Why would I need one? — Arcane Sandwich

Have you actually read After Finitude? I don’t find a single
positive statement about correlationism in it. Do you?

Correlationism is a live option in today's Continental debates. It is also a live option in the Analytic tradition. There is nothing inherently wrong with it. There is nothing bad about it… Perhaps some aspects of it have to be reformulated, perhaps others discarded, perhaps others reinforced. — Arcane Sandwich

Could you give a quote from Meillassoux supporting this assertion? All I find are claims that correlationism has been a disaster.

But that's my point, Josh. Language can't be a sort of free-for-all game. It needs rules. And I think that those rules are something akin to what lawyers call "Letter of the Law", as something different than the "Spirit of the Law". Interpretations (Spirit of the Law) are all fine and dandy, but sometimes we just have to go back to the Letter of the Law.

Do you disagree? — Arcane Sandwich

Could you just tell me what words you would replace “is a bad thing” with? I’m dying to know.

Where does it say that Harman and Meillassoux say "correlationism is a bad thing"? — Arcane Sandwich

Ya got me there.

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux.
— Joshs

Except for the fact that they don't say that. And even if they did, shouldn't you include Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier in that group? They are, at the end of the day, "the Founding Fathers of Speculative Realism", if you will. — Arcane Sandwich

They don’t?

The loosely demarcated movement known as Speculative Realism (SR) got its title from a conference named Speculative Realism: A One-Day Workshop, held at Goldsmiths University in April 2007. [1] The speakers – and original members – were, Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Quentin Meillassoux, even if the influence of SR has since spread well beyond the work of these respective philosophers. It would however be important to note from the outset that there are important and fundamental differences between the positions of the various thinkers that are often grouped under this umbrella term…

What is often said to almost exclusively unite all the original and current proponents of SR is their commitment to the critique of what Quentin Meillassoux terms ‘correlationism’ or what Graham Harman calls the ‘philosophy of (human) access.’..both terms are to an extent similar in terms of what they critique, namely (what proponents of SR see as) the prevalent tendency within Kantian and post-Kantian thought to treat the relation between thought and world as the primary subject matter of philosophy. In making such a claim, they argue that philosophy since Kant lamentably negates the possibility of thinking or knowing what the world could be like ‘in itself’, that is, independently of our all-too-human relation to it. (On Correlationism and the Philosophy of (Human) Access: Meillassoux and Harman.
Niki Young)

I like to think that I have about the normal number of friends and acquaintances. There’s about 30 people I’m in regular contact with, and almost all are people like me, directly connected to the arts in some way. Teachers, composers, poets, painters, writers and such. Yet not one of these people, or any of my relatives ever talks about, or ever mentions or reads anything about philosophy or philosophers. — Rob J Kennedy

You may not talk explicitly about philosophy or philosophers, but that doesn't mean that you dont ever think philosophically. Every time you take a step back from your art and think about how you are approaching it , and question how you might gain a different perspective on it, you are thinking philosophically. Artistic movements are comprised of innovators who asked themselves how they could express themselves through their art in a way that departed from the accepted approaches surrounding them. Only a minority of these artists ( William Blake, Terrance Malick, Kandinsky, Mondrian, Shelley, DuChamp, Wagner, Sartre, etc) will feel comfortable, however, in articulating their philosophical insights as full realized, concrete verbal concepts. It is this latter skill you appear to have in mind as what you call philosophy. Is there some specific personality type we could link to this? I doubt it. I certainty wouldn’t say that philosophers are inherently more introverted or isolated than painters, poets or novelists. Any form of creativity that is non-collaborative will require long periods of solitude.

I would turn the OP’s question on its head. What does it say about someone who calls themself an artist and yet who has no interest in philosophy? My suspicion is that if none of your artistically-inclined acquaintances have any interest in philosophy, then they are also less likely to be interested in modes of creativity outside of their narrow domain, or be interested in significantly innovating within their domain. Great art movements have always been filled with eclectic, curious souls whose art borrows widely from poetry , philosophy, politics, science, literature and spirituality, and everything in between. Perhaps what appears to you as a peculiarity of philosophy is more a symptom of a lack of innovative spirit among your social circle.

