Comments

  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.

    Truth cannot be out there—cannot exist independently of the human mind—because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false.
    Tom Storm

    Rorty did understand this. you will find in a footnote in this book an emphatic denial of non prepositional knowledge, and I take this as simply the same thing I am saying here: once you put something out there in a statement, a thesis, you have, and this is really what Wittgenstein was on about in the Tractatus, you commit it to the finitude of language. I take issue where it is flatly denied that we can, through the understanding's conceptual pragmatic architectonics acknowledge the world as meaningful. Rorty decided to teach literature instead of philosophy for just this reason, for literature "shows" us the world rather than explaining it. But on the other hand, phenomenology is descriptive/analytic, and what I talked about is an actual part of our existence. After all, language never could exhaust the the world's presentative content.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    But you are only able to say this from the perspective you have chosen. For many philosophers there remains a Kantian distinction between appearance and reality as it is in itself. Can we just make this go away simply by using different words or concepts? How is this different to saying that we can solve the problem of the origin of life just by saying God created it? It's only solved if God is 1) real and 2) God created life.

    If I say from now on I am a monist, that very act does not do away with the hard question even if it satisfies me, right?

    But maybe I've missed something in your response?
    Tom Storm

    I can put something out there, but you won't like it. One has to understand that there is a whole other philosophical world that continues in Germany and France that is not popular in Anglo-American philosophy. I read this, often enough with genuine understanding I would say, but it is an acquired ability. Joshs seems pretty solid on this.

    It is not a matter of just rearranging words. One has to argue. What is that Kantian distinction really about? Always one must go to the things that are given to see what there is that can provide justification. Kant had to talk about noumena; why? Either it is nonsense, or there is something in the witnessable, phenomenological (empirical) world that insists. This is where we have to look: what is it in the world we know that intimates noumena? What is there in the presence of things that is the threshold for metaphysics? How does one talk about such a threshold? One cannot say it, for it is an absence, and yet it is an absence that is in the presence of the world.

    Of course, this sounds confusing, but metaphysics is not just nothing at all, like an empty set. This absence is intimated in the world, so it is part of the structure of our existence, and so, it is not outside of our identifiable existence as Kant would have it, but in it, saturating it, if you will, and it is staring you right in the face in everything you encounter. In the analysis of what it is to experience the world, it is clear that the language used to "say" what the world is is radically distinct from the existence that is being talked about. The cup is smooth to the touch, and warm, and resists being lifted, and so on, but all this language I use to describe the cup takes the actual givenness of sensation up IN a language setting. I call it a cup, but the calling does not, if you will, totalize what is there in the language possibilities because there is something that is not language in the "there" of it. It is an impossible other-than-language, and because language and propositional knowledge is what knowing is about, the understanding encounters in the familiar day to dayness of our lives something utterly transcendental. The cup is both clearly defined as long as I can keep it contained within familiar language, and, utterly impossible, because it is there, radically unknowable, for to know is to be able to say. Wittgenstein put it simply: It is not how things are that is mystical; but THAT is exists.

    This is a hard idea to simply throw out there and expect to be well received. Nor do phenomenologists all agree with this. Heidegger held that language and existence were of a piece, and our existence is language, and I think this is right; but I argue (have read it argued, too) that IN this matrix of language-in-the-world, a transcendental affirmation is possible, and this affirmation occurs in-the-midst-of everyday affairs.

    But the effort is worth it, reading phenomenology, that is. In this issue, the hard problem of consciousness, phenomenology is not just an alternative view; it is necessary and inevitable.

    God is another issue, a metaethical issue. I hold that the impossible, the mystical Wittgenstein mentioned, is, as Witt agrees, is really about value, or meta-value.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    This from "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.

