Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
Hello, all ! I'm digging into the philosophy of science lately, especially into Popper, and I've come upon some themes that seem worthy of discussion here.
[quote = Popper]
Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its collaboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere…
...
Basic statements are not justifiable by our immediate experiences, but are … accepted by an act, a free decision.
...
Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.
[/quote]
Is anyone else reminded of Wittgenstein's later work here? Popper does not take the route of treating sense-data at the absolute which can falsify theories. Instead he talks of decisions. In his Logic, he uses the metaphor of a jury. I think he's trying to jump over the quicksand between language and the world apart from language. This 'swampy' element is something like 'common sense.' I imagine, for instance, everything that goes into a making a legitimate measurement, including one that falsifies a theory. Wittgenstein's discussion of the standard meter comes to mind. Popper admits or tolerates a dimness at the base of critical rationalism.
If we think of basic statements as facts and theories as interpretations, then facts turn out to be more 'complex' than interpretations (or to be a different kind of interpretation.)
Thoughts?
[quote = Popper]
Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its collaboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere…
...
Basic statements are not justifiable by our immediate experiences, but are … accepted by an act, a free decision.
...
Science does not rest upon solid bedrock. The bold structure of its theories rises, as it were, above a swamp. It is like a building erected on piles. The piles are driven down from above into the swamp, but not down to any natural or ‘given’ base; and if we stop driving the piles deeper, it is not because we have reached firm ground. We simply stop when we are satisfied that the piles are firm enough to carry the structure, at least for the time being.
[/quote]
Is anyone else reminded of Wittgenstein's later work here? Popper does not take the route of treating sense-data at the absolute which can falsify theories. Instead he talks of decisions. In his Logic, he uses the metaphor of a jury. I think he's trying to jump over the quicksand between language and the world apart from language. This 'swampy' element is something like 'common sense.' I imagine, for instance, everything that goes into a making a legitimate measurement, including one that falsifies a theory. Wittgenstein's discussion of the standard meter comes to mind. Popper admits or tolerates a dimness at the base of critical rationalism.
If we think of basic statements as facts and theories as interpretations, then facts turn out to be more 'complex' than interpretations (or to be a different kind of interpretation.)
Thoughts?
Comments (284)
I dont see Popper as compatible with the later Wittgenstein. Popper’s notion of falsification depends on certain assumptions concerning the invariance of method that Wittgenstein challenged. Many Wittgenstein scholars see his work as consistent with , and inspiring such figures as Kuhn and Feyerabend.
His main approach was to create a ‘science of consciousness’ and make firmer the ground upon which the more traditional ‘sciences’ stand.
“The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology”
1) Scientific investigation is a function of metacognition (active intellect), which is caused by intention, is pure, linguistic, rational, and cultural, and results in declarative knowledge.
2) Metacognition is founded on cognition (passive intellect), which is caused by perception, is empirical, non-linguistic, non-rational, and cross-cultural, and results in empirical knowledge.
No doubt they are different thinkers on the whole. Yet it also seems that the flexibility of Popper's system is often overlooked. 'Convention' is a surprisingly prominent word in The Logic. The point made above about basic statements reminds me of passages from On Certainty.
I have put some time in w/ Husserl & I'm a fan, and his later stuff might be said to amplify Popper's point in different style. His earlier stuff, which I don't know as well, seems to be mired in subjectivity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Husserl was after something like meaning-giving or meaning-bestowing fundamental intuitions. I don't see how such intuitions are checkable, though I empathize with the desire to give science something like an exact and profound meaning.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv
I like Husserl, and he's clearly pro-science. He sees the problem too, which is the clash of two 'obvious' realizations: (1) there is a world that precedes, outlasts, and contains me and everyone else and (2) only my functioning nervous system and living body allows me to be a me who is aware of is.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm
A little later he writes:
Quoting I like sushi
Do you not think such a science would also depend on the same swamp? How would theses in such a science be supported? Do we confer and co-articulate what we agree is an apt description of an otherwise private consciousness ?
There is public observation (consciousness is a misnomer to use here as it pertains to individual consciousness -- the "collective consciousness" we hear from time to time mentioned in writings is a hip pop philosophy, nothing else. It doesn't mean a thing in philosophy).
So public observation has coherence and objectivity. The bridges would've had fallen a long time ago if it weren't the case. The thing that science philosophers often cry about is the dichotomy between "theory" and "observation", which the likes of Putnam (you can correct me on this, not sure) also have criticized for being mistaken as a dichotomy.
I said this in another thread -- objective reality means that reality (out there: là-bas) contains the components of the scientific theories we develop as a result of our observation. The theories themselves are our observations -- which coheres with reality.
The issue in this context is how do we know the bridges haven't fallen? Let me be clear. We do know this. Do we explain knowing this in terms of sense-data? Or do we start with testimony? Can and should we formalize checking that the bridges haven't fallen? Popper wants to avoid an infinite regress.
Let's take a narrower example. Let's say a theory predicts a reading of between 23 and 25 kilograms. A scientist records a measurement of 24 kilograms. All is well, right? But what goes into taking a measurement? Do we worry about the device's proper functioning? The eyes reading the needle, scooping up sense-date? Is the scientist delusional? Should he measure 20 times, 2000 times? The point is that worry/doubt must come to an end at some point. We must trust in a swampy informal layer of 'experience' or 'common sense' or 'ordinary language.' This recalls On Certainty.
Excellent theme. This is also thinkable in terms of interpretation and fact. As I understand it, facts tend to include interpretations that are so uncontroversial that they are perhaps even unnoticed. We look 'through' our measuring devices. They become transparent for us.
Popper's view seems to make interpretation easier to understand and more exact than its murky substrate of fact. In some ways this is not surprising. Our science hovers above the domain of metaphysics which only aspires to play the role of a weight-bearing foundation.
All of the above -- that's why I'm saying about no dichotomy exists.
I prefer to emphasize the limited applicability of the dichotomy. To eject it entirely is to eject Popper's conventional demarcation of science from non-science. IMO, familiar distinctions tend to be justified in familiar contexts and only become problematic when taken by philosophers as absolutes.
Let's get concrete again. How does one test whether a pill causes weight-loss? A controlled experiment, right? We measure the weight of the participants before and after. We might say that "participant #20 weighed 156 pounds" is fact because no justification is expected or given. We 'trust' in this measurement process. It's transparent for us. We might want to check the math and the application of statistical principles though. This would be checking the interpretation, which is such because it must be justified/supported.
Right. There is a point at which doubting is absurd. Which then we know what "absurd" amount is. So, yes, common sense, sense-data, formal measurements, device all play a role. Calibration is a thing -- we're good at calibrating different devices so that we're not being fooled or delusional. Like I said, the bridges would have fallen by now if that's not the case.
Quoting jas0n
Oh no. When I said there's no dichotomy, I really meant that the philosophers meant within the scientific knowledge. So, the dichotomy matters in context. We're not comparing apples and oranges -- scientific observation and the arts, for example.
Husserl is not an empirical realist. He does not believe it is coherent to make the claim that a world precedes, outlasts and contains me and everyone else like some kind of container. On the contrary , the natural ‘ world’ is constituted via progressively more advanced intentional acts, and cannot be assumed as ha i g an existence out side of these acts. The ‘world’, understood most primordially, has its origin in the subject-object structure of time consciousness. That is to say , the transcendental subject is only what it is as a constantly changing flow of associative syntheses that is every moment exposed to and changed by an outside. But this is. it an outside of worldly objects as empirical naturalism would have it.
“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine?
Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)
“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)
“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)
Firstly, this ‘science of consciousness’ was based on radically different principles than that of empirical
science. Thus , he was not attempting a study of consciousness using methods that have anything whatsoever to do with what you would associate with empirical science. Second, his transcendental method , which is what he means by science of consciousness , doesn’t just apply to consciousness, it also applies to the natural empirical sciences, critiquing their limitations of self-understanding and grounding them in transcendental subjectivity.
That seems to be the case, and I find that problematic. The plausibility of the thesis that the world is my dream depends upon common-sense experience of myself as a social animal who understands that sense organs can be damaged so that this or that human is shut out from a realm of color or sound. The very notion of an ego seems dependent on other egos. The notion of truth-telling seems to depend on some kind of community in relation to a shared world.
Quoting Joshs
This basically collapses consciousness into being. If everything is X, then 'X' is useless, cuts no mustard at all. Did you hear about the solipsist who refused to turn around because everything was always in front of him anyway?
Quoting Joshs
I think we can naturalize this psychedelic vision by talking about the way the 'same' system of language 'lives' in all us who have internalized various cultural norms and habits. The philosopher can methodically ignore whatever seems contingent in his 'lifestream,' hunting for a primordial structure (some kind of postulated self-presence or eternal 'Now' that frames or accompanies that which changes.)
Popper rejected Hegelian dialectic in favor of a Kantian notion of an assumption approach of science toward truth He could not accept the notion that all aspects of thought, empirical theorization and methods and practices of scientific verification are contingent. They belong to communities of research which, when they undergo change , displaces not only the former theories but the accepted methods of proof that were tied to theories. Wittgenstein agreed with Kuhn, against Popper, that scientific change is like change in the arts , a matter of aesthetic shifts rather than an asymptomatic approach of truth through falsification.
He does not believe the word is my dream, but that we don’t represent , mirror, or correspond to
an indepdentlt existing world. He , like Derrida , Nietzsche and Heidegger believes that a world is enacted , produced and continually transformed through my perceptual and intersubjective engagement. My anticipations of events are subject to continual validation or invalidation from an outside which is always already co-defined by my interpretations of it.
I think you need to support this claim. I've been reading Popper's Logic, and I was surprised how flexible P was, probably because people like to paint papa Popper as the grinch who stole Christmas. He liked an alternative view (conventionalism) but defended his own. I think it's wrong to frame such a decision in terms of 'could not accept,' as if he was a child afraid of thunderstorms.
If other subjects exist, then so does the world? Yes?
If you are retreating to a group of subjects constructing a kind of interpretative layer on top of some given layer, then that's just a reasonable version of indirect realism, seems to me.
I think there's some truth in this, but I don't know if it's best to leap from the impossibly of exactly specifying the nature of science to the worthlessness of decent approximation. Dictionaries are 'stupid' and yet useful.
I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed as variations on an ongoing theme.
I see no mention of Peirce. Did I miss something?
Quoting jas0n
The tricky bit here is that measurements are where the facts - as theoretical entities - must interface with the physical reality they puport to measure. So there is the further thing of an epistemic cut.
Logically, a measurement is constructed to be a binary switch. What number should I attach to some modelled aspect of the world? And then a measurement is made by plunging the mechanical switch into the boiling flux of world. The switch is tripped and you pull your measuring implement out to read off the appropriate numerals.
So the mystery is all about the epistemic cut - the ability to make measurements that depends on being able to produce mechanical switches that interface between the logically/mathematically organised theory and the unbroken physical flow of the world - the thing in itself - that can trip the switch in a suitable fashion, giving some account of itself in terms of digits to be read off dials.
