One way of thinking about what I'm saying is that your reading of philosophy may be more fruitful if you do not approach a text with the presupposition that its author is a genius, as we're generally taught. — The Great Whatever

Do you think any philosophers you've read are geniuses, or at least, good at philosophy?

How could we know that essentialism or real universal "are the case", for a start. I'm not sure what that could even mean. — John

I don't have a good answer for this right now. Maybe because I'm bad at philosophy. All of this seems to be elaboration on Man being the measure. Which definitely has it's selling points. But there are three things that always bothered me about it:

1. We might not be alone in the universe.

2. The world is much bigger and older than we are.

3. It sounds like the reverse of the Copernican revolution, which removed us from center of the universe. Everything in science has dethroned humans as being central to creation, and yet many philosophers would put us back at the center when it comes to knowledge.

From this it certainly does not follow that substance is material; it has infinite attributes, remember. For the same reasons it obviously does not follow that substance is mental, either. — John

Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting.

I don't see how essentialism or real universals being the case would enable us to match our experience directly with anything beyond it. — John

Well, I suppose this all goes back to Plato and his realization that you need the forms for knowledge to make sense of the flux of the world. Empiricism focused on the flux, while Kant recast the forms as categories of thought.

It would seem that both trap us in a world of human perceptions and thoughts. And yet the world continues to surprise us.

So is reading Kant like reading the Bible, where the cultural context is often lost on the modern reader?

What the hell are we good at? — Bitter Crank

Telling stories. Maybe we should put philosophy into literary form. Or just have undergrads watch The Matrix and Fight Club.

Do we need something other as a comparison to notice whether we're poor at an activity?

Here's the suggested evidence that humans perform poorly at philosophy:

1. Errors in reasoning affecting even professional philosophers.

2. Failure to resolve issues explored by the ancient Greeks.

3. Failure to reach consensus on almost anything.

4. That professional philosophers generally agree with the assessment that their colleagues are poor at doing philosophy.

The evidence can be contested, but if it is correct, then we'd have reason for thinking humans aren't that great at philosophizing.

That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.

I heard hims say that in a talk on consciousness with Chalmers and Dennett. Dennett did not agree.

It's an interesting metaphor, but the problem I have with it is how we learned that pretty much of all of reality is stuff we don't need to know.

His argument is that despite only having the desktop appearance available to us when using computers, we've still managed to figure out quite a bit of the internal workings such that we know the desktop is an illusion. Evolution itself is a good example of figuring stuff out.

Dennett's counter argument was basically that animals need to be able to know enough truth to be fit, such was who's a mate, what food is, and what will kill it, otherwise evolution wouldn't work.

If the argument is that mates, food and things that kill are just metaphors, then one wonders what evolution is selecting on.

But that becomes hard to see if consciousness is being understood as a spatialised thing that exists at a location, like stuck inside the head looking out through the windows of the eyes to the world beyond. — apokrisis

It would seem that our sight dominated hominid brains have been fooled by a metaphorical way of thinking about our relationship to the world.

And that fits with the natural logic of the psychological process. To be aware of the realities of the present, we must be informed by the expectations of our past. And keeping it all "internal", it is our failures of prediction which constitute our signs of what "really just happened". We know we were surprised and so by logical implication (rather than direct knowledge) it is right to suppose that there is the noumenal out there as the apophatic source of our uncertainty. — apokrisis

You're saying that surprise is justification for belief in the world beyond us. If we were never surprised by anything, never wrong about how we think or perceive, then there would be no reason to suppose there is more to the world than what we think about it.

They illustrate the way the mind 'builds' the world and assimilates novel information into it. — Wayfarer

Which means a naive view of perception or realism doesn't work. But it's also a mistake to conclude that just because our minds work that way, the world is that way. For example, some have concluded from a meditative or drug induced state that all is one, because of their experience. But another explanation is that the mediation or drugs created the experience, and it has no meaning beyond showing that the mind is capable of collapsing self-other distinctions.

f there is a God, and if He has a view, then it would seem that it must consist in the sum total of the views of all His creatures. — John

This sounds close to Berkeley's idealism. What I gather from your interpretation of Kant is that the following philosophical positions are wrong: Materialism, essentialism and realism qua universals.

