I can relate to that; we can't say much about truth except that it is what is the case. The real problem does not lie in not knowing how to define 'truth', but in not knowing what is true in many areas of conjecture. It is not surprising that those who are uncomfortable with uncertainty don't find this palatable.

You say "fair enough", but I would like to know whether you agree or disagree or are uncertain and why.

I found your articulation clear enough. Again, I think the salient distinction is between the relativity of (certain kinds of) truth claims vs the non-relativity of the truth. The truth, if it exists, is simply what it is the case. Leaving aside extreme skepticism, we can know the truth in logic, mathematics and everyday observational matters, but when it comes to metaphysics and even scientific theory it is a different matter. That's my take, for what it's worth.

I’m arguing that in anti-foundationalism all justification occurs within our own systems, even for statements about justification itself. You seem to be saying that this implies that truth itself is context-dependent, which is not what I am claiming. Your point is valid but misdirected, my focus is on justification, not the nature of truth. — Tom Storm

@Leontiskis Seems to be conflating truth claims, which as you say, are always (or at least should be) justified within some context or other. and truth itself, which is in no need of justification. So truth claims are given in the context of language, and their justifications are given in the contexts of logic or empirical evidence.

Justifications relying merely on personal experience and testimony cannot be binding on others. Justifications in terms of authority, scriptural or otherwise, need to be underpinned by either logic or empirical evidence. If anyone disagrees they can cite some other criteria that serve to justify truth claims. I am yet to see anything of that nature offered here or elsewhere.

I suppose it's inevitable to see it in those terms. But bear in mind, there is another Axial-age term which has very similar functions, namely 'dharma'. Both logos and dharma refer to:
the intrinsic order of reality
the principle that makes the cosmos intelligible
the way things ought to unfold, not merely how they do
In other words, each is at once descriptive and normative. — Wayfarer

Yes, I'm familiar with those ideas. the Dao is another one. There are of course some commonalities given that all three were conceived of as eternal universal principles governing how things are and how they become, how they change.

So they are also understood as principles of intelligibility, and indeed, prior to modern science they were the only way that observed invariances could be understood. And, as you note, they were also normative, insofar as living in accordance with them was understood to be the way of harmony, while failing to live according to them was seen as the way of discord and strife.

We know they are ideas, and quite beautiful ideas at that, but we don't know if there is anything in nature that corresponds with them, whether they are anything more than human ideas. The picture science gives us of the evolution of the Universe suggests that the laws of nature have evolved as Peirce believed.

Is there any law at all that is absolutely fundamental to nature from the very beginning? The conservation laws: conservation of energy, mass, linear and angular momentum and electric charge as well as the second law of thermodynamics as well as the laws of logic and mathematics may be candidates. But again, we cannot be absolutely certain.

Much of philosophy seems to be a desperate scramble for foundational justifications that will 'beat' the other guy’s argument. The best one, of course, being God. If we can say a position we hold is part of God’s nature or the natural order of a designed universe, then we ‘win’ the argument (assuming winning means anything). — Tom Storm

I guess it depends on whether winning an argument or coming closer to what seems most likely to be the truth is the motivating desire. We can never be certain of the truth, so ideally we all should believe what seems most plausible to us, given that we have begun our inquiry with an open mind, or at least endeavored to do so to the best of our ability. That is what I admire about the scientific spirit. Even if we all achieved that impartiality it still wouldn't mean we will all agree, because plausibility is not something strictly determinable, just as beauty is not.

I don't language is necessary. But things would be unrecognizable if we didn't have it.

I'll order Hoffmeyer. Thanks! Unfortunately not available as e-book, but at least not $100+, like most Biosemiotic books I've looked at are. — Patterner

Yes, there may be consciousness without linguistically enabled thought, but there would be no thinking about consciousness.

I hope you enjoy Hoffmeyer's writings. Signs of Meaning is the earlier, more accessible work.

Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter. — Tom Storm

Yes, people have different views and some do believe in eternal, absolute foundations. The problem, as always, with different opinions, is the impossibility of independent arbitration between them to determine which is true and which false.

That would have been what the ancients designate 'logos'. — Wayfarer

If order is posited as basic, it suggests a universal intelligence or God. My personal belief is that order evolves―nature takes habits, as Peirce contended. Order emerges out of chaos.

It seems paradoxical to me that Platonism, which is an extremely abstract conception, should claim mind-independence. I think that if anything qualifies as being mind-independent it would be nature itself, not as it is modeled by us, but just as whatever it is apart from our ideas.

I am not one who thinks there are no foundations―on the contrary I think there are many foundations, namely all the different presuppositions our diverse domains of enquiry and worldviews are based upon.

Is there one overarching foundation for nature itself? I'm not sure the question makes any sense. The only "foundation" I think it makes sense for nature to have is chaos―the incomprehensible no-thingness that everything takes form out of―a foundationless foundation.

Is Platonism not a context? Is language itself not a context?

I agree with you that if the relativist-postmodernist is treating their assertion that “truth claims are always context dependent” as itself a truth claim, then they are attempting to achieve a view from nowhere. — Joshs

No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement.

I agree that there are philosophical "domains" that go beyond the self-imposed limits of Objective Physical Science. — Gnomon

I don't say they "go beyond" but just that they are different domains of inquiry.

Beyond their mapping of neural coordinates of consciousness though, modern psychology tells us nothing about how a blob of matter can produce sentience & awareness & opinions — Gnomon

The brain is not a "blob of matter" so your question is moot. You seem to be thinking in terms of some obsolete paradigm.

If you liked that book, you would probably enjoy Biosemiotics and Signs of Meaning both books by Jesper Hoffmeyer. He makes essentially the same kind of argument about mind, understood as the ability to interpret signs, being ubiquitous in living organisms right down to cells.

Consciousness is not generally considered to be the same as mind, but then both terms 'mind' and 'consciousness' have many different uses. For example we refer to "unconscious mind" and yet it seems strange to say that an unconscious state is a mental state. It is easy to see why it is impossible for us to be aware of neural states, while it is generally uncontroversial that all mental states (meaning states that we can be conscious of even if we are not always) are correlated with neural states (which we cannot be aware of).

What is awareness or consciousness if not attention? We say we are conscious when awake and yet probably more than 99% of the time we are on autopilot. Is consciousness reflective self awareness, and is language necessary for that?

Humans aren't very good at doing things properly. — AmadeusD

I agree with you about that. We are fucking up spectacularly when it comes to managing the ecosystem and most of us don't seem to be able to understand that only fools would treat it as an "externality", and yet that is precisely what most economists do.

The so-called hard sciences are the closest thing we have to an investigation that is impartial and open-minded (at least in principle). If scientific method is unreliable, how much more so are those practices, such as religion, which are not based on impartiality at all?

This is a bit of a goal-post move imo. I'm unsure that science is the best way to formulate beliefs about non-empirical matters. I'm unsure how it would have a leg up. It tends not to wade into those waters. — AmadeusD

As I said I don't believe science is always the best source to rely on in formulating beliefs about non-empirical matters such as ethics and aesthetics. I think we do have real non-science-based understandings of the human condition in general. Such understanding is exemplified in literature, novels and poetry, for example. I don't take issue with interpretations of mystical and religious experiences, provided they are acknowledged to be subjective interpretations. If religious interpretations are not acknowledged to be subjective then the road to fundamentalism opens up. And I would say the same about political ideologies.

Demonstrable truth is only to be found in logic and mathematics and to a lesser extent in science. I think people often conflate the observational and theoretical dimensions of science. We never can confirm with certainty that scientific theories are true, but observations can be confirmed by peer review. Scientific facts consist in what has been confirmed to be reliably observed. There are many scientific facts which we have no hope of observing ourselves, but I think it right to trust that the peer review process has determined which observations can be relied upon to be correct. That said, nothing about human knowledge is infallible.