A measuring stick doesn’t seem immediately like a switch, but it is. You can only read off some definite number and write it down in your log when you decide the analog continuity of the reality looks close enough - for all practical purposes - to one digit and not some other digit.
The epistemic cut is a further refinement developed by Howard Pattee and Robert Rosen in the 1960s, if you are looking for a formal understanding of the pragmatism that grounds the scientific method - and indeed, life and mind as reality-modelling systems in general.
If one assumes that an ego is 'given' or 'primary,' then perhaps one can cast everything else as an appearance for that ego. But I don't think this story is plausible. To me it makes more sense to take the ego and the world as 'equiprimordial' or conceptually independent.
Note that I grant the importance of a functioning nervous system in a particular human body. I don't think John Smith continues to feel or think after his cremation. I can't say much about what the world/universe is/was once all life is extinguished or before life arrived. So the subjective aspect should be acknowledged.
I like what I know of Pierce, and I'm fairly familiar w/ pragmatism (James, Rorty). It'd be great to hear what you can add from that angle.
I agree that it's a switch. Measurements seem to be forced to choose one among a finite number of options. (A Turing machine has an arbitrarily long tape, but real devices are finite.)
Quoting jas0n
The key for me is that Popper believed that determination of anomalies and the impetus of scientific revolutions were rational affairs, making use of settled method. Kuhn disagreed with this rationalism.
“If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.
This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).
The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.”
( Stanford Encyclopedia)
This makes excellent sense. I'd add that Popper is also including the social element of technique and communication. I have to 'believe' in a purported measurement. Did the technician do it correctly ? Record it correctly? Did the device perform correctly? Was the device constructed directly ?Do we worry about 'sense-data' tickling technicians soul? Or do we 'black box' the issue ? 'Look through' the whole mess, in a manifestation of trust, as if transparent and toward/at what is currently/actually a matter of living doubt?
I'd prefer to quote Popper himself, but I don't have a digital copy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/popper/#BasiStatFalsConv
One way to look at this is: evidence against a scientific thesis should be possible. Maybe we don't drop it right away. Life is complex. But it should at least look bad when it fails at prediction. It has to be specific enough to fail.
I don't find the underlined sentence to be obvious. Instead you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what?
I don't know about this. I don't doubt that you can find fragments and build a case in this direction, but the older W wasn't exactly systematic, and probably an opposite case could be built.
Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness.
Modern phenomenology got its start with Husserl's assertion that stripping away the layers of historically acquired philosophical and scientific dogma via the reduction, in order to get to ‘the things themselves', reveals to us an irreducible primitive of immediate present experience. But rather than this primitive subsisting in an objectively present ‘now' point appearing once before being replaced by another in an infinite series of past and future punctual ‘nows', Husserl proposed the ‘now' as a tripartite structure composed of a retentional, primal impression and protentional phase. In doing so, he replaced a temporality justifying objective causation with the temporality of the intentional act. Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense.
But this ‘someone’, understood most reductively , is just this empty zero point. So what is essential here is the idea that every experience is an intending beyond itself , and an exposure to an alien outside that remakes the nature of the ‘ego’ . Both the subjective and objective poles of an intention are remade by the act.
I get that, really. Call it the transcendental ego or the 'pure witness.' It seems to be a collapse of consciousness into being. All that is is consciousness. The empirical ego (my handsome mug in the mirror) is just a thing for that which things primordially. Nothing else ever. Substrates ? Matter? A mere product or manifestation of consciousness.
The following quote is not my kind of reading material. I discovered it when searching 'pure witness.' But perhaps you'll see a sort of parody of Husserl that's too close for comfort here.
https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/
I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness?
What would be private here if every moment of experience subtly remakes this ‘private’ realm? Where is the inside , the dream, the subject , the solipsism if the inside is always redefined by its outside? In order to have a solipsism there must be something , some intrinsic , immanent content lurking at the origin that protects itself from transformation as it encounters a world There is absolutely nothing of this in what I’m suggesting. On the contrary , I am suggesting a radically temporal and radically mobile and transformative notion of subject-object relationality. For me the origin is the difference, the in-between, the differential , neither subject nor object nor just a cobbling together of the two.
I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is.
https://integrallife.com/always-already-the-brilliant-clarity-of-ever-present-awareness/
This 'God itself' in entirety neglects other subjects it seems to me. We are all God, and yet we still have to figure out who to trust !
Cool. I was just looking for clarification. I acknowledge the complexity and sophistication of your position. It's a highly developed 'left wing' vision, while I've moved from the left toward the center over time. I reluctantly grant the claims of an exterior.
Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view.
This vision seems to require either some kind of 'divine' synchronization of our video games or a substrate of some kind (what some thinkers have probably meant by 'matter'). Let's say a man runs off to live alone in a cave and writes a philosophical masterpiece. A century later the manuscript is discovered and assimilated in the living speech of a community (alive in the dreams from which it was long absent). What makes possible such a detour? What is this substrate with memory?
Let’s look at how Husserl grounds the empirical
object.
One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.
We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.
Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.
In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.
But this ‘object’ is not yet the empirical object. In order to attain that notion of objectivity we must be able to recognize other egos as being like us. We do this not simply by constructing some sort of internal model of how we think others think. Rather , we directly perceive them as ‘alter-egos’ as beings like us but also different from us. Again, this is not our imaging of the other from
behind a wall of solipsism. It is a direct perception of them as other. As such, we can accept their own perspectives on objects which differ from our own, and take on a new attitude such that now our own experience of objects becomes a mere ‘appearance’ of the consensually perceived ‘empirical’ object that is the same for all of us. But meanwhile , this ‘empirical’ object is one which none of us actually directly sees.
So o hope you can see that this complex and intricate subjective and intersubjective system of reciprocal coordinations is anything but a ‘ divine synchronization’.
It is instead the actual way that we jointly build up a shared world.
Yes, I get that. Call it part of the mediation.
Quoting Joshs
This too I understand.
As a tentative indirect realist, I'd include all this in mediation. The stuff-in-itself from which the idealized table is constructed by our nervous systems and cultural conventions/habits is something like a point at infinity.
Quoting Joshs
The order of theoretical construction might not be the order in fact. Perhaps the self is peeled off from the tribe as the baby is peeled off from the mother. If one stresses consciousness as 'pure witness,' then one is perhaps tempted to construct others from perceptions. But if one grants language priority, then the subject is co-created with the others, an effect of language and other physical habits, despite having his/her/their/its own body. Consider what I take to be Heidegger's view, that one is primarily 'one' or the generic/default layer of habit/interpretation of a generation (and class and gender, etc.)
Note, my friend, that you still don't deal with the problem of the substrate. I think you grant a plurality of subjects? Is there a world that precedes or contains them in any sense? If not, how do we communicate without the synchronization? (I dream that I wave at you and you dream that I wave at you at the same time, etc.)
I accidentally hit 'flag' instead of 'reply,' which I mention both to apologize and to indicate to moderators that it was a mistake. (I hoped one could unflag, but it seems not.)
Anyway, what are you agreeing with ? @Joshs made quite a few points.
Step 1: bin James and Rorty. Dewey is OK though. :wink:
Even though Popper only came across Peirce late in his own career, he shared so much with Peirce down to a shared view that probability ought to be understood as propensity.
Quoting jas0n
Yep. But this is a rather secondary issue. Scientific method is well aware of these kind of commonsense problems and so pays a lot of attention to instilling a suitable level of experimental discipline and replicability.
Quoting jas0n
This is the more subtle issue. The idea that one exception could break the rule itself assumes a particular metaphysics. It says a theory can describe "how the world works" in some kind of totally constrained and exceptionless fashion - reality as a mechanism.
But the Peircean view follows the organicist tradition where the material ground of being is instead probabilistic - a sea of fluctuations or uncertain impulse. What Peirce dubbed a Vagueness, or Tychism.
And then a structure of constraints evolves to give firm shape to all the fluctuation. The possibilities are reigned in, narrowed in scope. In the limit - as Bateson put it - you still have plenty of fluctuation, but they are differences that no longer make a difference. Like an ideal gas at equilibrium, all the busy microphysics no longer makes a difference to the global macrostate.
And this is the world that science in fact describes. One that is probabilistic at base and thus always capable of exceptions that break the rule. And yet the rule is only in fact a constraint that limits exceptions to some long-run statistical profile.
So you have this conflict. There is the popular belief that the scientific method ought to be tuned to producing exceptionless law. Yet reality itself only has long-run habits.
Science is starting to realise this truth. Thermodynamics is starting to assert itself as the most fundamental model of the Cosmos.
So as far as framing laws goes, being so constraining as to be exceptionless would be to accept the idea that the Cosmos is an actual machine.
Peirce's pragmatism already understood this point. Which is why he stressed that universal laws were only really highly developed Cosmic habits. A propensity based view of probability itself follows.
Thanks ! I found it.
Well, I could definitely scrounge up some gripes about them. But they are readable. A bit squishy tho for my current taste.
Quoting apokrisis
My current view is mechanism with randomness. So a model will include random noise, for instance. Or the model will just be an empirically established distribution.
Quoting apokrisis
This makes sense to me. Zoom in and find a casino. The house tends to win, and chairs tend not to jump from one side of the room to the other. Broken plates tend not to reassemble spontaneously. But I only climbed a rung or two beyond Newton in school. Learning more physics is on the list with so many other worthy pursuits.
Quoting apokrisis
My understanding is that, back in Newton's day, folks were tempted/terrified to think of the world as a deterministic video game. As a child, I thought of laws that way and didn't think about the complexities of measurement and curvefitting and wasn't told about the randomness of modern physics.
Quoting apokrisis
Definitely a fascinating idea, which seems to replace the machine metaphor with one from biology. I've looked into biosemiotics a little bit (thanks to your intriguing posts) and it's good stuff.
Bigger picture: do you think in terms of lots of organisms each making a model of their world? Are you (roughly) an indirect realist? I understand the limits of the mind/matter distinction, hence 'roughly.' In this thread, I think the problem have other 'subjects'/persons hasn't been touched on enough. Folks either want to stuff the world into consciousness or flatten consciousness into the brain. I understand the motives for both moves, but each seems to simply ignore this or that issue. Are we different humans with different minds in the same world? And does this same world need some kind of an elusive substrate that we can carve into in order to communicate?
There are many conflicting interpretations of what Heidegger means by language and how he sees the relation between self and culture. This is from a recent paper of mine:
If Dasein's being-in-the -world is always structured as an intimate, pragmatic self-belongingness, how does Heidegger explain the basis of apparently normatively driven intersubjective ‘we' contexts? Heidegger's most systematic treatment of Dasein's role in a linguistic community appears in his discussion of average everydayness and das man in Being and Time.