    Chalmers;https://consc.net/papers/facing.pdf"]The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. that unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.
    "
    T Clark

    There is one fundamental premise that really should preside over the entire inquiry: all one has ever experienced, every can experience, and hence ever know, is phenomena. It reminds me of an issue I came across regarding Freud and the unconscious: The unconscious was considered to be a metaphysical concept entirely, and I thought, no, for there is an evidential basis for it. But the response was quick, pointing out that it was not that the unconscious had never been directly experienced, but rather that it was impossible for it to every be experienced, encountered, and this is why it belonged to metaphysics. Not just unknown but impossible to know. Why? Because the moment it comes to mind to consider at all, it is conscious, and references to the unconscious are only references to conscious events, which in turn were the same. The unconscious cannot be even conceived as a concept. It is nonsense.

    Here, anything that can ever be conceived, even in the most compelling argument imaginable, simply cannot be anything but a phenomenological event, for to conceive at all is inherently phenomenological. Nonsense to think otherwise. Consciousness is inherently phenomenological.

    There is no way out of this, for the moment the effort is made, one is already IN the problem; unless, that is, Husserl was right, and that it is possible to achieve an awareness of the intuited landscape of all things that is pure and absolute. This, then, is not a matter for science as we know it. It lies with the "science" of phenomenology. Which leads me to reaffirm that philosophy is going to end up one place, and it is here, in phenomenology. There is quite literally no where else to go.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Phenomenology affirms that idealism is accurate? So phenomenology is a monist view which dissolves the dualistic fallacy of mind and body?

    How does phenomenology affirm the above?
    Tom Storm

    As I see it, all it takes is the removal of the word representation and using presentation or givenness instead. Michel Henry puts it like this:

    Let us begin with indeterminacy. The first principle (of phenomenology) establishes a decisive correlation between appearance and being. This correlation impresses itself upon us with the strongest force because it is wholly immediate: when something appears, it happens to exist at the same time. This correlation is so powerful that it seems to be reduced [ramener] to an identity: to appear is thereby identically to be. When the principle says “so much appearing, so much being,” it intends neither the extension, nor in any fashion the intensity of phenomenological and ontological determinations that it brings together, but rather the common identity of their essence. It is to the extent that appearing appears that being thereby “is.”

    There is no privileging of something unseen that is that which appears through the appearance, or that the appearance is a representation of. I observe the cup on the table and there before me in the appearance is the reality.

    As to the dualistic fallacy, body, as opposed to mind, is nothing beyond what the appearance yields. All ontologies are reduced to the one status of what is simply there, before one's witnessing, analytic gaze. It is not "of" anything; but this does not mean the world is complete to the gaze. Taking the world up as it appears takes on a whole new set of analytical priorities. There is this indeterminacy and time is at the center of this: we are always on the cusp of an unmade future that calls for constant renewal, and seeing this is the what freedom is about. There are moods and fears and caring and all that is left out of science's paradigms are here given priority, for Being is not measured by quantifications on a space-time grid, but is measured phenomenologically, and here I follow Kierkegaard: qualitatively.

    Science has never addressed the most salient feature of our existence, value. Phenomenology, I would argue, has this front and center.

    Anyway, phenomenologists do say different things, but I think the above is a rough generalization.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    How does this differ to idealism?Tom Storm

    Idealism affirms that everything in the we encounter is idea. Phenomenology affirms it as reality.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Chalmers proposes that things like neutral monism or the extended mind would help us get closer to a theory of consciousness. He's flexible. But strictly speaking, he's part of the analytical tradition, so the physicalism you're speaking of is not essential to analytical philosophy.frank

    Thanks for that. Then I will have to read Chalmers on the extended mind. But the more one speaks of such things, the more one leans phenomenology. After all, what is it that is "extended"?
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    If instead the semantics of scientific concepts were perspectival and grounded in the phenomenology and cognition of first-person experience, for example in the way in which each of us informally uses our common natural language, then inter-communication of the structure of scientific discoveries would be impossible, because everyone's concepts would refer only to the Lockean secondary qualities constituting their personal private experiences, which would lead to the appearance of inconsistent communication and the serious problem of inter-translation. In which case, we would have substituted the "hard problem" of consciousness" that is associated with the semantics of realism , for a hard problem of inter-personal communication that can be associated with solipsism and idealism.sime