I am simply saying this is not without shaky foundations. We do not start with observation. We start with ourselves and can only carry out observations on the basis that we think our perceptual, recall and output systems are, at least practically speaking, not fallible in any major ways. These are things science cannot give us an answer to. — AmadeusD

Science doesn't presuppose that our observations are infallible―hence the importance of peer review. All we have to work with are our perceptual and recall systems. I'm not sure what you meant by "output" systems.

Anyway science is fallibilistic through and through, and our fallible perceptions and memories are all we have to work with. You might say this is problematic if you demand certainty, but otherwise it is just the human condition, and I don't think the fallibility of science is as great as the fallibility (in the sense of being subject to illusion) of scriptural authority, mystical experience and the rest..

Anyway it looks I misunderstood you to be saying that science is not a better foundation from which to speculate metaphysically than imagination and the other things I mentioned.

Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him. — Tom Storm

I think there are commonalities of understanding. A dingo will see a wallaby as potential food source, just as we might (if they were not protected). We observe birds dipping into water, perhaps to cool off, or wash themselves, just as we do. Birds and bees get nectar from flowers, and we also can do that with a certain limited range of flowers. Birds nest in trees and up here in Nimbin, there are actually some treehouses. I like the idea of "affordances" and it seems clear that many things in the environment offer similar kinds of affordances to animals as they might to us.

There is a Groundhog Day movie quality to much of that. — Paine

:lol: Indeed there is a Sysyphean element.

That would make things easier!

:up:

The bolded appears to rely on the italicised. That appears quite problematic to me, and likely what Wayfarer is getting at, i think. But you are patently correct, prima facie. — AmadeusD

Why is it problematic that metaphysical speculations should be based on something other than merely the imagination, scriptural authority, the supposed authority of the ancients or mystical experiences and reports?

I have no problem with philosophical speculation. It operates in science in the form of abductive reasoning. The point is that it should be underwritten by science, if we are speculating about the nature of things. For ethics and aesthetics it might be a different matter―science may not have much to tell us in those domains.

How things such as matter, mind or consciousness intuitively seem (the province of phenomenology) which is determined by reflection on experience, tells us only about how we, prior to any scientific investigation, might imagine that these things are. That may have its own value in understanding the evolution of human understanding, but it tells us nothing about how the world things really are.

So I was responding to the dogmatic assertion that "linguistic communication would be impossible if materialism were true". I reject that as dogma because it assumes that the material world is purely a "billiard ball" world of mindless atoms in the void..

Thanks. Copy/ pasting form the comments is a tedious process. I've often thought I should write my responses in a single word document and then copy/paste to the site, but I just never seem to get around to doing that. I'm not all that concerned about it, I guess, otherwise I would have been doing that all along.

Yes, I would say connected. Everything arises from social practices and contingent factors; the possibilities of our experiencing anything, perception, our bodies, and the way we experience the world are all shaped by these conditions. But this is not my area of expertise I think Joshs is a professional on these matters. My interest/knowledge is limited. — Tom Storm

I'd say everything about human life is socially mediated, simply because language is a social phenomenon, and so I must agree with you that truths are always relative to contexts. This can be shown by asking anyone who disagrees to state a context-independent truth. Within our common life there are a myriad of contexts, and they are all nested within the human context itself, which in turn is nested within the context of biology―the context of life that we share with other animals, and even plants, fungi and microbes.

Social and cultural evolution are preceded and underpinned by biological evolution. At the most basic level we perceive the world in the way our evolved 'embrained' bodies determine. As the study of animals shows language is not necessary for perception, and it seems absurd (to me) to say that if we had not been enculturated we would not perceive the same world that we do as enculturated beings, just on account of our human physiology.

From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities.