Zahavi is among those thinkers who interpret Heidegger's ‘we-self' of every day das man as taking precedence over his authentic self of ‘ownmost' possibilities. As das man , Zahavi claims
“group belongingness, rather than being founded upon an other-experience, preceded any such experience.”
“...an everyday being-with-one-another characterized by anonymity and substitutability, where others are those from whom “one mostly does not distinguish oneself” (Heidegger 1996: 11)
He surmises that Heidegger would approve of Schmid's(2005) assertion that “...the we, the “sense of us” or “plural self-awareness,” precedes the distinction between yours and mine, is prior to any form of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition, and is itself the irreducible basis for joint action and communication.”
Zahavi is far from alone in interpreting Heidegger's discussions of the discursive practices of Das man as assuming an introjection of norms by a socially created self or a socially conditioned self-affecting subjectivity. Heidegger's critique of Husserl's model of empathy was taken by many interpreters as evidence that the primacy of being-with for Dasein functions as the conditioning of a self by an outside.
For instance, Rousse(2014) says
“...the particular way I ‘carry out' my being and relate to myself is unavoidably susceptible to the pressures of the others' normative expectations.””... inauthenticity is a matter of a person having his practical orientation dominated by ‘outside forces',...the tacitly operative normative expectations about how one ought properly and normally to behave.” “ Dasein, as essentially ‘being-with', initially ‘gets' its existential answerability by being socialized into the shared behavioral norms of the One. In turn, this enables, even encourages, Dasein to act in accordance with them and to avoid taking its own (‘existentiell') answerability for how it comports and understands itself. To be responsible, then, is to be the kind of agent who has the possibility to take responsibility for the socially normative determinants of identity.”
By taking for granted the notion of normativity as a shared understanding, Rousse exemplifies the kind of thinking that Heidegger says disguises, covers over, conceals and obscures a genuine understanding. Das man isn't a matter of simply acting in accordance with norms that are communally understood but a way of thinking that pre-supposes and takes for granted that the self can internalize and introject meanings from others. Public interpretedness is not about behaving in accordance with culturally assimilated norms but believing that norms exist as the sharing of unambiguously intelligible meanings in the first place.
Rousse misreads authenticity as a self-reflexive self's becoming aware of what it has introjected, ‘taken in' from culture and its attempt to take responsibility for, or embrace its own alternative to, those norms. But for Heidegger what the self discloses to itself in average everydayness is not introjected meanings from a community. The self never simply introjects from an outside to an inside. The radically temporal structuration of Dasein makes such introjection impossible.
Heidegger's(2010) task is to explain how a Dasein which always understands others in relation to its very own pragmatic totality of relevance ends up believing in a cultural world of linguistic practices that appear to be the same for all. “...what purports to be an opening up of the world is in fact its concealment: by appealing to public opinion and tradition, idle talk creates in Dasein the belief that it possesses universally acknowledged and thus genuine truths.”
Heidegger chooses words like average, vague, flattened , confused, uprooted state of suspension, and ambiguous to describe Dasein's being as Das Man, to indicate that the heedfulness of Care is still primordially and implicitly operative even when it is explicitly concealed and suppressed . Average everyday discourse has to be vague, approximate, superficial and ambiguous enough to conceal, disguise, cover over, miss, obscure, suppress the fact that the meaning of what is shared is never interpreted identically for each dasein.
“What is talked about is understood only approximately and superficially. One means the same thing because it is in the same averageness that we have a common understanding of what is said.” “Publicness ” does not get to "the heart of the matter," because it is insensitive to every difference of level and genuineness.”
“Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. Idle talk, which everyone can snatch up, not only divests us of the task of genuine understanding, but develops an indifferent intelligibility for which nothing is closed off any longer. Discourse, which belongs to the essential constitution of being of Dasein, and also constitutes its disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk, and as such of not really keeping being-in-the-world open in an articulated understanding, but of closing it off and covering over inner worldly beings. “ “ Ontologically, this means that when Da-sein maintains itself in idle talk, it is-as being-in-the-world-cut off from the primary and primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself.”
“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].”“Usually and for the most part the ontic mode of being-in (discoverture) is concealment [Verdeckung]. Interpretedness, which is speech encrusted by idle talk, draws any given Dasein into 'one's' way of being. But existence in the 'one' now entails the concealment and marginalization of the genuine self [eigentlichen Selbst]. Not only has each particular given itself over to 'one', 'one' blocks Dasein's access to the state it finds itself in [Befindlichkeit].”(Heidegger 2011)
What is this genuine self, this genuine understanding, this originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, this “getting to the heart of the matter”, these primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mitda-sein, toward being-in itself, that idle talk conceals?
To say that in the mode of average everydayness Dasein disguises, covers over, conceals, obscures its genuine self, a genuine understanding, an originary and primordial way of appropriating the matter, “getting to the heart of the matter,” primordially genuine relations of being toward the world, toward Mit-dasein, toward being-in itself, is to say that Dasein explicitly experiences itself as a constituted self, introjecting norms from other selves , but this awareness pre-supposes and is grounded in an implicit mineness.
Average everydayness of Das man and idle talk shares with what Heidegger calls the ‘present to hand‘ the features of being derivative modes of the ‘as' structure of heedful circumspective significance, functioning as a contextually rich totality of relevance. They also share the feature of being a ‘dwindling down' of that wider experience.
Even as Zahavi mistakenly critiques Heidegger for giving precedence to “plural self-awareness,” over the distinction between yours and mine, Zahavi's I-Thou model of sociality falls under the scope of Heidegger's formulation of Das Man.
Zahavi(2012) says “The I and the you are prior to the we”. The I-you relation “is a reciprocal exchange of address and response that affects and transforms the self experience of the participating individuals... we take over from others (and make our own) a language, roles, attitudes and norms”.
This makes individual behavior in social situations the product of narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints. The presupposition here is that my own subjectivity always functions as a harbor in the reception of social signs . Intersubjectivity is characterized by a reciprocal cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and common to other participants in my community. Zahavi assumes these culturally normed practices that we internalize represent forms of meaning no less robust in significance and relevance to our lives than those which we generate.
In contrast, for Heidegger the social norms and practices that Dasein takes in are specific modifications of meaning on the order of a diminution of significance. The publicness of Das Man and the present to handness of things are modes of Dasein representing a deprivation and trivialization of intelligibility, significance and relevance, and thus a reduction of meaningfulness. Dasein becomes alienated from itself not by being taken over by, introjecting and internalizing an outside but by encountering itself (its ownmost world of possibilities) as almost devoid of sense. This is self-alienation as senselessness rather than internalization of an other.
“However, alienation cannot mean that Da-sein is factically torn away from itself....this alienation, which closes off to Da-sein its authenticity and possibility, even if only that of genuinely getting stranded, still does not surrender it to beings which it itself is not, but forces it into its inauthenticity, into a possible kind of being of itself.”(Heidegger 2010)
Zahavi's belief that socialization is a direct introjection and internalization from an outside marks it from Heidegger's vantage as an inauthentic and confused self-understanding, even if we assume with Zahavi that the subject is an active participant in what it takes in from others( I-Thou).
World-understanding as Dasein-understanding is self-understanding. Self and world belong together in the single entity, the Dasein. Self and world are not two beings, like subject and object, or like I and thou, but self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world. (Heidegger 1982)
We saw earlier how for Husserl the alterity and foreignness of other egos is constituted as a variation of my own thematics, via aperceptive transfer. Heidegger understands thematic mineness through the Care structure. Heidegger says average everydayness alienates Dasein from itself, but without Dasein's therefore being merely conditioned by others.
My being-with-others originates primordially as ‘my ownmost' being-with , relative to my significant aims and goals, to what matters to me. As the inauthentic mode of average everydayness communication become flattened, leveled down into the vagueness of a ‘we' understanding, but this average everydayness does not eliminate but only covers over the originary ‘mineness' of the Care structure of primordial temporality.
The ‘solitude' of the mineness of the self of Dasein is disclosed most fundamentally for Heidegger in the authentic mood of angst. Angst individualizes and thus discloses Da-sein as "solus ipse." This existential "solipsism," however, is so far from transposing an isolated subject-thing into the harmless vacuum of a worldless occurrence that it brings Da-sein in an extreme sense precisely before its world as world, and thus itself before itself as being-in-the-world.“ "Together with the sober Angst that brings us before our individualized potentiality-of-being, goes the unshakable joy in this possibility.”
As much as it is the case that Heidegger's being-with-others is not the precedence of anonymous plural self-awareness over Dasein's ownness, it is equally true that Dasein's self-belonging is not a retreat from the immediate contingency of world-exposure, not the choosing of an idealist self-actualization at the expense of robust being with others. Gallagher and Gadamer's readings of Heidegger appear to fall prey to such a solipsist interpretation.
Gallagher(2010) says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”
Gadamer(2006) writes:
“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”
Zahavi, Gallagher and Gadamer are right and wrong in their readings of Heidegger. Gallagher and Gadamer are right that Heidegger makes their notion of primary intersubjectivity a derivative modification of the primary self-understanding of Dasein. But they are wrong to interpret Dasein's self-understanding as prior to sociality. Being-with is instead the very site of sociality as a referential differential inside-outside. Zahavi is right that Heidegger places being-with as prior to Zahavi's model of pre-reflective self-awareness, but Zahavi is wrong in treating Das Man as an anonymous plural self. As a referential differential it is a more intimate notion of self- relation than Zahavi's present-to-hand oppositional subject-object structure.
There is a world , but not a static one that sits there waiting for us to represent it faithfully with our science. The world is a continual development , and we participate in this development via our behavior. To know is to change the object of one’s knowledge. Through intersubjective discourse and culture each of us contributes to the evolution of the world. Our sciences produce new worlds in the form of knowing.
Ah, but who would dream it was static? We project/discover 'motionless' patterns in the motion (project being on becoming.)
Yes, I suggested something like this earlier, that the self and other are created simultaneously from we-stuff, from 'one.'
Quoting Joshs
Yes, that's how I see it, and that's maybe my fundamental gripe about the transcendental ego, at least inasmuch as it's involved in constructions of the world from images given through peepholes.
Does this becoming conform to a scheme, like for instance a dialectic?
But Heidegger’s Dasein is involved in constructions of the world from a totality of relevance given beforehand.
This doesn't adequately deal with the holism of nature and thus our position as modellers of nature.
The world as a whole is entrained to the dynamics of the laws of thermodynamics. Life and mind arise in turn as mechanism to further that univocal cosmic project. We feel the hot breath of the thermodynamic imperative at every turn. It is what our modelling relation with the world is fundamentally about. We exist both by and for our evolved ability to break down barriers to entropy production.
The imperative was the same - univocally - for the major transitions in out socio-cultural ways of life: the shifts from hunter-gatherers, to agriculturalists and pastoralists, to eventually the miners of the buried bonanza of fossil fuels.
So to understand the human situation, we must be able to place ourselves correctly in nature. We must start with the core or fundamental imperative that drives us, and thus shapes our sociocultural mindset, our generalised and collective view of the world.