    But phenomenology is not about first person experience. This is a notion that issues from the very scientific perspective in question: here is a perceiving agent, there is a stone, and if phenomenology rules our thinking in this, the perceiving agent never leaves her private phenomenal space. Phenomenology does not think like this. It takes appearance as Being. I am there and stones are there and their existence is fully acknowledged as other than myself. My scientific conceptual relations with them do not change at all. All that has changed is now we are freed from the absurd ontology of physical materialism that makes it, not hard, but impossible to describe epistemic relations, which are THE biggest embarrassment of analytic's naturalism. What is left for philosophy is clearer analysis of what makes appearance possible.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    I don't want to get into a long discussion about how science has to proceed. I will say that there is no reason the mind would not be among entities amenable for study by science. You and Constance are just waving your arms and promoting a ghost in the machine with no basis except that you can't imagine anything else.T Clark

    Then the last word would be this: It's not my last word. All analytic philosophers know this. The distance between objects in the world and our knowledge claims about them given a physicalist model simply cannot be bridged through empirical science unless there is a dramatic change of thinking here. The first move will have to be an abandonment of an ontology of physical substance, for this pulls all things toward Dewey/Quine's (and obviously others I haven't read) and science's naturalism, and this simply does not work. Just ask Quine:

    "When . . . I begin to think about my own verbal behavior in theoretical or semantical terms, I am
    forced to admit that, here too, indeterminacy reigns. Philosophical reflection upon my own
    verbal behavior, concerned with hunting out semantical rules and ontological commitments,
    requires me to make use of translational notions. I then recognize that the intentional content of
    my own psychological states is subject to indeterminacy: semantical and intentional phenomena
    cannot be incorporated within the science of nature as I would wish.


    From Quine (though he does remain true to his naturalism throughout, I have read) and others I am led to believe that an ontology of physical substance has to be replaced by one of radical indeterminacy. This frees our doxastic affairs dramatically, for at every turn we are not led to those absurd physicalist delimitations, as if "semantical phenomena" has its final vocabulary, as Rorty put it, in this primitive idea. At the most basic level everything is indeterminate, so we are left with what is given, and givenness is basis of Husserl's phenomenological ontology. The distance is bridged by concepts like 'proximity' and 'intuition' as there is no epistemic distance between me and this cup simply because the cup's being there appears without distance. Being IS what appears.

    Of course, there is interpretative "distance" and this is a big issue. But then, distance, in the way it is talked about here, implies a distance from something, and one would have to posit that something to make sense of it. So, this implies our knowledge claims, the sound ones, intimate something of whatever-it-is that is there, undisclosed. THIS is where very interesting philosophy begins, in my thoughts: how to enunciate the appearances of the world to see if "Truth" possibilities of our propositions have any purport beyond their explicit propositional content.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    "I can't imagine" is a pretty pitiful argument.T Clark

    And worse, simply not true. I can imagine it. It is just far away from empirical science.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    You're basically describing the hard problem, the point of which is that science needs to grow conceptually in order to have the tools to create a theory of consciousness.frank

    I certainly agree. I am coming to believe phenomenology holds the key.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    The beginning of a theory of consciousness would just start with guessing at what kind of system could produce the experience of gazing straight ahead, being aware of sights and sounds in a seamless unity.frank

    The trouble is that on a physicalist model, and talk about nervous systems and axonally connected systems, neurochemistry, and the like, one is supposed to first get beyond a universal physical reduction. Of course, you can say, well, we just have to live with this and empirical science is the only heel that rolls, but I would disagree: A scientific idea has to have something to observe, and here, this would be self's interiority. This is not objective and empirical and science can't touch it.