It is impossible to situate Deleuze within the "correlationist" stereotype — Number2018

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist. — fdrake

Who says correlationism is a bad thing? Answer: folks like Harman and Meillassoux. You may be aware that Meillassoux has been accused of positing an ontological dualism between matter and thought, and Harman has been called a rational subjectivist. In arguing against what they perceive as the subjective idealism of ‘correlationism’ they succumb to their own strains of dualistic idealism, and this prevents them from understanding that there are other ways of thinking a correlation among elements of the world besides one which assumes a transcendent subjectivity. Let’s look at Meillassoux’s definition of correlationism:

Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another. Not only does it become necessary to insist that we never grasp an object 'in itself', in isolation from its relation to the subject, but it also becomes necessary to maintain that we can never grasp a subject that would not always-already be related to an object.

if we substitute for ‘subject and object’ ‘inside vs outside’, We arrive at Deleuze’s assemblages. He gives us a correlationism (connections, conjunctions, resonances, series, consistencies, diagrams, surveys) produced by non-oppositional, non-hierarchical, pre-subjective differences-in-themselves. This is not to say that Deleuzian assemblages don’t represent a kind of idealism (the virtual is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’), but it is of a quite different sort than that which reifies subjectivity.

He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components.
“The forces within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism, or a-grammaticalities which supersede the signifier” (Deleuze, 2006, p. — Number2018

Yes, but wouldn’t these components lose their characteristics as stratified forms as they are plugged into planes of consistency, and wouldn’t this plane of consistency integrate this outside into its own pre-personal diagrammatic order?

But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization?...Now there is no hint in all of this of a chaotic white night or an undifferentiated black night. There are rules, rules of "plan(n)ing," of
diagramming, as we will see later on, or elsewhere. The abstract machine is not random; the continuities, emissions and combinations, and conjunctions do not occur in just any fashion.”
(ATP)

But one might get the impression that the molar level lacks autonomy and primarily reflects the derivative effects generated by the molecular level. Differently, molar formations do possess their own regime, and they react back upon the molecular forces from which they emerge. They attempt to organize and suppress what exists on the molecular level. As a result, the non-representative desiring machines begin to form reactive structures. Yet, without some kind of causal relation between the two levels, all of this may remain at an exclusively descriptive level. — Number2018

Yes, the actual and the virtual communicate and affect each other as heterogeneities. And yet notice how Deleuze characterizes the molar as ‘false’, as a distorted surface effect , an external envelope, as hiding that which gives rise to it, which is its principle. So yes the molar has its autonomy, but it’s the autonomy of an illusion.

In accordance with Heidegger's ontological intuition, difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever by the identical, the similar, the analogous or the opposed. There must be a differenciation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator, by virtue of which the different is gathered all at once rather than represented on condition of a prior resemblance, identity, analogy or opposition. As for these latter instances, since they cease to be conditions, they become no more than effects of the primary difference and its differenciation, overall or surface effects which characterise the distorted world of representation, and express the manner in which the in-itself of difference hides itself by giving rise to that which covers it.

The two repetitions are not independent. One is the singular subject, the interiority and the heart of the other, the depths of the other. The other is only the external envelope, the abstract effect. The repetition of dissymmetry is hidden within symmetrical ensembles or effects; a repetition of distinctive points underneath that of ordinary points; and everywhere the Other in the repetition of the Same. This is the secret, the most ... profound repetition: it alone provides the principle of the other one, the reason for the blockage of concepts.” “ The material sense results from this other, as if secreted by it like a shell.”

“What it comes down to is that we cannot content our­selves with a dualism or summary opposition between the strata and the destratified plane of consistency. The strata themselves are animated and defined by relative speeds of deterritorialization; moreover, absolute
deterritorialization is there from the beginning, and the strata are spin­offs, thickenings on a plane of consistency that is everywhere, always pri­mary and always immanent.”

Are those authors arguing that Object Oriented Philosophy is materialist? That would be a convoluted thing to argue, I suppose. Harman is explicit about his immaterialism. — Arcane Sandwich

I think what is important to the authors is that Harman, like the others they discuss in the paper, break away from a subject and language-centered ontology in favor of one that does not slight the agential power of non-human objects.