Excellent argument. But it will be ignored. :grin: — apokrisis

It is an excellent argument and it will be ignored―when confirmation bias is that strong it becomes impenetrable.

As the adage, apparently misattributed to Mark Twain has it: "Never argue with stupid people―they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience".

Thanks Jamal, the projected new forum sounds great. Is there any way of exporting one's posts from the old forum as a word file?

Rational thought is simply thought which is logically consistent with its premises. People speak about premises being rational, but that's a harder things to measure. If rationality equals consistency, what can the starting premises of a movement of thought be consistent with? Tradition? Scripture? Science? Everyday experience?

I suppose I should say what I've been reading, which I usually never bother to do. I tend to read non-fiction in the morning and fiction at night, and I often have several books on the go. Currently reading Biosemiotics and Signs of Meaning by Jesper Hoffmeyer. Other books on the go Life's Ratchet by Peter Hoffmann, Beast and Man by Mary Midgeley, The Everpresent Origin by Jean Gebser, Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse and The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy.

that linguistic communication would be impossible if materialism were true. — Wayfarer

I see no reason to believe that. Perhaps you are working with a redundant model of material as 'mindless substance'. If material in all its forms were nothing but mindless substance, then of course it would follow by mere definition that conscious material is impossible. But that is specifically the "question-begging presumption" I was referring to.

Thing is, consciousness is already strictly a metaphysical conception, hence necessarily non-physical, — Mww

That would be so only on certain question-begging presuppositions.

The point is that neither idealism nor physicalism are, contrary to what their opponents like to suggest, self-refuting. Actually idealism is not usually criticized for being self-refuting, but rather for being explanatorily impotent, implausible or even incoherent in that the only forms of idealism which can serve to explain our everyday experience rely, in order to give an account of how shared experience could be possible, on ideas like God or universal mind or collective mind' ideas which themselves are not able to be satisfactorily conceptually explicated or related to everyday human experience.

Is this an infinite situation? I experience the knowledge that I'm experiencing warmth. And I experience the knowledge of the knowledge that I'm experiencing warmth. And… — Patterner

No, I'd say that's just empty playing with words.

You’d think that would be ‘nuff said. — Mww

The problem is that the idea of physicalist inconsistency is a strawman given that eliminativists do not seek to eliminate or discount the fact of being conscious (consciousness) but instead believe that it is an entirely neural, that is physical, process, and that the kind of default imagining of what consciousness is, based on the "seeming" of introspection and rationalist conceptualization, is an illusion.

Now, of course they may be wrong, and there seems to be no way to test that hypothesis, as there is no way to test the idea that consciousness is somehow (although the somehow remains obscure) non-physical.

The point I would contend is the idea on either side of the debate that their conclusions are "slam dunk". That idea only shows dogmatism, closed-mindedness.

I agree that people, as individuals, need to look after their own, and their family's, living and well being first and foremost. Christ advocated giving to the poor and needy, but of course one must have something to give, that is have enough for oneself―an excess, before being in a position to give to others. The welfare state, though is not an imposition on individuals to do the support of the sick, the vulnerable and the needy, that role is, ideally, taken care of by taxing the "haves" in order to provide for the "have-nots".

That too. It's a kind of Social Darwinism, but with a religious/spiritual theme. I find that the religious, at least the traditionalists, are far more serious and realistic about life, about the daily struggle that is life. I appreciate that about them and about religion. — baker

There is a difference, though, between individuals not giving to others because they have no excess to give, and the supposedly God-given right of individuals to accumulate as much wealth and power as they are able to without being morally required to give at all if they don't feel like it. Their right to do this is predicated on the idea of individual merit―if they have the ability to accumulate wealth and power they should be allowed to do so unrestrictedly. But this ignores that fact that individuals use the privilege and benefits of a society that everyone (ideally and if the able to) contributes to, in order to rise as far as they can on power/ wealth scale. There is no acknowledgement , in that kind of thinking, of what the individual relies on―the societal infrastructure. So, I see it as a kind if willful blindness on the part of the right―and a kind of hypocrisy.