    Now Husserl called what he did a science because he was flowing the scientific method: observing descriptive features of thoughts, relations, phenomenal intuitions and so forth. Perhaps on the cutting edge of discovery is this century ago phenomenologist.
  • The ineffable
    Exactly that ethics is in the doing.Banno

    You have have just missed the proverbial barn door, I think intentionally. Your issue is not with me. It is with Witt.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Integrated information theory is a stab at creating a theory grounded in direct experience. It's a beginning.frank

    Okay, I'll look into it, but it would have to be something like an alternative to causality. The only way this can work would be two very radical ideas: S knows P is the issue. One cannot disentangle P from justification, and it really looks like P and the justification are the same thing, that is, the nexus of the epistemic connection is not to be separated from P itself. Causality (perhaps you've read some of the proffered solutions/failures to those Gettier problems, the severed head, the barn facsimile, e.g.s) does not, of course, carry P to S, to put it plainly. P is lost instantly in the causal sequence describing the knowledge connection. One radical solution is to say S and P are bound in identity: In some describable way, P is part of S's identity, and the brain/object separation has to be dismissed. Another way is come up with the magical connectivity that allows S and P to be altogether independent entities, yet epistemically joined.

    The former is in the bounds of what a phenomenologist might defend. All things I witness are witnessed in sphere of my personal totality. I suppose we are in Kant's world here, or some derivation. Husserl had to address the issue of solipsism. For clearly when I know P, P cannot be foreign to my powers of apprehension; it has to be IN this somehow. For objects to be MY objects justifying my knowledge claims, there must be a "belonging" that intimates P AS P, and not P as something that is not P. If P belongs to my own epistemic constitution, then the intimation is possible.

    Then, working with a physical model seems hopeless. I actually suspect that the brain does not produce conscious experience, but rather conditions it. Experience exceeds the physical delimitations of the physical object, the brain. Call it spirit??
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    That science has not explained. I see no reason to believe it can't.T Clark

    In order for science to do this, there must be in place at least some working concept of epistemic relations that is grounded in observational discovery. I can't imagine.
  • The ineffable
    I can't make sense of that.Banno

    What do you suppose Witt had in mind when he said this?:

    It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental
  • The ineffable
    So what is it you can't say, show or do?Banno

    Read what I wrote, with underlining:

    What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.

    And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
  • The ineffable
    But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts.Banno

    It is the ineffability in question. You say showing and doing are not ineffable, but is what is shown and done exhaustively effable? This was the point: no.
  • The ineffable
    If what is meant by "pre-predicative" is showing and doing, then what you say might work. But showing and doing are not ineffable; they are as much part of our speech acts, our language games, our form of life, or whatever other term one prefers, as are sentences and texts.Banno

    What is meant by pre-predicative is very simple: There is in the world, that which is not language. Just this. You can say language is joined at the hip with perceived objects, and I think this is right; however, it is clear as a bell that, say, a spear to the kidney is not a language experience. I know the pain, and afterward I can tell you about it, and this telling will be an illustration of the way experiences are inherently understood in language. But this possession of the language counterpart of the speared kidney does not preclude the understanding of the pain "as pain", rather than pain as accounting, describing, explanation. Knowledge may be propositional, and if the world really were "just the facts" as is found in Wittgenstein's grand book in his Lecture on Ethics, then the matter would end here. But we all know that the most salient feature of pain is the pain itself, "prior" propositional assignment.

    And "pain' is just a term, granted. But in the language that announces it, there is the mysterious and impossible "more" and "other".
  • The ineffable
    Yes, being embroiled and otherwise interacting with X has some conditions of possibility of involvement with X, but there's no guarantee that those render the articulation of X and its conditions of possibility from within that involvement impossible. You can't get outside of the involvement, but you don't need to to articulate within the involvement. In fact, you'd need to interact with X someone to give an account of it - that also holds for the mechanisms by which accounts are given in general and their presuppositions. Like space, time, history, culture, language, perception...