Graham Harman is not a materialist, Joshs, nor is Object Oriented Ontology a kind of materialism. Harman is against materialism. He has an article (which is a really good read, BTW, even if I don't agree with it) called I Am Also of the Opinion that Materialism Must Be Destroyed. He has been an immaterialist ever since his first book, Tool-Being. — Arcane Sandwich

I was drawing from the paper ‘ WHAT IS NEW MATERIALISM?’ by Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan & Thomas Nail

The second strand of negative new materialism is “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) – a term Graham Harman coined that defines a theoretical commitment to thinking the real beyond the human experience of matter. “What is real in the cosmos,” he asserts, “are forms wrapped inside forms, not durable specks of material that reduce everything else to derivative status. If this is ‘materialism,' then it is the first materialism in history to deny the existence of matter.” For Harman, the essence of beings is to withdraw from all the objects that compose it and think it. As such, being is never something anthropocentric, experienced, or relational but is something absolutely and non-relationally “withdrawn” from everything else, as though it were comple-tely “vacuum sealed.” As it happens, this essen-tialist view of identity as something radically self-contained is in fact perfectly captured by the three discrete, individually circumscribed circles, zeros, or “O's” that have become the theory's standard iconic shorthand. This view also leads Harman to affirm what he calls “a new sort of ‘formalism.'

Timothy Morton similarly argues against “some kind of substrate, or some kind of unformed matter”78 in favor of essential forms that infinitely exceed the human domain of meaning-making. For example, Morton describes “hyperobjects” such as global warming as “real entities whose primordial reality is withdrawn from humans.” For him, as for Harman and Tristan Garcia, “objects” ultimately refer to an infinitely hidden essence that never even partially reveals itself in any relation.“

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. I see that as a loss of flexibility in the theory due to its usual emphasis.

Edit: "New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation. — fdrake

It depends on which brand of New Materialism you prefer.
For ‘negative’ new materialists like Graham Harman (Object Oriented Ontology) and Quentin Meillassoux (Speculative Realism) nature can be thought independently of the sociois, since matter is independent of or withdrawn from thought. By contrast, in the performative new materialism of Karen Barad and Vicky Kirby, nature and the social, ontology and epistemology are inherently co-implicated and mutually constituting. This is consistent with Deleuze’s account, which does not split nature off from the psychic or the social.(“… the plane of consistency knows nothing of the difference between the artificial and the natural.”)

“Every abstract machine is linked to other abstract machines, not only because they are inseparably political, economic, scientific, artistic, ecological, cosmic—perceptive, affective, active, thinking, physical, and semiotic—but because their various types are as intertwined as their operations are convergent. Mechanosphere.” (ATP)

↪Joshs - Not every thread is about perception. For example, this thread is not about perception. — Leontiskos

Would you say it is about cognition?

↪Joshs - Yeah, you rolled in your schtick. Model/norm != perception — Leontiskos

And what is your schtick? How would you characterize the role of perception?

Looks like you need to try reading that post again — Leontiskos

You claimed that a model or norm implies something true and pre-existing in the external world on which it is based. The quote I included argues that perception and cognition are not models or representations of a pre-existing world, they enact a world through guided action.

When one talks about a magnifying glass and looks at a magnifying glass while under the impression that the magnifying glass itself is the object of interest, they have misunderstood what a magnifying glass is, and how to use it. So too with norms, models, frames, etc — Leontiskos

Yes, but human perception is neither a lens nor a camera.
It is not designed for observation but for guided action.

This central concern of the enactive position stands in contradistinction to the received view that perception is fundamentally the truthful reconstruction of a portion of the physical world through a registering of existing environmental information. In the enactive approach reality is not a given: it is perceiver-dependent, not because the perceiver “constructs” it as he or she pleases, but because what counts as a relevant world is inseparable from the structure of theperceiver.