Thus yes, humans only see the model of the world that they construct for themselves. But this model isn't fundamentally diverse, or plural, or something each of us contributes to except in the form of reinforcing the general direction being taken in the furtherance of the universalising goal.
Every poet and artist contributes to the current exponential rise in fossil fuel consumption just as much as anyone else. And do as little to change the situation, even if they might feel they want to. Same goes for the informed scientist. Neither cultural influence, nor technical influence, have had any influence, if you are tracking the human curve of entropy production - as Vaclav Smil has done.
So yes, we humans model the world - but in the univocal fashion that is appropriate to gaining control over nature and its resources so as to sustain our existence as dissipative structures, or organised beings who flourish by becoming ever smarter at being entropy degraders.
It is only when you get down to this level of science-informed modelling that you can clearly diagnose where things have gone wrong for us.
Organisms need to combine their entropy production with the ability to recycle their structural materials. They need to be an open path for the transaction of entropy - the flow from some source to some sink - while being closed for the matter that constructs that open path.
This is what nature does over all its organismic scales. Nature is indeed Gaian as when bacteria first evolved CO2 consuming photosynthesis, they just about poisoned the planet with the waste product - oxygen. But then the ability to consume oxygen in respiration - and make the waste product of CO2 - closed the cycle at a planetary level. A new self-balancing and autopoietic level of material recycling/solar flux harvesting was created that was capable of regulating the atmosphere and climate itself.
Everything worked smoothly until we came along as disruptors. We lived within the old system - the one entrained to the solar flux and its coupled photosynthesis~respiration balance. But then we stumbled upon a form of semiosis that went beyond social language - the techno-semiosis of mathematically structured thinking. And at the same time, we stumbled across a vast buried resource of unconsumed energy - the buried carbon quietly accumulated in sedimentary rocks over half a billion years of rotting vegetation and rotting plankton.
The scientific and industrial revolution were the result, a new stage of the human adventure that was predicated on the exponential rise of fossil fuel burning, coupled to a flagrant unconcern for the normal need to ensure a system of dissipation that was also closed for materiality. We built the entropy generating path - the one piping the stores in the ground to the heat sink of outer space. But didn't include recycling in the economic budget. We just filled our environment with material waste as if that too was a normal, natural, thing to do.
Then of course we found that getting rid of all the heat of the burning was also a problem. The atmosphere - the Gaian blanket of gas so lovingly gardened by nature for the past billion years with its marvellous photosynthetic~respiratory balance - acts as a barrier to the disposal of heat into the black unconcern of outer space. The heat exchange capacity of the atmosphere, and the planetary climate stability which was so carefully and biosemiotically constructed, has become a frustration to our entropic desires. Houston, we have a snafu.
So it is quite possible to step back from the human condition and see the whole story laid out.
Nature is dissipative structure based on biosemiotic modelling. To persist as biosemiotic dissipative structure requires being an organism - closed for materiality, open for entropy. It says that in the label. To be a structure is to recycle your matter in a way that achieves a dynamical stability. And to dissipate is to degrade some energy source, importing the good stuff at one end, exporting the waste heat to some bottomless sink outside yourself.
Life and mind arose doing just this. It evolved through four major grades of semiotic world modelling to get to us modern humans - the coding steps of genes, neurons, words and numbers. The three earlier levels of world modelling managed to make themselves closed for material, open for energy transaction. But the fourth level of modelling - the one based on numbers that wants to treat nature as a machine - isn't doing so well. Or it has over-performed on the entropy production, under-performed on the material recycling.
So for the scientist who understands the reality of organismic being, the inadequacies of the machine model, all this as plain as the nose on your face.
But the current paradigm - the economic juggernaut that has entrained both the typical scientist and the typical poet to its world model - has grown so mindlessly powerful that nothing is even slowing it in meaningful fashion. Only crashing off the road could bring it to a halt.
Philosophy used to be a discourse that seemed very important to pointing the way ahead. But that was when the dominant world model was linguistic and aimed at fine-tuning a way of life still lived within the constraints of the daily solar flux.
We now live by a world model that is techno-semiotic. And if philosophy was up to date, it would be presenting fine arguments about what it really means to be an organism - at the noosphere scale.
Instead, we have this stale nonsense - this warmed over Romanticism - about the human individual and the pluralistic struggle against totalising discourse. Or alternatively, the "commonsense realism" of Enlightenment thought that addressed the pragmatic concerns of the human way of life of yesteryear, then failed spectacularly to address the new world that its logical atomism, and other mechanistic tropes, were engendering.
So much time being wasted pissing about on antique concerns. :up:
Good way of putting it.
Quoting jas0n
As I've just outlined, the biosemiotic view would be that humans embody four quite distinct levels of world-making. But everyday folk philosophy carries on oblivious to this complexity in being "a subject" in "the objective world".
So the biological basis to being a conscious creature - a combo of genetic evolution and neurobiological development - is a well-integrated affair. A billion years of life with a multicellular complexity would tend to produce something suitably polished.
But we humans only tacked on symbolic and grammatically structured thought - the modern linguistic self - about 40,000 years ago. That is plain to see in the abrupt rise of symbolic art. That produced a new level or organismic existence where we became subjects not only to the world as seen by our inherited genes, or the world as it needs to be understood neuro-developmental as a body navigating confusing spaces, but as a subject within a linguistic community. Suddenly we were living in tribal spaces, freighted with symbols, taboos, customs - a new shared state of mind that our biological being had to become fully immersed in so as to survive.
So we can distinguish two distinct levels of personhood there. Nature and nurture. We are subjects in the world that our bodies must construct, and also subjects in the world our social organisation must construct. The two worlds have to be functionally aligned to feel like they are the one integrated "state of mind". But it's only been 40,000 years.
For the first 30,000 years, we were hunter-gatherers and so living as close as we could get to the entraining rhythms of nature. Then came one of those climate fluctuations - the ending of a cycle of ice ages, the loss of the big easy game harvested by excitable bands armed with spears, the start of agricultural and pastoralism. The domestication of the natural world by the imposition of a new communal understanding of nature as something to be socially parented rather than rudely hunted and gathered.
Even the socio-linguistic self can evolve its world model in radical ways. Or that socio-linguistic self starts to take over the neurobiological self as the centre of gravity when it comes to the business end of entropy production and the maintenance of a way of life, or the structure of the dissipation.
And it has been barely 500 years since we shifted into our new state of mind - the technocratic view of the world.
So the world - as it is understood to physical science - is the world as we are now constructing it. It emphasises technology - the desire for the mechanisation of all things that thus rewards a mindset which see its world in terms of mechanistic possibility. If we can look at the world as just an arrangement of efficient causality, then that looks like the world that we technological creatures could absolutely flourish in.
Only a few centuries earlier, we would have been looking at the same world through the eyes of the gardener or herder. We would see nature as a wilderness in need of domestication.
Wind back to the last set of ice ages and the world we saw was one with mysterious natural rhythms - the changing seasons, the wandering beasts, the dangerous boundaries demarcating different language communities, different tribal bodies. Nature was a flux. People clung together, bonded by a state of mind that was a narrative of ancestry and hard-earnt survival craft.
So it is true that there is some kind of substrate reality that grounds our idealistic fantasies. But where is the final point of view that sees this in a totalising way?
I've made it clear that for me, it ain't a mechanistic view of the substrate. That is reductionist and one-sided. It divides reality in a broken fashion that leaves the idealistic fantasies as its matchingly monistic "other".
The only view that sees through the muddle is the one that can both divide and unite. The good old logic of the dialectic, the dichotomy, the unity of opposites. This steps out of monism and leads us to the triadic systems view of reality - the holism that is an organic causality.
And the true final step is when the holism describes not just the substrate "out there" but captures the holism of the modelling relation, the semiosis, which is about an "us in here" as well.
Biosemiotics reveals all nature's clever tricks. It shows us how we - as human subjects - have this complex psychology that results from stacking up four levels of an ever enlarging "consciousness", or Umwelt.
The levels aren't even that well integrated. The techno-semiotic level in particular is still a half-baked view of reality ... as it needs to be seen in order for us to flourish in the world we are so busily trying to construct.
And yet, we can also see enough to that one grounding imperative shines through as the evolutionary trend. Learn how to be a dissipative structure - an autopoietic material being sustained by a bountiful entropic flow. Learn how to see a reality that looks just like that, as the reality that a subject prehends is the reality they intend, by their own existence, to bring into being.
Quoting apokrisis
I can understand something like the limits or the bias of the projection of mechanism, as if a hammer insists on seeing only a nail. I have never been satisfied by a metaphysical system, though I feel the urge toward a totalizing vision. I'm intrigued by the triadic systems approach, but I can't quite bring it into focus. The problem might be point of view. I can see only through my human (biocultural) 'lens.'
Kojève's version of Hegel was spectacular, implicitly semiotic perhaps. Reality is presented as fundamentally historical and conceptual (so 'concept' loses its mentalistic associations and becomes something neutral or just the structure of the world.)
Quoting apokrisis
This kind of thing, yes. Hard to do, but necessary for a comprehensive account that takes itself into that account.
Quoting apokrisis
I relate to this, and I connect it with the difficulty of philosophy. Tie a knot over here and another knot comes undone over there. Or it's blanket too small for the bed.
I like Heidegger, to be clear, so I'm not sure what you mean here. The self and the other are equiprimordial, as I think Hegel saw. The starting point of the Cartesian peephole doesn't make, although it is tempting when looking at the human body and its sense organs. Thinking/meaning is historical, more software than hardware, more 'we' than 'I.' We can think of the brain as hardware and as the tribal culture as a self-modifying, distributed OS with no official version. The game of rationality and inquiry happens only within language (is largely body independent, though some body is necessary.)
I would say that yes. I am making a claim about human nature, postulating a permanent structure in human experience. Let me note that I agree with the tripartite structure of time. I suppose I'm just making the point that we are still within metaphysics. I love the early Derrida on Saussure. I'm especially interested in the meaning of meaning, in something like the limits of clarification, ineradicable ambiguity, the futile yet intoxicating chase of a luminous plenitude. If ambiguity is ineradicable and ubiquitous, I'm not exactly sure what it means to say so.
Dialectic reminds me that the meaning of signs is external to the subject and inexactly determined by the history of their endless recontextualization within an infinite dialectic, which is not to say we should not strive toward what might be a point at infinity, an impossible mastery of our own signs.
Hegel was certainly trying to express the triadic logic of systems theory. Peirce did it best, but even he comes at it from at an angle that largely misses the hierarchy theory story.
Once you raise your metaphysical dimensionality from monistic and dualistic to triadic, you are dealing with structuralism at a level that is like trying to to imagine a four dimensional object. If you try to make any part of the whole your stabilising viewpoint, you have already lost the holism you hoped to model.
But then if you combine the many views - Aristotle, Hegel, Peirce, systems science - you get a feel for the way it all connects as an emergent structure of relations.