If essentialism or real universals were the case, then we would have a way of matching our conceptions with the way the world is. If materialism were the case, then there would be a way to world was, independent of how we or any creature thinks about it or perceives it.

Anything that does reliably appear is considered to be real. — John

Is the stick bent in the water, or does it just appear bent, or are we imagining it to be bent? Did I hallucinate the person in the window, or just imagine seeing a face there?

Is it hot in here is it just me?

Our thinking is a kind of flowering of the world, it is in in that sense in total harmony with the world, like all expressions of nature. Really, when you think about it; how could it be otherwise? — John

Because humans noticed a long time ago a discrepancy between appearance and reality, and that people are quite capable of being wrong about a number of things. Simon Blackburn called this the loose fit between mind and world, and the reason that philosophy came into existence.

Dennett has said that although some animals appear to notice the difference and appear troubled by it, they are not able to reflect on it.

But would it also be abstracted from space. time, mass, shape, number, relation and so on? — John

The reason the view from nowhere is not abstracted from those things is because they're not subject to perceptual relativity or creature dependance, far as we can tell. They have an objective quality to them.

Thus, some people are hopeful that communication with aliens is possible, should we ever make contact, because they will have come to realize the same objective features of the world. In Sagan's Contact book (and the movie based on it), the detection of an alien signal is based on the prime number sequence from 2 to 101. And the main character expresses the view that math is the universal language.

he best we can do is to say things like, for example, that if we had been around at the time of the dinosaurs, and if we are right in thinking that they existed at that time, then we would have seen them. — John

Which would mean it's possible the world is as we think it is, at least in some cases, such as dinosaurs living 65 plus million years ago, we just can't get outside being human to know.

So then the Greek skeptics were right about our knowledge claims.

So Gods' view is from nowhere in particular, but not from nowhere, per se. — John

Right, I think Nagel's argument was that "nowhere" meant a view abstracted from human perception of colors, sounds, smells, etc.

That makes sense to me; and I agree with the point about Kant. The upshot then would seem to be that there is nothing but reality as interpreted; which would seem to be synonymous with reality as conceptual schema, or Wittgenstein's 'world as the totality of facts'. — John

But then what are we to make sense of the world without us, since the totality of facts shows us that we've only been around a short time, and only exist on little speck of dust.

Is the world really on as humans conceive it? Or is it that the world has to be as we fundamentally conceive it (time, space, quantity, etc)?

Or is it that there is no world without us, which runs counter to totality of facts we've accumulated.

I don't understand this position by Davidson, Kant or Witty. Are we back to Protagoras? Man is the measure of all that is and all that could be? Yeah, humans!

Some concepts do seem to be fundamental; space, time, causality, materiality, form, function, quantity, quality, relation, modality. I just thought of those off the top of my head; I'm sure there are more. Do you think we can do without any of those? — John

Perhaps not. But we can revise our thinking on them. And we can propose concepts without one or more of those categories you listed.

The idea that time and space arise from something more fundamental, or that the cosmos is massively contingent and without any prescriptive laws of nature. Or that time doesn't really flow, and the future already exists. Stuff like that.

Did Kant think those things couldn't exist in the world? Was carving nature at its joints incoherent to him?

It seems to me it is in thinking that Kant is concerned with pointlessly debunking the idea of "viewpointless" knowledge that you are misunderstanding what he is about. If he is "shadowboxing" with anything, it is what he refers to as the "transcendental illusion", which is the idea that there is an actuality that exists "out there" like an all-encompassing 'image' that mirrors every possible viewpoint, that somehow "looks like" the world we see. Of course we must think there is a viewpointless actuality, but we cannot really imagine what it is like, because all imagining is from some viewpoint. Kant points out that noumenal actuality cannot be "like anything", because it is viewpointless, and everything we know is viewpointful. — John

So Kant was saying that the God's eye view, or Nagel's view from nowhere can't be had by us, because we have to conceive of the world someway, and that someway cannot mirror the world as it is, because the world is not from any sort of conception or view.

Thus, the noumena.