A classical illustration of the perceptual guidance of action is the study of Richard Held and Alan Hein, who raised kittens in the dark and exposed them to lightonly under controlled conditions. A first group of animals was allowed to move around normally, but they were harnessed to a simple carriage and basket that contained the second group of animals. The two groups, therefore, shared the same visual experience, but the second group was entirely passive. When the animals were released after a few weeks of this treatment, the first group of kittens behaved normally, but those who had been carried around behaved as if they were blind: they bumped into objects and fell over edges. This beautiful study illustrates the – enactive – view that objects are seen not by the visual extraction of features, but rather by the visual guidance of action. Similar results have been obtained under various other circumstances and studied even at the level of the single cell.

If the reader feels that this example is fine for cats, but irrelevant for humans, let us consider another case. Paul Bach y Rita designed a video camera for blind persons that can stimulate multiple points on the skin by electrically activated vibration. Thus images formed with the camera were translated into patterned tactile sensations – with the following results. Patterns projected onto the skin had no “visual” content if the subject remained motionless.

However, if the subject directed the camera by moving his head, hands, or body for a few hours, a remarkable transformation occurred. The tactile sensations became visual perceptions, the patterns of vibration on the skin were not felt but seen as images projected into the space being explored by the bodily directed “gaze” of the video camera. Thus in order to experience “real objects out there,” it was enough for the person to actively direct the camera. This experience is an excellent example of the perceiver-dependent nature of what otherwise seems an internal representation of a perceiver-independent world of features.

Cognitive science is waking up to the full importance of the realization that perception does not consist in the recovery of a pre-given world, but rather in the perceptual guidance of action in a world that is inseparable from our sensorimotor capacities, and that “higher” cognitive structures also emerge from recurrent patterns of perceptually guided action. Thus cognition consists not of representations but of embodied action. Thus we can say that the world we know is not pre-given; it is, rather, enacted through our history of structural coupling, and the temporal hinges that articulate enaction are rooted in the number of alternative microworlds that are activated in every situation. These alternatives are the source of both common sense and creativity in cognition.

Thus it seems more and more compelling to look at knowledge – to understand understanding – in a manner that can only be called post-Cartesian: that is knowledge
appears more and more as being built from small domains composed of microworlds and microidentities. Behavioral repertoires vary throughout the animal kingdom, but what all living cognitive beings seem to have in common is know- how constituted on the basis of the concrete. Thus what we call general and abstract are aggregates of readiness-for-action.( Francisco Varela, Ethical Know-how)

Manuel DeLanda has the best "post-Deleuzian" assembly theory, IMHO. He takes a few elements from Mario Bunge (specifically, his concept of causality). I don't accept assembly theory myself, I prefer ontologies that are more object-oriented. — Arcane Sandwich

DeLanda does have an interesting take on assemblages. I read Graham Harman, and came to the conclusion that his approach is a throwback to certain strands of 19th century empiricism.

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis.

I'm sure you agree with that, I'm mostly spitballing — fdrake

Ah yes, I think might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages.

It is only at the submicroscopic level of desiring-machines that there exists a functionalism—machinic arrangements, an engineering of desire; for it is only there that functioning and formation, use and assembly, product and production merge. All molar functionalism is false, since the organic or social machines are not formed in the same way they function, and the technical machines are not assembled in the same way they are used, but imply precisely the specific conditions that separate their own production from their distinct product. Only what is not produced in the same way it functions has a meaning, and also a purpose, an intention. The desiring-machines on the contrary represent nothing, signify nothing, mean nothing, and are exactly what one makes of them, what is made with them, what they make in themselves.”(AO)

But who cares, there are many different kinds of assemblage theory, and I’m not suggesting you’re obliged to stick religiously to Deleuze.

Artefacts are made from the stuff around us. It's not an either-or — Banno

Not from, with. It’s an important distinction. Artifacts are produced by the way we incorporate elements of our world. What that stuff ‘is’ is their role in the normative gestalts we construct.

I find this some of the most interesting ideas on the forum. The notion that scientific laws and maths are contingent human artifacts rather than the product of some Platonic realm seems more intuitively correct to me. But as an untheorized amateur, I would say that. — Tom Storm

And can you see how this notion doesn’t take away from science the usefulness that we know it has in our lives? People tend to go into a panic when you suggest his to them, as if the ground has been pulled out from under them and suddenly cats will be mating with dogs and murderers will run rampant in the streets. But accepting this idea of science as contingent artifact leaves everything exactly as it has been. It just gives us further options we didn’t see before.