Quoting jas0n
Good analogies. And that is why hierarchy theory seems central to me. It is the basic structure of recursion itself. It is about the self-organisation or emergence of "fit" in any holistic sense.
Perhaps you can help me with the point of view involved. For instance, is human philosophy conceived of as something like reality's self-knowledge? Are human concepts (or 'dementalized' signs) given 'full status' as entities and not just as representations of some substrate? Is reality made of signs that are neither mental nor physical ? For this distinction is itself a cut of the sign ? Have you looked into Derrida's différance?
What role do we play? Would other intelligent lifeforms play? Is reality best understood as an organism? And us as organs or cells or suborganisms?
As I mentioned earlier, even though I think Gallagher and Gadamer misread Heidegger , they at least recognized that he was not dissolving the self into an interpersonal ‘we’ .
Gallagher criticizes Heidegger for not making what MerleauPonty calls ‘primary corporeal intersubjectivity’ primary. He says: “In Heidegger, and in thinkers who follow his line of thought, we find the idea that a relatively complete account of our embodied, expert, enactive, pragmatic engagements with the world can be given prior to or without reference to intersubjectivity.”
Gadamer(2006) writes:
“Mit-sein, for Heidegger, was a concession that he had to make, but one that he never really got behind. Indeed, even as he was developing the idea, he wasn't really talking about the other at all. Mit-sein is, as it were, an assertion about Dasein, which must naturally take Mit-sein for granted..."Care" [die Sorge] is always a concernfulness [ein Besorgtsein] about one's own being, and Mit-sein is, in truth, a very weak idea of the other, more a "letting the other be" than an authentic "being-interested-in-him."”
Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s.
Gallagher claims that:
“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”
While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.
Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.
Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.
“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”
“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”
“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our
bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
Just to be clear, I consider the impersonal we to be a kind of bottom layer. Of course we have personalities! But who are the great personalities? In general they are those who exploit that which came before. We are time-binding apes. The bottom-layer plugs us in to the network. So this isn't some war against individuality. It's just a critique of Cartesian fiction taken as a necessary starting point. The 'interior monologue' is something that can only come after being a little we-blob. 'The subject is an effect of language' and 'the soul is the prison of the body.' Even if these are overstatements, they at least balance an old philosophical prejudice...the lonely subject, imagined as that which is most primary, most given, most secure...
If I am misreading Heidegger and following Dreyfus, that's fine with me. These names are signs that organize texts, facilitate contextualization, etc. Fame implies no authority.
There is no ‘interior monologue’. Derrida says all speech is writing , so when I speak or write to myself, I am speaking to the other. This is the origin and only site of the social. My ‘internal monologue’ is therefore not internal but an exposure to alterity , and this happens BEFORE my engagement with other people.
“When he writes himself to himself, he writes himself to the other who is infinitely far away and who is supposed to send his signature back to him. He has no relation to himself that is not forced to defer itself by passing through the other in the form, precisely, of the eternal return. I love what I am living and I desire what is coming. I recognize it gratefully and I desire it to return eternally. I desire whatever comes my way to come to me, and to come back to me eternally. When he writes himself to himself, he has no immediate presence of himself to himself. There is the necessity of this detour through the other in the form of the eternal return of that which is affirmed, of the wedding and the wedding ring, of the alliance.
From this point of view, there is no difference, or no possible distinction if you will, between the letter I write to someone else and the letter I send to myself. The structure is the same.”
“… how do I connect the question of the constitution of time (and the alterity within the living present) and the question of the other (of the 'alter ego' as Husserl would say) ? Well my quick answer would be that the two alterities are indissociable. A living being - whether a human being or an animal being - could not have any relation to another being as such without this alterity in time, without, that is, memory, anticipation, this strange sense (I hesitate to call it knowledge) that every now, every instant is radically other and nevertheless in the same form of the now. Equally, there is no ‘I' without the sense as well that everyone other than me is radically other yet also able to say 'I', that there is nothing more heterogeneous than every 'I' and nevertheless there is nothing more universal than the 'I'.”(Arguing with Derrida)
Derrida is not saying that the subject is the effect of language seen as socially imposed norms. It is the effect of differance , writing , the mark, the trace.
The social intervenes already within myself, before my exposure to other persons.
Derrida critiques Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Husserl on the primacy of corporeal intersubjectivity.
“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection. That is a motif to which Husserl remains particularly and fiercely faithful.
... at the moment when it is a matter of orienting Husserl and making him take the other into account in a more audacious way (the other who is originarily in me, or for me, and so forth)-at the expense of a Husserl who is more classical, more ego-centered, and so forth-there is a risk of the exact opposite resulting. One runs the risk of reconstituting an intuitionism of immediate access to the other, as originary as my access to my own most properly proper-and in one blow, doing without appresentation, indirection, Einfohlung, one also runs the risk of reappropriating the alterity of the other more surely, more blindly, or even more violently than ever. In this respect Husserl's cautious approach will always remain before us as a model of vigilance. (P.191)
Even between me and me, if I may put it this way, between my body and my body, there is no such
"original" contemporaneity, this "confusion" between the other's body and mine, that Merleau-Ponty believes he can recognize there, while pretending he is following Husserl-for example, when he follows the thread of the same analysis and writes: "The constitution of others does not come after that of the body [with which Husserl could agree, but without inferring what follows.-J. D.] ; others and my body are born together from the original ecstasy. The corporeality to which the primordial thing belongs is more corporeality in general; as the child's egocentricity, the 'solipsist layer' is both transitivity and confusion of self and other" (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 174; my emphasis-J. D.). This "confusion" would be as originary as the "primordial thing" and would make possible the substitutions (that we have noted are impossible) between the other and me, between our two bodies, in what Merleau-Ponty unhesitatingly terms "the absolute presence of origins. " In another example, he writes:
“The reason why I am able to understand the other person's body and existence "beginning with" the body proper, the reason why the com presence of my "consciousness" and my "body" is prolonged into the compresence of my self and the other person, is that the "I am able to" and the "the other person exists" belong here and now to the same world, that the body proper is a premonition of the other person, the Einfuhlung an echo of my incarnation, and that a flash of meaning makes them substitutable in the absolute presence of origins.” (Merleau-Ponry, Signs, p. I75)
And so, must we not think, and think otherwise (without objecting to it frontally and integrally) , that the said "same world" (if there is some such world, and if it is indeed necessary to account for it, and account for its "effect," as "sense of the world") is not and will never be the "same world"?(On Touching - Jean-Luc Nancy, p.193).
Quoting jas0n
Eugene Gendlin disagrees with you. Gendlin’s phenomenological approach to intersubjectivty has much in common with Heidegger’s, and also with Derrida.
Gallagher claims that:
“…intersubjective (social and cultural) factors already have an effect on our perception and understanding of the world, even in the immediacy of our embodied and instrumental copings with the environment.”
While Gendlin agrees with Gallagher and others that the experiencing body is inherently an environmental, and thus social interaction, he construes the nature of this intersubjectivity differently. The reciprocally causal temporality underpinning the embodied approaches
leads necessarily to the idea of intersubjectivity as an interdependent cobbling and co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the ‘joints' of such interactive bodily and social practices are simultaneously within my own subjectivity and
common to other participants in my community.
Socialization is seen as a direct introjection or
conditioning from the cultural environment, leaving personal experience with only a weak pragmatic self-consistency . This is what Gallagher calls primary intersubjectivity, after Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. By contrast , Gendlin’sgrounding of temporality produces an implicatory rather than a reciprocally causal account of relation between body and world. This imbues bodily sense making with a pragmatic integrity, intricacy and self-intimacy missing from other accounts of intersubjectivity.
Gendlin’s re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, like Heidegger’s Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making in a more fundamental process than that of socially distributed joint activity.
“Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.” “ It is not the body of perception that is structured by language. Nor is the body's interaction structured by culture and language alone. Rather, it is the body of interactional living in its environment. The body's interaction is always more intricate than language. It is after and with language, always again freshly ongoing and constellating this situation in the present.”
“To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out.”
“In living, our bodies generate, imply, and enact language and culture; but with and after those, our bodies imply (project, experience, sense, practice, demand . . .) more. What they imply is inherently interactional and social, but it is more precise and implies what has never as yet formed and happened.”
This may be so, and one can also go in the direction of 'art mysticism' and insist that concept is wrong way to grasp 'Reality' in the first place. On the other hand, it's a move away from a critical and exoteric inquiry/articulation and back into the darkness of intuition and the ineffable. I'm not immune to the charms of the aesthetic or even the mystical. As Nietzsche might say, it may be only those who are secretly sustained by 'dark forces' who can indulge in reckless and thorough criticism.
Well, sure, but this concept remains legible. I am criticizing a subjectivism that would construct the world from the idea of such a monologue. David Pearce treated the external world as an hypothesis which he mostly accepted, if memory serves, so that he presumably had to discuss within himself whether others existed. I think this is absurd, that such thinking is parasitic on a basic worldliness or with-others.
So this dialectical scheme is a kind of logic of becoming?
Quoting jas0n
But it is not external to the Dasein , the self-world relation, or Derrida’s differance, which is the temporalizing
differential that can be understood as the self’s relation to itself from one thing to moment. To say that the meaning of signs is ‘external’ to the subject is not to say that there is no pragmatic intimacy and belonging in meaning to say something. What I mean is always in a relation of a mattering, relevance and significance in relation to my ongoing concerns.
But by the same token there is also no meaning of signs absolutely ‘external’ to the subject. Hypostatizing the social simply swings the pendulum from an excessive subjectivism to an equally excessive empiricism.
So a little boy talks to himself before he talks to mommy and daddy?
He talks to them as the others to his self-othering monologue, a compounding of otherness. Of course , he will only discover their otherness by their failure to respond to him in as anticipatable a way as his body responds to himself.
Something like that is surely the case. But that is also too flowery language.
What does it mean for humans to ascend to a mathematical level of abstraction in semiosis? As science, it has resulted in us trying to de-subjectivise our inevitable first person point of view to recover the objective third person, or God's eye, point of view. Or better yet, following more insightful approaches like Nozick's Invariances, we seek to dissolve our highly particular view of the world in the mathematical acid of universal symmetry.
So to the degree the world is understood as physical - some blend of fundamental material accident and fundamental constraining structure - we can hold a mirror up to that. We can construct a metaphysics that sees the world in this way. And pragmatically proves itself as a correct view because it offers us control over all the physics involved.
Thus it is not about "knowledge" in some passive Cartesian representational sense. It is instead knowledge in its enactive and pragmatic sense - its modelling relation sense.
This how we get from semiosis of the actually modelled kind - the biosemiosis of life and mind - to recover some kind of semiosis as the pansemiosis by which the cosmos indeed brings itself into being.
One flaw in Peirce is he conflated the two - especially in his "transcendental" mid-phase of thought where he wrote his notorious comments about matter as effete mind, not making it clear enough whether this was pansemiotic metaphor or pansemiotic metaphysics.