    It reads close to one of those "we have eyes therefore we cannot see" arguments!
    fdrake

    Yes, you can articulate the involvement, but only within the involvement. Outside the involvement, there is no X. This is why familiar models fail to grasp the issue.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    I disagree with this. Scientists don't generally say that biology is nothing but chemistry. In the same way, mental processes, including consciousness, are not nothing but biology. But they are bound by biology in the same way that recorded music is bound by a CD or MP3 reader or radio. Music is not nothing but electronic equipment and electrical processes.T Clark

    The difference here is that compact disk's relation to musical sounds is clearly explained by the science. Here, it is precisely this relation that science cannot explain.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Antonio Damasio is a neuroscientist who studies the biological foundations of mental processes, including consciousness. The book I have is "The Feeling of What Happens."T Clark

    Thanks! Got it just now on Kindle. I'll give it a good read, but the prospects are dim for this kind of thing. As i see it, if one goes by a physicalist model, there can be nothing but brain awareness of brain awareness, and, of course, all of this is NOT brain awareness at all, because the very idea of brain awareness is itself lost in the reductive process to the "impossible". Rorty thought like this. To break with this requires an entirely different paradigm of knowledge relations; radically different. Can't imagine a neurological approach finding this. Talk about brain cells, axonal fibers and so on, begs a question that, not only has not been addressed, but cannot be addressed in any concept I can imagine in the closed systems neurological functions.
  • The ineffable


    Elsewhere he says different things. I'm not interested in these when the OP is "The ineffable".
  • The ineffable
    This may well be accurate. But there's an assumption that seeing the world with clarity matters. What's the goal? You've already hinted that madness awaits.Tom Storm

    Well, isn't that why they call the whole affair ineffable? Ineffability is entirely in the abstract until it is realized that it literally saturates our knowledge claims and therefore living itself.
  • The ineffable

    One has to actually climb Wittgenstein's ladder out, and this takes a working through the Tractatus, and implicitly attending there are Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer....and not to forget, a suicidal drive to understand the world. To see things with genuine clarity, one simply has to be a bit insane, for the world is NOT, as the world, something that conforms the ready-mades of our understanding.
  • The ineffable
    f
    I have always hated Imagine - its been used as a secular hymn for decades here in Australia and its mawkish tone suits this era where sentimentality dominates. Religion hasn't had much of a role in public life here since the 1960's, but it had a small revival of sorts a few years ago with a stunted, evangelical, Trump-lite Prime Minister (2018-22). He turned out to be one of this country's most ethically compromised and unpopular leaders. I think many people today more correctly associate religion with coercion, poor moral choices and shifty politics.Tom Storm

    Better, though, than that ode to aggression, The Star Spangled Banner: the music was lifted from a once a popular drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydAIdVKv84g


    But on the matter of religion, not to forget that religion, beneath the robes of pomp and pretense, is metaphysics, and metaphysics is not nothing.
  • Why is the Hard Problem of Consciousness so hard?
    Neuroscience believes it is beginning to make headway,Joshs

    I would be fascinated to read about this.
  • The ineffable
    By the way, I question whether religion ever satisfactorily provided solace or explanatory power. Religion was a compulsory, even totalitarian backdrop to human life for centuries and made many people unhappy. It was feared and obeyed, and although it dealt with tragedy and loss and meaning - the ostensibly ineffable - it generally did so in the most brutish of ways (obey God's will; have faith, etc) and seemed to make demands rather than provide consolation or integration.Tom Storm

    See the above
  • The ineffable
    This seems to be an important for you. How would it look if it could be done? It's difficult for people to see past Biblical literalism or scientism or naïve realism for the most part, just how would such nuanced philosophical thinking enter people's lives?

    Philosophy giveth, and philosophy taketh away, and you are saying that philosophy is so taxing to understand it could never be the social institution religion has been. I recall reading that Wittgenstein once recommended going to church, participating in the rituals and so on, simply because this dimension of our existence was too important to reduce to utterances and argument. He also drew from Tolstoy's depth of conviction, and note the way his protagonists like Levin from Anna Karenina realize what is profoundly important in life in living a kind of holy life working on the farm, rather than talking about it. And you can hear Kierkegaard behind this in the praise of the Knight of Faith, a simply lived life, but lived so completely in, if you will, the light of God, in everything done. The doing, and not the thinking, theorizing: this thinking and theorizing UNDOES the, call it non-natural (not part of "states of affairs") and mystical bond with divinity. And, of course, to even say this in an explanatory context, is nonsense, because we have left the extraordinary intimations of myth and moved into propositional truths in doing so, and this does harm to the most important part of the Tractatus: that which should be passed over in silence.