↪Banno This is one of the main points of OC. We often refer to things as true without being justified, just as we can use the word know without it being JTB. They're just different language games. In other words, you can hold them as true in practice, e.g., chess rules — Sam26

Chess rules are not true or false in themselves, the moves in the game which these rules specify are true or false.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
199. The reason why the use of the expression "true or false" has something misleading about it is that it is like saying "it tallies with the facts or it doesn't", and the very thing that is in question is what "tallying" is here.
200. Really "The proposition is either true or false" only means that it must be possible to decide for or against it. But this does not say what the ground for such a decision is like.
205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet false
(On Certainty)

Since the laws of chess are the ground in the basis of which moves in the game can be correct or incorrect, the laws of chess are ‘not true, not yet false’. Is this what you meant?

But doesn’t that assume the very separation between mind and world that elsewhere you’re very keen to criticize? Humans are, after all, part of the very world which mathematics describes so effectively. — Wayfarer

On the contrary, it is because mind-body and world are inseparable that the world we perceive is a world that matters to us in particular ways We are not just part of the world, we interact with our portion of the world in normative ways. as does one aspect of the world with another. There is no one way the world is in itself , it world can show up for us in many different ways, depending on how we choose to cut it up. If we carve it up by way of idealisms like mathematical logic , bodies ina geometric space and physical causality, it will appear to ‘miraculously’ conform to our calculative specifications. If we burrow beneath these idealisms, the world will show up for us not as conforming to mathematical rules and laws, but as amenable to an infinite variety of patterns of normative relationality with respect to our practices or knowing.

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person. — frank

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves.

why is it that mathematical predictions so often anticipate unexpected empirical discoveries? He doesn’t attempt to explain why that is so, as much as just point it out. — Wayfarer

Apparently he has some ideas concerning why that is so.
Wigner wrote:

“It is important to point out that the mathematical formulation of the physicist's often crude experience leads in an uncanny number of cases to an amazingly accurate description of a large class of phenomena."He adds that the observation "the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics," properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, "is now truer than ever before.”

I myself am a critic of ‘scientism’, the attempt to subordinate all knowledge to mathematical quantfication, but I don’t think that invalidates Wigner’s point. — Wayfarer

If Wigner’s point is that the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics, then that’s precisely what I’m trying to invalidate. It’s the human-constructed norms of nature that are written in the language of mathematics, not anything to do with nature ‘in itself’.

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality — frank

When you talk about treating a person as a subject, you bring into play notions of empathy, seeing things from the other’s perspective, allowing yourself to become involved in their situation. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target. Since the movement of their experience involves a vantage that is different from yours, you must be able to navigate not just the contextually changing vicissitudes of experience as you experience them, but be able to some extent to see these changes from another’s eyes. Moral concepts can help or hinder this project depending on how well they take into account the stance-dependency of experience, and the mobility of stances in response to changing circumstances. We may accept that persons are not stationary in their attitudes, opinions and responses to the world and to each other, because our attitudes are mutually affected by interaction with each other, but we may still feel it necessary to impose stationary moral principles on the dynamics of our involvement with each other.

↪Sam26 You don't seem to have said anything of substance with which I would disagree, so long as you agree that hinge propositions are true. — Banno

I thought the whole point of hinge positions , language games and forms of life was that the concept of truth was precisely irrelevant to them? Hinge propositions, as the grounds of truth-apt assertions, are themselves neither true nor false.

94. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.
199. The reason why the use of the expression "true or false" has something misleading about it is that it is like saying "it tallies with the facts or it doesn't", and the very thing that is in question is what "tallying" is here.
200. Really "The proposition is either true or false" only means that it must be possible to decide for or against it. But this does not say what the ground for such a decision is like.
205. If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet false
(On Certainty)

What the anti-realist is really point out is that how the world appears to us is in some important way the product of the mind-brain. We perceive but also interpret the sensory data, and those judgements are internal to the mind, such that we don't notice the role our mind plays in constructing what we take to be independently real — Wayfarer

Would you consider expanding your concept of idealism to include not just the mind but also the body, the organism and perhaps even the inanimate world? There is plenty of work by Merleau-Ponty (corporeal intersubjectivity) and enactivism (sensorimotor coupling) showing how the interpretive and constructive contributions you attribute to the mind are in fact the product of a holistic web of agency that ties together mind and body as an inseparable mesh. It is not strictly speaking the mind that constructs the world, but the embodied organism.