It should be clear that I don't subscribe to the Cosmos as having its own model of itself in a biosemiotic encoded sense. And indeed, it is part of the very theory of biosemiosis that the very possibility of a symbolic code only gets born where physicalism reaches its own naturalistic limits.
A symbol has to be a physical mark, even if just a dot being printed, or a blank being left, on an infinite Turing tape. But the great trick of semiosis is that if you can afford to encode information in a way that seems physically costless, then you - as an organism - can escape all the strictures of the material world.
This is Pattee's epistemic cut. Life and mind arise because they can make physical marks - like a DNA codon or a new synaptic junction - which look perfectly meaningless to the physical world that they then sneakily turn out to regulate.
It costs the body as much to code for a nonsense protein as it does for some crucial enzyme. The world - as a realm of rate dependent dynamics - can't see anything different about the two molecules in terms of any material or structural physics. Both are equally lacking in meaning - and even lacking in terms of being counterfactually meaningless as well. The two molecules just don't fit any kind of signal~noise dichotomy of the kind that semiotics, as a science of meaning, would seek to apply.
But then the body does know the difference as the difference is precisely one it imposes on the physics. It says I could be producing molecular junk or molecular messages. You - the world - can't tell and so just have no say in the matter. I - the body - am thus absolutely free to throw proteins into the bubbling stew of metabolic action and see what sticks as the best evolutionary choice.
Evolution doesn't just happen to organisms. They invent the binary distinction of sense~nonsense so as to make themselves evolvable as something completely new - a structure of rate independent information - imposed on rate dependent dynamics of the merely physicalist world.
So yes, the human story has reached the point where it holds up a mirror to the physicalism of the real world. But it can only do that by adding itself as a further trick - the trick of semiotic mechanism - which the physical world does not appear to contain and which is only present because the physical world in fact has strict limits.
The physical world is capable of abolishing all entropic gradients. But it can't even see the negentropy that is the informal structure that an organism accumulates so as to have its own parasitic existence on this world.
It's a splendid irony. A form of transcendence in that a model of the world must transcend that world. And yet the books get balance as that brief escaped from entropy is then paid back to the world with interest. Life and mind earn their way in the cracks of existence by breaking down accidental barriers to maximum entropy - like the way industrialised humans are taking half a billion years worth of buried carbon, slowly concentrated into rich lodes of coal and petroleum, and burning the bulk of it in a 200 year party.
So the answer to your question is that there is further recursion in the physicalist tale as it now has to add the new thing that is life and mind. The mirror we hold up would show the Comos the self that is also now the one with us in it - the informational degrees of freedom that its laws of thermodynamics could never forbid, but which also didn't in any immediately obvious way seem to require.
It is only because entropification must be achieved in any way possible - and life and mind were the one further way possible - that we can be considered part of the natural order.
Quoting jas0n
This is the epistemic cut issue. As I previously said, the central trick of semiosis is that a sign is really - as Pattee makes clear - a switch. And it is then easy to see the connection as well as the cut. A mechanical switch is both a logical thing and a physical thing. It has a foot on both sides of the divide.
So that fact puts a halt to the homuncular regress. The two worlds - of entropy and information - are bridged semiotically at the scale of your smallest possible physical switches.
And that is what the biophysics of the past decade has confirmed. All life and mind is based on the ability of proteins - molecular structure - to ratchet the quasi-classical nanoscale of organic chemistry.
The nanoscale is the tipping point where all the key physical forces converge to have the same scale. It is the "edge of chaos" or zone of criticality. In material terms, it exhibits the maximum thermal instability.
And in being peak material instability - halfway between the quantum and the classical - it is also the most tippable state. Biological information can get in there and tilt the entropic odds in its own favour.
But all this is extremely new science. Even in biophysics, the fact is still sinking in.
Quoting jas0n
Yep. But only doing due diligence. :grin:
Generally post-modernism is the backlash against its own structuralist past. It wants to kill the part of itself that was valuable. It got tangled up in Romanticism, Plurality and Idealism in likewise wanting to distinguish itself from Enlightenment rationalism and the hierarchical views of Natural Philosophy.
As philosophy, it is a self-parodying mess. Yet of course, take any text in isolation and it often says something that could be seen as reasonable and obvious.
So between AP and Continentalism, I stick to Pragmatism as the middle path that offers the most coherence.
Agreed! Call it an overcorrection. I have toyed with denying qualia, not because I don't have the usual intuitions, but because these intuitions are contingently blocking inquiry.
I think we both need to be careful to distinguish between body and 'symbolic' ego. At times I've preferred an 'external' view, watching bodies learn to emit the token 'I' appropriately. A body is trained to emit tokens interpreted as a self-description internal realm. A body is trained that such a narrative features a single protagonist. This perspective, admittedly one among others, takes 'culture'-coordinated bodies navigating a shared world as primary.
Plausible but vague and hard to do anything with. Something is gestured at. A Romantic poet might talk of the chains of rigid conceptuality scraping the incomputable flesh of a most elusive goddess.
That's math, though, a game of symbols, a generalization of chess, one might say. One can be ultra-precise in this limited domain.
"limited domain"? Perhaps you're on the mark, but, from personal experience (haven't had much of that to be frank), I'd say mathematizing issues (transforming it into a mathematical one) goes a long way towards resolving them.
Science is math, if not it can't be a science (physics envy).
That said, it's still unclear to me how and where Wittgenstein is relevant vis-à-vis science. I've stumbled upon a very basic point of contention (ostensive definitions), but science is known for stipulative, operational and theoretical definitions. I'm not sure how all that relates to Wittgenstein-Popper in re science-philosophy.
This I do understand, and it was your posts on this site that brought this to my attention.
ideaQuoting apokrisis
This makes sense too. I think I grok the basics of dissipated structure.
Quoting apokrisis
OK, 'smallest possible' is a new thing I hadn't considered before.
Quoting apokrisis
I've focused on Derrida as he follows the logic of Saussure. The signifier/signified is an echo/version of the physical/mental distinction. Derrida (as you may know) destabilizes this dichotomy. Signifiers refer to still other signifiers (not a signified made of pure thought-stuff that shines for/as the ghost in the machine.) I got into Saussure because of Derrida, and I was impressed by how much was already there in Saussure (the systematically or interdependence of signs for their meaning and the idea that language/'thoughtsound' is 'form not substance'.) The points you made in the definition thread were quite Derridean, or at least according to my interest/understanding of D. The life of language depends on a continuous recontextualization of signs that imposes the toll of an ineradicable ambiguity. To be sure, differences that make no (practical) difference can be ignored.
Yes. Hence the success and prestige of science/engineering. Math is brilliantly stupid.
Quoting Agent Smith
In On Certainty you can find passages suggesting something like Popper's swamp. If I want to check whether a meter reads 35 kilograms, I have to trust my eyes, trust my ability to read numbers, etc. There's a deep layer of unnoticed mostly automatic skill that we mostly don't bother to question. Note that we don't have to agree whether the world is 'really' mind or matter or neither or both or whatever...to launch satellites and facetime a nephew in Spain. The 'foundation' works because we stick to relatively uncontroversial questions like 'did the rock weigh 20 kg?' without getting bogged down in semantics. As practical creatures, we only have so much time for the pleasures and torments of metaphysics.
One point that trips people up is W's claim that belief makes doubt possible. The first quote is how I usually understand this. I trust the meaning of my language as I express my doubt. I trust that I will be heard.
:lol: Explain yourself.
In my humble opinion, Wittgenstein sets the bar too high. As the title of his book, On Certainty, it becomes clear that he's critiquing, what he probably believes is, the impossible standards of philosophy (impossible in the sense too rigid, lacking flexibility, exacting, stringent, you get the idea).
This, mayhaps, isn't Wittgenstein, but rather other philosophers who put a premium on precision in re words, which, as per Wittgenstein, boils down to getting a fix on the essence of words which he claims is an illusion.
Mind you, I've never really understood Wittgenstein. He feels wrong and so I've decided to skip him in my qyest to understand philosophy.
Most language is too meaningful, too suggestive, explosively untamed. It needs context, context, context. Philosophy still doesn't know what it means by 'meaning.' But (practical) math requires much less context and yet delivers far more clarity. Math is 'hard' because...most people find it too boring for the necessary concentration ? Or they drag in too much meaning and can't just see it as a calculus? I think it's harder to understand Hegel or Derrida or Wittgenstein than to learn calculus. I don't claim to have mastered any of those thinkers. The dialogue is endless.
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it. He offers no system. He pops lots of balloons. He demonstrates an approach to philosophy via examples. The battle is against knee-jerk obedience to something like unnoticed metaphors in ordinary language. But that's one attempt among others to find a theory or main idea in the fog....
Mathematics is overrated then, oui? I don't know how to respond to that, math being my hobby and all.
I can say this though: Mathematics helps reduce vagueness (Wittgenstein's family resemblance is ultimately that, oui?).
As for context, I've oft repeated that Wittgenstein hasn't said anything new and I fail to see why all this fuss about his so-called language games. If you disagree you need to tell us how contexts differ from language games. Are you up to the task?
I love math. It's my job. I recommend reading Cantor's work directly, if you are up to the challenge. It's not very formal. I think he trusted that he was working with universal intuitions. His ideas on the order types of sets inspired me to develop a new construction of the real numbers. This just means coming up with a system that satisfies certain criteria. I think of math as (among other things) a sort of 'clay' with which to make 'sculptures.' I've made cryptosystems, new types of neural networks...fun stuff.
Quoting Agent Smith
I don't find the 'language games' spiel all that exciting myself. I do think Wittgenstein is great though. I blend him with Heidegger and Derrida and others. Instead of games, I'd stress how we tend to be imprisoned by metaphors/pictures that constrain our thinking 'invisibly.' These 'pictures' are knee-jerk automatic framings of a situation inherited from the past. Think of culture mistaken for nature, the way we happen to do things mistaken for the way things must be done. If such pictures were 'conscious' or on the 'surface,' it'd be trivial to critique them. The pictures/metaphors/framings I'm talking about dominate/instruct/mislead the critique/discussion of more obvious 'pictures.' Note that I'm emphasizing the metaphoricity of thinking in all of this, flies in bottles, shadow-watchers in caves, Neo in The Matrix,... Some have claimed that our technical/abstract terms are just dead metaphors, their blood having been drained till they are imageless.
That is already contained in Peircean semiotics.
Yes, that is another issue with PoMo. When it was structuralist, it was dyadic Saussurean semiosis it went for and not Peircean triadic semiosis.
But then a closer examination of Saussure says he was actually so much a Saussurean either. He suffered the usual over simplification. :smile:
It’s been a long while since I read any Derrida. And for me, I didn’t feel I was learning anything new at the time. The points were already familiar from social constructionism and Vygotskian psychology.
As for metaphors, I have nothing against their use - it makes for interesting reading, adds zest to what otherwise would be a dull and boring interaction among ourselves to say nothing of how it makes certain subjects/topics more relatable, oui?