    The reason Witt's Tractatus is so important, as I see it, is this: when he draws the line between the sayable and the unsayable, THEN calls the whole affair nonsense because such lines are impossible, and this is because a line implies something on both sides to make sense, and this contradicts the matter of something not being sayable as one has essentially just said it in talking about lines drawn. But what does this come down to? Extraordinary, and completely right, I say: lines cannot be drawn not because there is nothing THERE, but because the thereness is IN the world; the world IS metaphysics that comes to us when language is "bracketed", and this is, obviously, a term from Husserl and his reduction.

    And so I ignored your direct question, I know. Something like this: how can something--if you are on Witt's side, so deeply important that must remain silently possessed, or as to your thoughts that the saying it can be, in my thinking, spoken about and will one day replace religion-- put institutionalized in a society?

    The process of religion as we know it perishing has been fairly gradual, but I couldn't help but notice last night watching the New Year come in on CNN, that the song chosen to announce this occasion was John Lennon's Imagine. Now, I try not to read too much into things like this because culture is so entangled and impossible to read, but CNN is a major player in American culture, and Lennon's song is an explicit repudiation of religion. I get the impression things are going to move fairly quickly away from religion as the older generation disappears.

    The way such a difficult philosophy will become the new religion I think is found in the way the 60's attempted a kind of interfaith movement, bringing Hinduism, Buddhism, paganism, and so on into the fold. Buddhism, for example, is very close to the kind of alignment I try to conceive between Husserl's epoche and Wittgenstein's Tractatus' insistence on silence. Meditation IS silence; silence that keeps at bay (brackets) interposing thoughts that would steal attention away from the "pure" phenomenal encounter.
    Tom Storm
  • The ineffable
    This wider relevance is not peripheral to , or separable from, S is P, but inextricable to its very sense. It is what, on any occasion, we are really on about when we say ‘snow is white’. What the logical proposition does is equivalent to the way an empirical statement of fact in a natural science seems to make our affective involvement with the meaning that is being presented either non-existent, or utterly inconsequential to and separable from the apprehension of the facts.Joshs

    This is, to me, as Tom put it, "Wow." If I understand this, empirical science, and the naturalism usually associated with it, abstracts from "the wider relevance" in order to make sense of things. S is P is, if you will, the tip of an iceberg, and the "iceberg" is not something that can be made subject to the reductive, deflationary powers of logical placement, the "categories" of a totality (Levinas lifts this term from Heidegger, I am reading, and Levinas seems a bit aligned with your statement here) that in part determine meaning.

    Best my thoughts can take me thus far.

    Interesting to me is the way this matches up with divisions between religion and science. The latter has always left the intractable dimensions of our existence to religion; and gladly, because it had no clue as to how to deal with it. But now, religion's institutions are failing, and I see it as philosophy's mission to step up.
  • The ineffable
    Wow.. This is probably confronting for those of us who think that some stable meaning can be arrived at using language. I hadn't considered the 'transformative' power held by words like 'is' and 'as'.Tom Storm