Any organism capable of sensation and movement, even an amoeba, constructs and interprets its world relative to norms of sensorimotor engagement with it. With Barad, Deleuze, Haraway and Rouse we are able to include the inanimate world as itself organized agentially (configurative assemblages) relative to itself, such that one part of the world interprets another by intra-affectiing with it. Expanding your conception of agency would allow you to avoid the charge of anthropocentrism.

Can you explain what about Wigner’s famous paper you think is confused? — Wayfarer

Wigner believed that mathematics is unreasonably effective at producing forms of description that ‘just so happen’ to fit the patterns of the physical world remarkably well. In so doing, he confused a passive representation of how things really are with an organizing scheme that forces us to see the world in a particular way (mathematical idealization) and to ignore other equally valid ways of conceiving it.

s the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory. — fdrake

This may be a quibble, but it seems me a difference between Gallagher’s approach (and other enactivists) and Deleuze’s is that Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality. The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages. Foucault comments:

The Logic of Sense can be read as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology of Perception. In this latter text, the body-organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations which arise from the perception of things, while, according to Deleuze, phantasms form the impenetrable and incorporeal surface of bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped that falsely presents itself as a centered organism and distributes at its periphery the increasing remoteness of things.

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field.
— Joshs

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that. — frank

The propositional statement ‘x is y’ involves the manipulation of logical symbols. Cognitive science, using the computer as its model, used to depict all cognitive processes by way of symbol manipulation inside the head. More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping Just because we can use symbol manipulation models such as ‘s=p’ doesnt mean that the underlying cognitive processes operate this way.

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously. — frank

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment.

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication. — frank

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field. Seeing the world o e way for the purposes of drawing and another for the purposes of walking is a matter of a change in the manner of discernment.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.
— Joshs

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought. — frank

There are many things one is not explicitly aware of when one is driving, such as the physical actions involved in driving the car. One can be daydreaming about how the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns, and not remember any of the sights along the way or how one navigated the route to get to the destination. These conceptual aspects that one was not paying explicit attention to were nonetheless made use of in a implicit way. They were below the level of but never far from explicit awareness. Their proximity to explicit consciousness is demonstrated whenever something unexpected happens with the car. It may be a pothole or there may be a strange engine noise, and suddenly one’s attentional focus is immediately fixed on how one is driving , where one is , etc.

As far as seeing relative stability as absolute identity, what many fail to understand is that the experiencing of anything as absolutely self-identical over time, which traditional philosophies count on to ground ‘truth’, not only requires that a thing is qualitatively changing with respect to itself moment by moment.’, but it is the meaningful, relevant way in which it changes itself that gives us the sense of its continued identity.

Just to keep the argument clear here, what should we say the description "a cat" is contingent upon? Obviously I'm not looking for a reply along the lines of "It's contingent upon language" -- that goes without saying. But what else? What are the factors that suggest that particular bit of language? — J

Language itself is contingent on our material interactions with the world, interactions which constitute a field of possibilities of action out of which objects emerge as what they are. It is our doings that produce such fields. If we are deprived at an early age of the ability to touch, pick up and interact with things, we don’t develop the ability to see them as meaningful objects. We see a visual field, but the meaning of object only makes sense in terms of what we can do with it.

I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary. — frank

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. That is to say, seeing colors and contrasts and lines and textures is not seeing purely what is there without any mediation from prior conceptually-derived expectations , any more than is seeing the visual field in terms of trees, houses and cars. It is just a different sort of conceptual stance.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.