Without that it's only human, it's only us complexly ooting at each other about homo sapien stuff, and that's it. — Wosret

So Humeans are howler monkeys, and Kant is the monolith from 2001? j/k

so we both can get outside of them, and he isn't trying to justify some cultural prejudices, but secure the objectivity and universality of thought itself. — Wosret

What does it mean for thought to be objective and universal? Does that just mean for all humanity? Or any thinking being? I take it Kant wasn't endorsing Platonism.

Novices are generally not good at any activity; so this wouldn't seem to support the idea that practiced philosophers are bad at philosophy. In fact if they were not good at it they would not be able to recognize how bad undergraduates are. There is no absolute good and bad; expertise is relative only to the range of expertise within any field. — John

I changed my post, because that would need to be expounded on to say that if professional philosophers made the same fundamental mistakes as students, unlike with other professions, then there would be reason to think humanity is just bad at philosophizing.

This means that our experience of the world is ineluctably conceptually shaped. That is what it would mean to say that Kant thinks we cannot 'get outside our conceptual schemas', although I doubt he ever expressed it exactly like that. — John

Did Kant mean it in the broadest sense that we can't get outside of some form of conceptualizing the world, or that we can't get outside of specific fundamental concepts?

Beyond Kant, the anti-realist argument would be that we can't get outside our thinking about the world to see what the world is actually like, and adjust our concepts accordingly. But that flies in the face of history and most fields of knowledge, were humans do revise their concepts based on new knowledge and experiences.

What we moderns think about the world is different in many ways than what various ancient groups though, because our knowledge and experiences of the world has grown quite a bit.

hTen poor reasoning also comes to mind. It's not so much the specifics of our beliefs and arguments, but rather the 'form' of arguments which we propose do not hold up to rational scrutiny -- they are rhetorical ploys or make basic errors in reasoning. — Moliere

Definitely this would be a sign that we're bad at it, particularly if professional philosophers fall prey to the same poor reasoning.

So, you believe that we can and do understand the world in ways that are completely free from any conceptualization whatsoever? — John

No. It all depends on what is meant by being trapped inside our conceptual schemes. But then that leads down the paved road of endless semantic dispute.

So maybe we would need to get clear what Kant and others of a similar mind mean, and what people using Kant to make such arguments mean.

I've taken it to mean that we can't check our concepts against the world (or how others think), and thus revise them accordingly. Which seems patently false.

Then there is no sense in which we are inside them... — Banno

Maybe so. Now that you've put it that way, inside is a spatial metaphor. It gives the idea that we're trapped inside some space, and can't get out to the much larger space called the world.

You might believe the best was achieved by Spinoza, but won't it always be possible that I could disagree with you, just as I might disagree with you that Mozart's music is greater than Bach's or Beethoven's, or Miles Davis'. — John

If philosophy is an artform like literature or music instead of math or science.

I think this whole idea of TGW's that humans are bad at philosophy, that a great philosopher like Kant, for example, really just believed stupid things, is itself a very stupid, facile, even childishly petulant response, that consists essentially in wanting to believe that without making any genuine contribution or effort one could raise oneself to a level above those who are generally considered to be the greats. — John

I believe the example of Kant making a fundamental mistake was that we can and do get outside our conceptual schemas to check them against the world, even merely in our interactions with one another. Or if you prefer Davidson's critique, conceptual schemas are an incoherent notion.

But not everyone agrees, which seems to be a big problem in philosophy: the lack of agreement over what constitutes a good or bad argument, outside of an accepted logical proof.

Taking some isolated component of the formalism and asking what it really is makes no sense, at least to me. — SophistiCat

I don't understand how it makes no sense. Let's take a couple of examples.

Mendel theorized that genes were the units of inheritance, but he wasn't able to observe them. That had to wait until the discovery of DNA.

Neptune was predicted based on irregularities of Uranus's orbit that could be explained by the existence of another planet.

And atoms were theorized by the ancient Greeks. It's only been in the last few decades that they've been seen, and even manipulated to produce a short animation.

People in the past might have argued that atoms or genes or what have you were just formalisms tying observations together, but they turned out to be real. So when we ask whether the multiverse is real, or just a formalism, we want to know whether other universes exist in the same way our observable universe does.

And someday, we might figure out a way to observe them, say if they have a gravitational effect on our own, or if some scifi scenario such as wormhole travel becomes possible.