    I quite agree, and it is simply fascinating: As I see this, generally speaking, propositional differences are not analyzable in terms of parts and rules. Rather, each propositional construction a sui generis singularity. And consider that a proposition, while never conceived outside of the historical possibilities that constitute the foundational base of knowing something is the case, is never conceived in some neutral space of interconnectivity. It is always, for lack of a better word, subjective. Dogs, cats and traffic noise are always MY dogs, etc.; this "my" is more than simply a term on the logical grid of a language. It is always an embedded "my" in an existence that imposes powerfully from "outside" the totality of what language brings to heel. This is where one encounters ineffability: where questions like, why are we born to suffer and die? address, not this totality, but an entirely OTHER than this, which must go nameless, and nameless not because it belongs to another order of thinking, but because the question drives thought beneath or outside itself. We face this OTHER, and frankly, by my lights, this should be a profound struggle, because questions go to the depth of meaning, simply because we are creatures of depth, evidenced in the aesthetic/ethical/value of our affairs.
    And isn't this where philosophy must bring inquiry, finally, when the deflationary tendencies of the presumption of knowing yield to the extraordinary actualities of our existence?
  • The ineffable
    I've argued elsewhere at considerable length that there is no general account to be given of truth beyond that found in T-sentences. Your demand for such an account asks the wrong question.

    Are we done?
    Banno

    Well, as Kierkegaard would put it, you seem to have forgotten that we exist, and Kierkegaard was a great inspiration to Wittgenstein. If curiosity ever enables you to do so, read his Concept of Anxiety. Here he explores the threshold of human depth and understanding as it is beheld in the withdrawal of categorical systems. Yes, such a thing is possible.

    No one is asking that language take up meanings that are not there. In the infinite malleability of a language, there are constraints that limit contextual plausibility, and among these restraints there are these "threshold" issues that emerge, in t he margins of meanings, but also, somehow (hence the term 'ineffible'), embedded in meanings, since this is the matrix in which all meaning is made. So my ability to speak about what objects are may have propositional limitations, and these limitations may be imposed by an existing body of default contextual possibilities (exclusively socially defined according to Rorty) of a language, but it is a foolish supposition that there is nothing else, or that anything else that may be doxastically coercive or imposing in some way is unqualifiedly possessed by standard meanings. In other words, while to talk about THE threshold of the meaning making resources is awkward and assailable, it is not the case that there is nothing at all "there". It is rather that what is there is inchoate and nascent, awaiting a new language category, a new philosophical conversation.

    Ineffability is what is there on the horizon of the openness of language possibilities as inquiry stands in the midst of a world. As I see it, it literally takes practice to understand this, and as long as analytic philosophy persists in philosophy, this will remain hidden to philosophers. Ineffability is there as a real imposition. Language games, it should be argued, are not closed games, nor are they restrained by logic to be settled within some arbitrary finitude, and reason, it should be added, does not constrain content.

    You actually believe "'snow is white' iff snow is white" is a fitting response to the most problematic philosophical questions. It is a partial response, a useful, localized response. But it is reductive to the point of a vacuous absurdity in the matter discussed here.
  • The ineffable
    Since you mention Rorty in relation to epistemology , would you agree with the following? Rorty rejects epistemology in favor of a hermeneutic approach. In doing so , he is avoiding the problem of skepticism that arises out of epistemological thinking , the presumption of a grounding for knowledge claims and the attendant problem of figuring out how our beliefs ‘hook onto’ the world.Joshs

    Rorty would say, if I read him right, that one can only be skeptical if there is something to be skeptical about. And there isn't. Truth is made, not discovered, for there is nothing to discover outside of the dynamics of meaning making. One can never step into some impossible world that is there which cannot be second guessed, and then point to proposition X and say, see how this deviates.

    I think this right, actually. I also think what we call absolutes are really, to use his jargon, concepts among others in a certain vocabulary of contingencies. But then, IN this vocabulary, we discover something wholly other. This is, for lack of a better term, the metaphysics of presence, which is revealed in our aesthetics and ethics.
  • The ineffable
    ↪Constance, in your first post on this thread you gave us:
    The reduction I have in mind is Husserl's. The idea is to consciously dismiss presuppositions that implicitly give us the familiarity of the familiar world in a perceptual event.
    — Constance
    My reply, to you and to various others, was summed up in what you quoted above,
    (it) pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus.
    — Banno
    Your response was
    You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.
    — Constance
    To which I asked
    What?
    — Banno
    eliciting in turn your enigmatic response. If you think that T-sentences do not answer your question, then have a go at explaining what it is you are asking. "(H)ow epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world" is an ambiguous question.