How would you have it? Minus the metaphors would you even grasp the basics (of any subject)? It's hard to say how much of culture is mistaken for nature: people seem to call it as they see it, in my humble opinion. If a known cultural pattern is apposite, I see no harm in using it to make sense of nature. Also, I feel there isn't that much of a difference between culture and nature - each seems to inform the other until they blend to the point of being an inseparable whole/unity - where does culture begin and where does nature end?
Wittgenstein, does he use a lot of metaphors in his work? I haven't been able to get my hands on his later book (Philosophical Analysis or something).
:up: Did we extract the essence therein or was all of it just a waste of our time?
I have a collection of his essays. I've glanced at his semiotics. If there's a single best book on this in particular, let me know. Peirce seems to be dispersed.
Quoting apokrisis
I'll look into the difference, but if you feel like trying to summarize, I'll be glad to read it. Dyadic plays into the rest of Western philosophy, which is not necessarily good but of course familiar.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm a fan of the guy. He's quite radical. I know that I initially gave Derrida too much credit that belonged to Saussure. Still, it matters that Derrida emphasizes the vague, default prejudice of the proximity of crystalline and luminous signified and some kind of subject. Phonocentrism also seemed like a legitimate target along these lines. Saussure did prioritize speech as the 'real' aspect of language. Derrida emphasized the independence of the medium, that it was all 'like writing' in the 'bad' way, not backed up by a consciousness in complete possession of its meaning, open always to a recontextualization that could shift the entire system of signs (some more than others, of course.) Wittgenstein's beetle analogy makes a similar point in a different tone and style. (I through in my interpretation for context that might help you help me understand Peirce better.)
Did you check this?
I think of 'toy' languages, like the one where the carpenter can only say 'hammer' and 'nail' to his helper, and the helper hands what is requested.
Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. In the example above, there is a simple context (two dudes working together to build something.) But context is a broader concept, it seems to me.
What's that? I mean what's oversimplification? So simple that it fails to give an accurate account? Childish stick figures?
I'm sure your fine without him. But his emphasis on difference and early concern with semiology and 'grammatology' seemed relevant. He definitely blurs/troubles the mental/physical distinction (and actually every distinction, aiming as he does at their condition of possibility.)
I think you underestimate their force and prevalence. Lakoff, Hofstadter, Wittgenstein. Folks have been trying to tell us that we think in pictures, often without realizing it. See what I mean? (With your inner eye.) Do you grasp what I'm saying? (With your intellectual hand?).
How can abstract thoughts get themselves established in the first place?
We think in pictures? Perhaps, but still in the dark about how.
All I can tell you is this. Once rationality or to be precise, logic, enters the picture, semantics is no longer part of the game. Logic has its own syntax and that's all that matters. Validity, as you'll recall, is all about form, the content is of zero significance. When I think logically, it's all syntax and no semantics.
Ergo, I feel justified to say, Wittgenstein is irrelevant to philosophy as it's wholly a logical exercise. It doesn't matter what I think p or q means so long as we both agree that modus ponens holds like so:
1. If p then q
2. p
Ergo
3. q
If the argument above makes sense to me with what I substiute for p and q, is it the same for you with your own assignments for p and q, their specific values?
:confused:
I'd say....no. The basics are metaphors, frameworks, 'big pictures.'
Quoting Agent Smith
A really easy example (if you are an atheist) is people sincerely burning other people to save their souls at the cost of their bodies. Or people living in terror of hellfire, etc. From the 'outside,' this is superstition (culture). From the inside, God and hell are very important parts of the world, if admittedly hidden away somehow (nature, though not the nature of godless 'scientism.')
I think you accidentally made a funny, unless you meant to do that....
So you get a machine for cranking out tautologies, or for checking formal proofs. This is on the level of programming a computer to check for checkmate on a chess board. Clear, yes, but at the cost of saying nothing at all. The life of the signs that matter is out there in the world. I like Chess, but even that is fun because there's the drama of another tricky human on the other side, or because of time pressure, or the aesthetic aspect.
I spent years writing mathematical proofs (it was my job), and it probably helped me as much as anything else to experience just how sloppy and ambiguous ordinary language is.
Well I entirely disagree, but it's as you like.
Like I said, I'm not terribly excited by the language games game. I could squeeze some stuff out, but I'm more interested in the way the past haunts a future that haunts the present.
Some quotes on the metaphor issue:
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A metaphysical sentence is always symbolical and mythical. The sentence “The soul owns God to the extent, in which it takes share of the Absolute.” does not contain any signs, only symbols whose colourfulness and evocative power were erased. With some phantasy it can be said instead: “The breath is seated on the shining one” (God) “in the bushel” (to the extent) “of the part it takes” (in which it takes share) “in what is already loosed (the Absolute),” and elaborate it metaphorically even more: “He whose breath is a sign of life, man, that is, will find a place in the divine fire, source and home of life, and this place will be meted out to him according to the virtue that has been given him of sending abroad this warm breath, this little invisible soul, across the free expanse.” Even at this point we would not arrive at the original figures of speech, though our fantasy would read as an old Vedic hymn. From this, says France, follows that metaphysicians rub the colours from the old myths and fables, and are their collectors. They cultivate white (colourless) [clear] mythology.
...
First and foremost, there are no originary concepts. All of them are tropes, starting with the word arch? – origin and principle, that is, governing rule, control. The value of the “basis”, “base”, “ground” corresponds to our wish to stand on a firm ground.
...
The words for comprehending and conceiving (fassen, begreifen), says Hegel, have a totally sensuous contents that is substituted by spiritual meaning. The sensuous words are becoming spiritual in the process of their use.
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Lakoff stresses how bodily out metaphors are. Mammals.
Thought you might like to glance at Derrida on Peirce in Of Grammatology.
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In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated. In his termi nology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol :
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, par ticularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs. These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo.
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies. The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It must be recognized that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of "the arbitrariness of the sign") is rooted in the nonsymbolic, in an anterior and related order of signification: "Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs." But these roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play: "So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo."
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to sign. No ground of nonsignification --understood as insignificance or an intuition of a present truth --- stretches out to give it foundation under the play and the coming into being of signs.
...
Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains therefore the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself ( truth ). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to "reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs." According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign." There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen is not to be proper, that is to say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius). The represented is always already a representamen.
Also, in case you've never sampled it, Kojeve's Hegel.
Indeed, we still seem to be in the grips of such metaphors if they are that to begin with.
Do you mean to recommend that we abandon this figurative language? How will that advance our cause which is to comprehend the universe and ourselves? If we discard all these familiar modes of expression, we're left with absolutely nothing! Then, perhaps, we can think in pictures, wordless images.
Intriguingly, language did begin as pictures (pictography): the letter "A" is actually a sketch of an ox (head). You'll have to invert "A" to notice that. Similarly the letter "w" is supposed to capture the waves on/in water or something like that.
Only later did language evolve to become what it is - abstract sound-based symbolism. Why? Probably because it made language more versatile, complex enough to express ideas and describe the world. So, when I write "A", I ignore the ox noggin that it actually is, and latch onto, instinctively as it were, to what it is now (a certain sound) and what meaning it has been ascribed, if any.
What about how logic is semantics-independent? The form of valid arguments use variables (p, q, r, etc.) that can be replaced with actual propositions with constituent concepts/words (constants).
Modus Ponens
1. If p then q
2. p
Ergo
3. q
Suppose an argument about God:
Argument X
1. If God exists then God intervenes (in human affairs)
2. God exists
Ergo,
3. God intervenes
If you're a theist, the argument will make sense to you (the conditional, statement 1 in both arguments). However, if a deist, statement 1, the conditional, is false.
In other words, homing in on the actual meaning of "God" is a matter of logic. If disagreements pop up, one reason could different meanings for the same word. We can then analyze the argument and reconstruct the definition which one's interlocutor is employing.
Also, logic doesn't care about semantics, just make sure you're consistent in usage of words and it's smooth sailing.
To put it simply, we can altogether ignore semantics just so long as you get the grammar/syntax of logic correct. In other words, Wittgenstein, whose philosophy is semantics-oriented, is taken out of the equation as it were. :grin:
No. That's like a fish giving up water. We think metaphorically, maybe only metaphorically. The point is to not be trapped unwittingly in a metaphor.
Philosophers (and regular folks) still don't agree what 'God' means, what 'exist' means, what 'intervene' means (at least in this context), and of course what 'mean' 'means.' Meaning is social and therefore ambiguous. We mostly ignore this, because we mostly stick to practical talk. Start talking religion and politics and things get ugly. Somehow the other fellow just doesn't 'see' it (the folly of his ways, his bad logic, etc.)
Well this might not be so easy....
Quoting Agent Smith
IMO, He's taken out of the equation only when a person isn't interested in the problem of meaning, doesn't 'feel' it maybe. I think it's people who long for clarity that'll notice how hard it is not to spit fog and try to figure out why. The tantalizing fantasy is the ghost in machine who actually knows what he's talking about: sure, he might have trouble 'finding the right words' for it when talking to others, but he at least knows what he's trying to say 'directly.' He can see his beetle, which is the signified face of a sign understood as only requiring a signifying 'vessel' as a kind of jetpack to shoot across the air into the cogito-soul-ghost of the other, who'll hopefully dial up the same pure content. This is the nomenclature fantasy which assumes similar mental content, as if all share in the mind of a kind of language god, or come equipped with same thought crystals that just need labels (soundmark conventions) attached. This 'pure content' is the unquestioned metaphor that dominates lots of philosophical and 'sub-philosophical' talk about meaning and consciousness. But for practical purposes, it doesn't really matter. A person can have a primitive theory of meaning and still be very good at talking with people. There's a big difference between a mostly automatic skill and dialectically developed account of that skill.
You want me to eat the cake and have it too. :grin: I like that although you have my sympathies, having painted yourself into a corner like that. That's what happens to all philosophers in the end. They tend to exit one cage only to walk into another. My personal point of view; could be way off the mark. The question is am I?
Quoting jas0n
Don't conflate disagreement with problems with meaning. Indeed, differences in definition is a cause of many quarrels, but then to oversimplify it as being only a definitional issue is not, in my humble opinion, a very sensible thing to do.
I have my concepts, my own logic, and I can understand them within the constraints and freedom therein present. You can't tell me I'm confused and nor can I say the same thing about you, oui?
I don't mean definitions, which humorously supports my point. You 'automatically' (it seems) read meaning in terms of definition, but definitions are relatively artificial. No one could use a dictionary if they weren't already embedded in the living language.
Quoting Agent Smith
On a personal level, of course I respect your freedom. Philosophically speaking, I think the point is to challenge apparent confusion/misunderstanding and try to resolve it. A thoroughgoing relativism/subjectivism (which is where that thinking seems to lead) ends up being sad and boring. Go back to simple things, like the boy who cried wolf. Or the danger in mistaking correlation for causation. Then's there's our deeper goals. What if people want to be understood? To be respected as trustworthy interpreters of a shared situation? Or just to be amusing by transcending cliché? Making a good joke. Point being that we do care about being perceived as confused, credulous, biased, or predictable, etc. We are networked beings. We depend on one another's intellectual virtues (and of course friendly intentions.)