Not clear to me what the metric for such a comparison would be. — Brainglitch

That you don't hear mathematicians and physicists saying that kind of thing about the entire field that Witty was quoted above as saying, and that although they may not respect a certain physicist or mathematician, and their particular field of study, they don't think the entire field is a confused muddle that is still grappling with the same issues the Ancient Greeks were.

And if you asked a group of mathematicians or physicists whether a currently difficult, unresolved problem will be solved at some point in the future, they are likely to say yes, and express optimism that humanity can solve such challenges.

And, as discussion sessions even at professional philosophy conventions attest, there is virtually unanimous agreement among those who try to do philosophy, that there remains much muddled confusion and unintelligible nonsense. — Brainglitch

So professional philosophers do agree with the contention that humans aren't very good at it?

Which, I might note, supports my assertion that rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain even for short intervals. — Brainglitch

I'm asking whether rational though qua philosophy is harder than in fields like math or physics, which people generally acknowledge to be challenging subjects.

Is philosophy difficult in a way that those sorts of fields are not, seeing as how progress is made in them?

My personal observation on forum philosophizing is that any thread on any topic of good length will involved a lot of shifting terms and adjusting the initial argument to the point that by the end of the thread, it's impossible to tell what was resolved by the effort, although it can be educational.

Rational thought is very difficult for humans to sustain, let alone express coherently, even for short intervals (as this or virtually any other forum or Comment section on the internet evidences.) — Brainglitch

So philosophy is harder than math or physics.

But we're able to determine progress in math or the sciences. The who is the human race. Our collective effort at philosophizing, with professional philosophers representing our best effort. But anyone can contribute.

The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions... — darthbarracuda

Reminds me of NY Times article on Wittgenstein's philosophy. The author wasn't sure whether Witty was right or not, but he thought professional philosophers should give his arguments more consideration than they have.

How would you decide that people were either "good" or "bad" at philosophy? — Bitter Crank

The mistakes they make when philosophizing.

Would one look for "progress"? — Bitter Crank

Ability to correct our mistakes over time.

Are people bad at literature? Literature has made little "progress" beyond the achievements of the first surviving works we have (just my opinion). — Bitter Crank

Is literature a field that progresses? I don't think it's the goal of writing to advance the field. It's like asking whether art progresses. New forms are introduced, and people may or may not value the new over the old, but there isn't an objective criteria for what counts as progress. Maybe the accumulation of works could be considered a sort of progress?

If philosophy is an art form, then okay, progress doesn't matter. Landru from the old forum argued that philosophy isn't about resolving issues, it's about generating new discourse, or something along those lines.

But then again, philosophy does utilize logic to make arguments. If it's more of a math or science, then we would expect progress. The question of free will should have been put to rest by now, for example. Dennett would claim that surely there is an answer to the problem of free will within all permutations of 50 pages of writing or less.

Yes, although I've read where the Churchlands have said there aren't any propositions in the brain, excepting the ability of the brain to produce propositional statements. Anyway, it was just an extreme example of potentially changing how we think about something considered fundamental.

Also, is this question understood by you to be equivalent to the question as to whether we can get outside our "faculties"? — John

Good question. Someone like Meillassoux would say we do with math. We are able to model things black holes and the inside of atoms without being able to experience them. We're also able to create imaginary worlds different from our own, or ask what it's like to be a bat.

Is the question as to whether we can "get outside" our conceptual schemes meant in the sense of 'outside all possible conceptual schemes' or 'outside one conceptual scheme and into another'? — John

My understanding in critiquing it is that there are fundamental categories of thought we can't escape, or check the world against to see whether the world is different than how we think about it.

So time would be one that Kant mentioned, and yet, modern physics, philosophy and science fiction have all played with different notions of time, even to the point of denying that time is fundamental. That it could be an illusion.

That is an odd conception of free will you have going there. I have coffee every morning because I like coffee in the morning, but I could have tea; I have the freedom to change, but I do not. If God is good then he chooses not to do evil, but that doesn't make him unfree. — unenlightened

Then why couldn't humans be the same way? I'm not saying we shouldn't be free to choose coffee over tea, I'm saying we shouldn't be free to poison the coffee and give that to our neighbor. And society agrees, which is why there are laws against murder.