    It's not enough just to read a bunch of philosophers and pick the bits you like. We are not doing philosophy until we engage with and critique those views. I think you agree with this.

    That is what this thread involves. It sets out various ways of understanding the notion of ineffability, and seeks comment on them. It gives folk enough rope, a place to set out a part of their thinking or the thinking of their betrothed, with the aim of identifying problems and inconsistencies therein.

    The problem is that you have still to set out what it is you are asking.
    Banno

    You were dismissive of the references in the Tractatus to the mysticism and transcendence; you ignored Quine's admission that he could not reconcile his naturalism with experiential phenomena; and you don't seem to grasp the essentials of phenomenology that you reject out of hand, given that you consistently misrepresent it in your statements.

    And you cannot handle basic questions. Asking you about the epistemic relation between brains and couches is elementary. Causality? Is this a carrier of what is essential for knowledge? I mean, you have to deliver yourself from arguments that encompass the question and have something that comes to mind when you step away from these and into an actual world encounter. Otherwise you are lost as a philosopher.

    So there you are, brain facing a couch. Obviously a knowledge relation is in place, some nexus of intimation. Do tell in a couple of sentences. It doesn't matter if there is more to say. Just say IT. No need to be slippery.
  • The ineffable


    Because, Banno, it is a banality, one that simply begs the question about the world and language. You need to return to earth.
  • The ineffable
    The cup has one handle" is true IFF the cup has one handle.Banno

    Adorable. And predictable.
  • The ineffable
    What's difficult here is sorting out what it is you expect me to provide.Banno

    But I underlined this:how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world.
    There is no question as to the embeddedness of the response. Just make the response.
  • The ineffable
    That, of course, is the wrong question.

    It's the wrong question because it is based on the presumption of an "in here" and an "out there".

    Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain.
    — Constance

    The cat would have difficulty getting onto your brain because your brain is enclosed in a skull.

    Yes, I understand that you want the question to be understood figuratively. But then, what is it that you are asking? How it is that you are aware of the cat? How it is that you divide the world up in such a way that there are cats and non-cats? How it is that your cat-sensations lead you to infer that there is a cat-in-itself? Which of these is supposedly represented by "How is it that anything out there gets in here?"

    What is it that you actualy want an answer for?
    Banno

    It can go several ways, but here I am asking a simple question, which is how epistemic connections work between knowledge claims and objects in the world. I certainly don't defend anything like, heh heh, cat-in-itself. But that is in another world of thought
    If you think your philosophy is too complicated and nuanced to give a simple response, I understand. For the same holds for me. But then, if the question were put to me, I would have a succinct reply, one that subsumes the details.
    It really shouldn't be so difficult, really. If I asked Rorty or Quine or Dewey, e.g.s, a reply would be readily forthcoming, though they would have a lot of explaining ready to hand.
  • The ineffable
    “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.” From Mill, On LibertyRichard B

    Suggesting that something is fair game even if it cannot be conceived clearly or as a genuine interest at the outset. Quite right. But then, there is the matter of being dismissive of that which is taken up and not being stifled. Is one not being disingenuous if the determination that something is false when set up for analysis, is dismissive of that which gave rise to the inquiry in the first place? In other words, why bother opening a discussion about ineffability, if philosophical occasions of this are rejected out of hand? Or are not reviewed at all?
  • The ineffable
    What?Banno

    In response to "What?" I wonder how you feel about Rorty's question, one of my favorites: How is it that anything out there gets in here? Out there, of course, is my cat, and in here is my brain. It is the kind of thing that leads very quickly to the issue of ineffability.
    No need for a thesis, just jot me a sentence or two, if you would.
  • The ineffable
    The problem here is the truncated "nothing but" pretends that our sensations are prior to our "being in the world". It assumes the perspective of an homunculus. That's pretty much the assumption of Joshs and @Constance, too.Banno

    You shouldn't raise questions about things you don't really have an interest in.