By the religious/spiritual people themselves. — baker

Are you saying that the religious people themselves have a cynical view on what religion is supposed to be?

Look at the dates in the statistics in the link. This is recent. — baker

You're right. I didn't read it more than cursorily. It's certainly true that old attitudes to women and indigenous folk generally, which were certainly significantly driven and justified by religious beliefs, still linger on today.

For starters, overcoming the good boy scout mentality. I sometimes watch the livefeed from our parliament. The right-wing parties are the religious/spiritual people. The way they are is what it means to be "metaphysically street smart". I haven't quite figured it out yet completely, but I'm working on it. — baker

OK, I'm obviously less clear on what you mean than you are. Is it something like metaphysics-as-politics? Or, given that the political right is generally associated with the idea that individuals, their personal achievements and the merits and privilege that thereby accrue to them, are more important than social values which support looking after those individuals who "don't make the grade"; is that the kind of thing you have in mind?

How about we follow the money and suggest that what is going on is not a politization of institutionalized religion, nor a corruption -- but a correct, exact, adequate presentation of religion/spirituality.

That when we look at religious/spiritual institutions and their practitioners, we see exactly what religion/spirituality is supposed to be. — baker

Can you elaborate? It's not clear to me what is meant by "exactly what religion/ spirituality is supposed to be". Supposed by whom?

For example, for a long time, violence against indigenous women was far less investigated than violence against women of other categories. Hence initiatives like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_and_Murdered_Indigenous_Women. — baker

Today, rape, torture and murder are generally considered to be crimes even against the "enemy' in war. That indigenous people were once widely thought of as less than human, usually on account of religious attitudes, is not relevant.

I resent I'm not as metaphysically street smart as they are. — baker

What does being "metaphysically street smart" look like to you?

The point is that we don't create our characters, we are mostly molded by genetics, family circumstance, teachers, and encounters with others. Any decision we make anywhere along the line, which might be thought to be some kind of self-construction of character is really just an expression, a manifestation of our already existing character.

"Freedom" belonging to "timeless intelligible character" is itself an unintelligible notion as far as I can tell. That said, I'm open to having it explained to me in terms that make intuitive sense. I also see Kant's conceptual distinction between empirical and intelligible causality as being without any real substance. Perhaps I don't get it, but from my perspective causation is an inference to explain what is observed (the empirical), and is intelligible only as such.

The idea that we, as things in themselves might have, from that perspective, a radical freedom just seems like a fudge, even though, although not having studied Kant intensively and knowing that he had made that very argument, but simply extrapolating from the idea of the noumenal, I once imagined the argument and used it myself.

Once I thought more about it and let go of the emotional need to believe in free will I came to see it as fatally underdetermined. For a start I would need to be fully consciously aware of and in control of that purported freedom for it to really count as such.

:up: I always liked that Schopenhauer line. To be free in the kind of libertarian sense that it seems people who believe in free will usually entertain we would need to be able to create our natures from scratch. It would be like pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps in defiance of gravity and flying. Sapolsky is good on this. An interesting debate between Dennett and Sapolsky.

:up: Institutionalized religion seems always to become politicized, and hence corrupted, coming to serve power instead of free inquiry and practice.

:up: If we had had another religion or no religion Western culture would have developed differently to be sure. The same goes for Platonism, Aristotle, the Stoics, etc., etc. As we know from complexity theory, even small differences can compound to later produce much greater differences.

"It is wrong to rape _my_ daughter, but why should I care about what happens to your daughter?!" — baker

I don't believe that is characteristic of most people at all. People are outraged at the rape of other people's daughters or sons, are generally outraged by any rape at all.