When he writes, "The underlying dif­ficulty is their effort to separate rational, normative relations among semantic contents from their realization by humans as living organisms who evolved and developed in discursively articulated environments," is this a somewhat awkward equivalent to "There are no propositions that aren't 1st person singular or plural"? — J

The way I think he would put it is ‘all propositions, including 1st person plural, are derivative of 1st person singular stances, but the 1st person singular includes within its own autonomy its discursive, partially shared circumstances with others.

being a bishop is a way of treating that piece of wood, being a dollar coin is a way of treating that piece of metal and being two animals is a way of treating that cat and dog. — Banno

My point would merely be that, when paleontologists unearth two fossilized birds who fell into a tar pit together when the branch they were sitting on snapped 2 million years ago, they (and we) are justified in thinking that there were indeed two birds that fell into the tar pit. This, despite this event being prior to man or any human languages.
— Count Timothy von Icarus
Did you think that somehow this is incompatible with the account I gave? How? — Banno

A way of treating something as something is a convention. How can a convention pre-exist the existence of human beings on the planet? It’s one thing to say that there was a world prior to the arrival of humans and our conventions of language, but it’s another to specify the nature of that world (two birds, or a cat and a dog) on the basis of our contingent discursive accounts of it. It is neither true nor false to say that there were a countable number of animals prior to the arrival of humans.

Predication handles recognition, likeness, etc. The way predication works is that the potentially transient properties of an object are specified.

The object has to be held as unchanging relative to the properties.

For instance when I say the wax has melted, the wax has to be temporally stable. If it's not, then the wax has ceased to exist. Therefore it can't have melted — frank

But prior to the use of predication, perception handles recognition and likeness. Predication is just an abstractive invention tacked onto perception. Just because predication may require an unchanging nature relative to properties, this does not mean that perception does. Perception recognizes ‘unchanging’ objected all the time, even though built into the recognition is that this self-persistence is only relative self-persistence, a way of continuing to be the same slightly differently. Recognizing sameness over time as inferential compatibility is optimally useful, whereas the propositional requirement of absolute unchangingness leads to confusions and the appearance of contradictions and incompatibilities.

Words are meaningful only when we put them to work. Repeat a word over and over again and it gradually loses all sense of meaning. We understand propositions as meaningful not because of but in spite of our presupposing them to be dealing with an unchanging identity. Wittgenstein describes the notion of changeless repetition as language on holiday or an engine idling.

“..the very attempt to achieve a clear view of matters by suspending usage renders them opaque, like shining light on a developing picture. This is what Wittgenstein means by his famous claim that “the confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.”

“…detaching a phenomenon from absorbed activity drains it of the meaning that flows through it while knitted into its language-game. It is this shriveled, barren husk of meaning that seems strikingly incapable of generating vibrant communication. Instead of a profound discovery about language or meaning or thought, however, this is just an odd fact about us, like the way repeating a word over and over again (“noodle, noodle, noodle . . .”) reduces it to a thick senseless sound. It offers no secret insight into the profound workings of anything, except the folly of philosophy. (Lee Braver on Wittgenstein)

Should we say that, at some given level of demonstration, we have "raw, unmediated perception"? Something we can point to and say, "This," sans interpretation? — J

This isssue is formulated in an interesting way by Joseph Rouse, who contrasts his view of discursive normativity as functioning ‘all the way down’ from the accounts of figures such as Quine, Sellars, McDowell, Davidson and Brandon, who each in different ways relies on a sovereign. account of nature to ground statements of fact.

Accounts of the intralinguistic, ra­tional determination of semantic contents and their inferential or other ho­listic interrelations ultimately depend on showing how those relationships are accountable to causal capacities and interactions of worldly objects. Each account—Quine on holistic adjustments of theories at the “tribunal” of sen­sory surface irritations, Sellars on integrating the manifest and scientific im­ages of humanity-in-the-world, Davidson on token identity of mental and physical events, John McDowell on relations between law-governed first na­ture and conceptual capacities inculcated by second nature, or Brandom on judgments of practical and perceptual reliability—fails. The underlying dif­ficulty is their effort to separate rational, normative relations among semantic
contents from their realization by humans as living organisms who evolved and developed in discursively articulated environments.

