism, ridding the equation of pesky semantics. You affirm the pesky semantics, but deny naturalism. Your idea of objectivity is certainly different from his. Or is it? — Astrophel

I deny Quine’s version of naturalism, but I affirm Joseph Rouse’s naturalism, which doesn’t force the normativity of scientific inquiry into the constraints of a sovereign view of physics.

No doubt, the "slightly different semantic sense" occurs from moment to moment, but does this really undo self persistence? How is it that I am the same person that I was a moment ago? Technically, you would say, I am not. But on the other hand, this belies the very concrete "sense" of my existence, which is not analytically reducible. — Astrophel

Aren't there times when ‘being the same’ matters and other times when ‘being different’ matters? The point is that it is not the question of persistent self-identity which is primary but why it is important and for what purposes. There is relative ongoing stability in purpose and mood, and this stitches together continually changing moments of sense. We don’t need an unchanging world, we need a world whose changes we can navigate coherently, with some sense of familiarity.

IMO, the relativist sees 'many paths to many mountains and therefore arbitrarily choses between them' whereas the pluralist sees many paths up the mountain s/he (we) cannot escape from and seeks the shortest to the summit (C.S. Peirce ... D. Deutsch). — 180 Proof

The choice can never be arbitrary, precisely because our attitudes, values and actions must always conditioned from within a specific system of discursive practices which legitimate and make intelligible our ethical choices. The consequences of our decisions matter deeply to us in ways that we recognize as profoundly relevant in our lives as interpreted from the vantage of our involvement within partially shared ways of life. Nothing could be more arbitrary than this. It would be a mistake to separate our discursive practices from the ‘way the things really are’. Our practices are directly plugged into the world; they are the way that world shows itself to us, and there is no way to get beyond or above these practices to a non-discursive reality.

Most accused of radical relativism agree that it is self-refuting, and for that reason it is a straw man argument. Joseph Rouse puts forth a good explanation of the difference between ‘anything goes’ relativism and the non-sovereign, ‘normativity all the way down’ positions writers like Foucault actually espouse.

Relativism is an assertion of epistemic sovereignty, which proclaims the epistemic "rights" of all knowers or knowledges. The most fashionable forms of epistemic relativism today, which are also those frequently and mistakenly associated with Foucault, are those which dismiss all claims to objectivity or truth as merely masks for power. But such claims are the exact epistemological parallel to the radical critique of law as itself a form of violence, which Foucault insisted always "assumes that power must be exercised in accordance with a fundamental lawfulness." To make this assumption, whether about power or knowledge, is to remain committed to a conception of sovereignty, from which such fundamental lawfulness can be rightly assessed.

What, then, does a post-sovereign epistemology have to say about the legitimation of knowledge? The crucial point is not that there is no legitimacy, but rather that questions about legitimation are on the same "level" as any other epistemic conflict, and are part of a struggle for truth. In the circulation of contested, heterogeneous knowledges, disputes about legitimacy, and the criteria for legitimacy, are part and parcel of the dynamics of that circulation. Understanding knowledge as "a strategical situation" rather than as a definitive outcome places epistemological reflection in the midst of ongoing struggles to legitimate (and delegitimate) various skills, practices, and assertions. Recognizing that the boundaries of science (or of knowledge) are what is being contested, epistemology is within those contested boundaries.”