It may be neural. It may be computational - below the level of the neural, as Randy Gallistel suggests. There are some who think neurons alone don't suffice to explain mental activity, hence proposals like Hameroff and Penrose who speak of microtubules. — Manuel

I would think that since computation can be done on physical machines, we would have little reason to think that neurons are not capable of doing it. If mind is computational and computation is a physical process then it would seem to follow that the mental is really a function of the physical. That seems most likely to me, but it remains an opinion.

There's also the linguistic component discussed by Chomsky a very intricate unconscious model which we can tease out into consciousness to discover its form. — Manuel

Not being familiar with Chomsky's work, I have nothing to support a comment.

But unless you want to say something, I enjoy talking with you, I think your use of mental is not problematic, as I said it's a caveat, and I mention it because I feel hesitancy to create more distance than there is between the mental and the physical. It's more monist issue. — Manuel

I also enjoy your input and perspectives. Difference is good―I don't think we want this place to become an echo chamber. I also agree with you on not wishing to create a substantive difference between the mental and physical, even though I think the distinction is useful in some of our thinking practices.

It's not so much the brain (though of course if we lack it, we might not be thinking in high quality), more so what comes alongside consciousness and thinking, which is an obscure apparatus - we cannot introspect into how we do what we do with the mental. But this is just a quibble — Manuel

I'm going to respond with another quibble. You are again referring to what we cannot introspect as "mental", whereas I think it most plausible to consider that what we cannot introspect is 'neural', and that it is precisely it's character as non-mental that makes it impossible to introspect.

I don't understand what you mean by structure on these levels. Are we speaking of the seemingly concrete nature of rocks, or that certain food seems to be liked by many animals? — Manuel

No, I was referring to the different ways different animals' sensory organs are anatomically structured. For example, we know dogs see limited colour compared to us (mostly blues and yellows) due to their lack of red sensitive cones in their eyes.

Yes, normal moral intuitions can be countermanded by religious or political ideologies. It usually takes the form of "offering" it seems.

Yes by and large, but i don't think they come to these convictions by reasoning or considering evidence. — ChatteringMonkey

Right, and I haven't anywhere said otherwise.

Edit: "offering" should have been "othering". Damn spellcheck!

I generally agree, but not for moral beliefs because those are not or at least not easily verifiable with evidence. How many people do actually change their minds about those when confronted with evidence or rational argument? — ChatteringMonkey

Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on?

As to how many people change their minds, have you ever heard an argument to support the position that murder, rape, theft, exploitation or torture are morally permissible?

Not rosy, I realise how the people were controlled with brutality. But at least the rulers realised the benefits of the ideological stability provided by the church. — Punshhh

I'm not arguing that it didn't benefit the rulers.

I think religion, in various forms is still a very significant part of modern culture. I also think it is natural, once someone starts thinking for themselves, to require evidence for beliefs.

The nervous system is then a component of a system of which the brain is a part of. — Manuel

Of course. In all organisms there is no actual separation between parts of the system. But I think there are good reasons to think of the brain, just as we do of the heart, the lungs and other organs as functional systems in themselves.

What about language use? We literally do not know what we are specifically going to say prior to saying it (or typing it.) Clearly we have a vague meaning, which we can express through propositions, sometimes expressing what we wanted to say, sometimes we just get approximations. — Manuel

I think what you say here supports my view. What we say is preceded, it seems most plausible to think, by neuronal processes, brain processes of which we cannot be aware. So I don't think it is right to refer to them as mental processes, given that I think the term is most apt when applied to what we can be conscious of.

Yeah we have been stuck on this point before if I recall correctly. I am skeptical that they do. Not that they necessarily experience things COMPLETELY differently from us in all respects, but in some respects they do. Dogs with olfaction have access to a world we barely imagine. Mantis shrimp have 16 color receptive cones which renders the experience they have of the world very different from what we see. — Manuel

You seem to be misinterpreting me to say that other animals see things in the same way as we do. I'm not saying that at all―I'm saying they see the same things we do but in different ways according to the different ways their sensory modalities are structured.