Yep, as you said there, it's not that conceptual schemes can';t be relative, but that there can't be conceptual schemes. — Banno

And , if I understand Davidson correctly, there cannot be conceptual schemes thanks to what Rouse calls Davidson’s assumption that semantic meaning is grounded in the ‘token identity of mental and physical events,’

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is it really the preservation of pure identity over time that we need in order to benefit from a concept of truth, or is it inferential compatibility, the understandability of something on the basis of recognizability, likeness and harmony with respect to something else?

Terminologically though, I would rather say this is a refinement of our intentions, as opposed to our concepts. This is because otherwise, we would be forced to say that "wetness" or "human" is changing, but it seems to be an important distinction that are intentions are changing (and hopefully becoming more perfect). I did not experience a different water when I went swimming before I came to know that water was H2O, a polar solvent, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The concept of ‘object’ serves a purpose for us. It allows us to unite features and attributes into a single ‘this’. The concept of feature or attribute also serves a purpose for us. It allows us to anticipate how an aspect of the world will respond to our investigation of it. When we turn our head one way, we anticipate it will move in the other direction. When we walk around it, we expect to see another side of it. So in a sense, objects are instructions for how to anticipate responses to our actions on a part of the world. Knowing about water is know how it will respond to our touching it , moving in it, exposing other objects to it. Knowing about water is also knowing where it came from, how it was created and how it can be transformed. These are important to us when we want to interact with it in special ways.

We could say that the object is an anticipatory dance between us and a part of our surroundings. But notice how the ‘same’ object changes depending on the pattern of this dance. Take an object as simple as a point. Does it makes sense to talk about a point i swore t of the nature of the way we dance with it?

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core. (Nelson Goodman)

Note that these conventions are not just ways of describing a thing. They are instructions for how iinteract with it in particular ways in order to achieve a predictable series of responses from it. How that object appears to us is a function of what we are doing with it, how we are dancing with it. To ask if the planet Jupiter exists is to ask about a particular sort of interactive dance. It makes no more sense to imagine Jupiter the planet independently of some convention of practical engagement with it than it does to imagine a tango with only one performer, or a duet with only one singer. Is a photon a particle or a wave? It depends on which apparatus is dancing with it.

Yes, but the response doesn't really act as a good counterpoint. We might very well use a PC desktop as a doorstop. However, we wouldn't turn into into a soup and serve it for dinner, wear it as an earring, attempt to drink it if we are thirsty (seeing as how it is not a liquid), use it as a sledgehammer to replace our sidewalk, ask it out on a date, hire it as our attorney, take it home as a pet, etc. Just as we wouldn't use a hunting knife to clean our ear and just as, while there are pastoral societies all over the world that raise animals for their meat and milk, none raise animals to consume their feces.Nor do any pastoralists mate sheep to cattle, goats to horses, etc — Count Timothy von Icarus

We are not disagreeing that the world poses constrains on what we can do with objects, so I have no problem with your laundry list of all the things we can or cannot do with specific things. What I am arguing is that our perception of of what we can or cannot do with a thing is based on HOW we understand what that thing is, how it works, and that understanding is not static, it evolves
over time. When our understanding of a thing changes, due to shifts in scientific and technological knowledge, it is not simply a matter of reconfiguring our knowledge of the external causal associations between objects. What also changes is the ‘core’ concept of object as center of properties and attributes. The reason that this core concept of objectness does mot remain stable in the face of changes in under is that it is an abstraction derived from a system of relations not only between us and the world we interact with, but between one part of the world and another.

Sure. That does not make the world only the result of those "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them". Not just any "acts of coordination and correlation between events and schemes which assimilate them" will do. There remains novelty, agreement and error, embedding us in a world that does not care what we believe. — Banno

That’s right. We don’t simply fabricate the world according to our wishes. And yet, the only access we have to the world is through our aims and purposes. Care is indispensible to the connection between us and world, in the form of relevance , mattering and significance. Isnt this the basis of the normative power of language games? No matter how strange and surprising things can strike us , they are always, at a more fundamental level, already familiar to us thanks to the fact that even the most unanticipated event is recognizable on the basis of a background intelligibility. This is what precludes radical skepticism and doubt.