I don't think anyone ever gets out of all the cages they are in. But this cage metaphor might suggest that cages are always bad. It's more like a mass of automatic habit that simultaneously helps us survive and opposes innovation. We inherit dead metaphors because they worked pretty well for previous generations. Perhaps a philosopher is someone who's invested in understanding and escaping from a certain kind of linguistic cage (and they'd only understand their 'game' this way as one of its later moves).
A relevant quote:
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...Gadamer also takes issue directly with this view of prejudice and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our prejudices are themselves what open us up to what is to be understood. In this way Gadamer can be seen as attempting to retrieve a positive conception of prejudice (German Vorurteil) that goes back to the meaning of the term as literally a pre-judgment (from the Latin prae-judicium) that was lost during the Renaissance. In Truth and Method, Gadamer redeploys the notion of our prior hermeneutical situatedness as it is worked out in more particular fashion in Heidegger’s Being and Time (first published in 1927) in terms of the ‘fore-structures’ of understanding, that is, in terms of the anticipatory structures that allow what is to be interpreted or understood to be grasped in a preliminary fashion. The fact that understanding operates by means of such anticipatory structures means that understanding always involves what Gadamer terms the ‘anticipation of completeness’—it always involves the revisable presupposition that what is to be understood constitutes something that is understandable, that is, something that is constituted as a coherent, and therefore meaningful, whole.
...
In this respect, all interpretation, even of the past, is necessarily ‘prejudgmental’ in the sense that it is always oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the dialogue with the matter at issue. Here, of course, there is a further connection with the Aristotelian emphasis on the practical—not only is understanding a matter of the application of something like ‘practical wisdom’, but it is also always determined by the practical context out of which it arises.
The prejudicial character of understanding means that, whenever we understand, we are involved in a dialogue that encompasses both our own self-understanding and our understanding of the matter at issue. In the dialogue of understanding our prejudices come to the fore, both inasmuch as they play a crucial role in opening up what is to be understood, and inasmuch as they themselves become evident in that process.As our prejudices thereby become apparent to us, so they can also become the focus of questioning in their own turn.
...
Gadamer thus advances a view of understanding that rejects the idea of understanding as achieved through gaining access to some inner realm of subjective meaning. Moreover, since understanding is an ongoing process, rather than something that is ever completed, so he also rejects the idea that there is any final determinacy to understanding.
...
Conversation always takes place in language and similarly Gadamer views understanding as always linguistically mediated. Since both conversation and understanding involve coming to an agreement, so Gadamer argues that all understanding involves something like a common language, albeit a common language that is itself formed in the process of understanding itself. In this sense, all understanding is, according to Gadamer, interpretative, and, insofar as all interpretation involves the exchange between the familiar and the alien, so all interpretation is also translative.
...
We cannot go back ‘behind’ understanding, since to do so would be to suppose that there was a mode of intelligibility that was prior to understanding. Hermeneutics thus turns out to be universal, not merely in regard to knowledge, whether in the ‘human sciences’ or elsewhere, but to all understanding and, indeed, to philosophy itself. Philosophy is, in its essence, hermeneutics.
////////////////////////////////
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
Each word has a form of life that maybe private (enough) to be incomprehensible to an other. So, if we're to avoid the pitfall of talking past each other, we must come to an agreement as to what the words we use mean, but then that's impossible for it seems the notion of private languages applies also to groups/socieites/tribes if you will.
It's possible that you and your favorite philosophers, some of whom you mention by name, could be participants in a language game I'm not familiar with. The same applies to you however, I'm playing my own language game, a simple one in all likelihood but still one that'll you have to work out for yourself, assuming you feel that's worthwhile.
As for me, I'm trying my level best to get an idea of what you're trying to say here. Do you mean, à la Wittgenstein, that language is inadequate for philosophy? If yes, why make all this effort to convey your thoughts? If no, why bring up Wittgenstein at all? :chin:
Coming to what I said about logic, semantics is irrelevant. If so, Wittgenstein is too, oui? I don't need to know the meaning of words to do philosophy, a rational/logical enterprise, so long as I'm consistent, ja? P and Q in [math]P \to Q[/math] must mean the same thing as in another statement like [math]P \land Q[/math] in the same argument. Note here that P and Q can be anything at all - semantics is not an issue.
We see the importance of the future defining our present in Heidegger, too. Heidegger describes the proposition ‘S is P’ as ‘seeing something as something’. He calls this the ‘as’ structure and it is the fundamental basis of perception, cognition , affectivity and theoretical knowledge.
“...in interpretatively addressing something as something, one addresses the thing encountered against the background of a more or less explicit acquaintance with it: as a tool as suitable for this or that, etc.
The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act.”
In experiencing something as something, Dasein comes back to its having been from its future, which is to say, it interprets a global context of relevance via the ‘as’ structure. In so doing, it “takes apart’ the relation between what it encounters and a previous instance of it by coming back to it from a fresh context of relevance. Seeing something as something makes sense of what
is encountered in a new way, on the basis of a freshly modified totality of relevance. It is produced rather than discovered.
"The essence of something is not at all to be discovered simply like a fact; on the contrary, it must be brought forth. To bring forth is a kind of making, and so there resides in all grasping and positing of the essence something creative…. To bring forth means to bring out into the light, to bring something in sight which was up to then not seen at all, and specifically such that the seeing of it is not simply a gaping at something already lying there but a seeing which, in seeing, first brings forth
what is to be seen, i.e., a productive seeing. "
How does a body know what is emitted ‘appropriately’? Via social reinforcement , shaping, conditioning? How is it that each of us emit what is socially ‘appropriate’ in unique ways , with unique senses that doesn’t simply correspond to the ‘ norm’ but contributes its own variation on the ‘norm’? Isn’t a social ‘norm’, ‘convention’, ‘shared practice’ merely an abstraction derived from what is in fact always ways of sense-making unique to individuals who particulate in those ‘shared’ spaces? Doesn’t this make the ‘shared’ space derivative and the personalistic space primary?
Isnt what you are describing precisely Heidegger’s concept of Das Man of average eveydayness , where we all share the same appropriate meanings?
There is nothing ineffable and mystical here. It’s stating a fundamental concept common to Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty , Derrida , enactive embodied approaches in cognitive science and Pragmatism that when we intend a meaning we intend beyond what we intend. Cognition is fundamentally anticipative.
This squares with what I've learned. The future haunts the present in terms of the past, or something like that.
Yes and others have described something similar in terms of analogical/metaphorical, embodied cognition. I think they're right.
Quoting Joshs
I agree with Dreyfus that we learn how to see/use a fork or a chair as 'one' does. The background is part of the 'who of everyday Dasein.' This quote also hints toward the Wittgenstein idea of the domination of unconscious/automatic pictures that tacitly dominate and otherwise explicit interpretation.
Yes.
Quoting Joshs
The norm is blurry and self-updating. Some variations become more common, others fade out. One metaphor here is that culture (the one) is a distributed operating system. No one has/is the official version. Creativity is constant. But creativity would be unintelligible without some kind of average background. From my POV, we never know exactly what we mean. We are forced to play jazz, thrown into a novelty only partially tamed by social habit, contributing to that novelty ourself despite our best efforts to conform. One does not have to try to be unique. One even struggles against this uniqueness, perhaps just in this way becoming most valuably unique.
I guess this is the heart of the structuralism, the laws of thermodynamics and entropy. What does such a structure entail? If not particles then certainly objective relations of forces that are describable through geometry and other forms of mathematics. So this structuralism points to objective , mathematizable properties and attributes. Quite specific and quite powerful. It’s like a specifically shaped piece of a puzzle (of course we’re not talking about an object but a principle guiding a multi-dimensional system of relations) that constrains and organizes the whole. It could be otherwise but it s not . It’s thermodynamics and entropy, and that means that our most personal and intimate experience is most fully understood via this fundamental ‘puzzle piece’.
Quoting apokrisis
Because of its primordially as objective structural source and center , everything else in the world, including all of human history , can be judged by way of correctness and conformity relative to this constraining structural center, where and how things have gone right or wrong.
Quoting apokrisis
The semiotic structuralism of Thermodynamics and entropy may not be an atomistic machine but it is still a RubeGoldberg-like machine to the extent that it claims to stand outside of time to reveal the whole story rather than determining and redetermining history from out of the here and now.
Quoting apokrisis
Can’t get around the laws of thermodynamics and entropy and all of our personal hopes and dreams and feelings are beholden to these. Sounds a bit totalizing to me.
I dunno. I prefer to think history is reinvented every moment. But then I’ve never been very good at obeying laws, even the laws of thermodynamics.
I don't know if it makes a big difference to say one is prior to the other, but the symbolic/linguistic ego as opposed to the separate body looks like part of the software to me. If you want to talk about culture as 'really' just being the performance of bodies, I guess you can. If a room is dancing the Charleston, though, you might want to focus on the form of the dance, 'imperfectly' realized by each dancer. If you allow the dance to slowly mutate, then you have a metaphor for culture.
I agree.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#LinUnd
To do so would require that we use words, yes? Hence the hopelessness of starting from scratch. And what works in math won't work in philosophy. 'Language is received like the law,' and meaning evolves historically.
Quoting Agent Smith
One way to grok Wittgenstein is as language trying to climb out of its own stupidity or automatism, as a snake trying to shed its own skin. In the same way a developing mind is trying to slide out of its own confusion and prejudice, but it can't help but relying on the little it knows as it finds its way about. 'Thought' is trying to figure out its own laws, its own frailties, struggling toward clarity and mastery, illuminating its own darkness Socratically.
Why try ? Lots of motives. Among others, I get a deep pleasure from doing philosophy, almost like playing on a conceptual saxophone (I often have Coltrane playing beside me as I write.) Whether I'm good, bad, or average....I feel as if I was born to do philosophy, like this infinite quest is the point...at least for my personality type. On the road again, toward a slightly more comprehensive and stylish understanding of reality, toward that point at infinity, a limit never attained.
Yeah, this is cultural relativism. You can think of each tribe as having a generic personality and the world as a room full of these 'people' who never exactly understand one another. Interpretation/translation is an infinite process.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/herder/#PhilLangLangThouMean
I’m not sure what a ‘body’ is in general. I get that in this example ‘body’ is point of view. I like
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body of embodiment as a gestalt figure-ground ensemble.
I wouldnt say the form of the dance is ‘imperfectly’ realized. by each participant. One would only say that if one already took for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm. But if , as I am arguing , there are only ever individual interpretations of the norm or
standard, then there as many Charlestons as there dancers of it. Which isn’t to say that one cannot aim to improve one’s performance of the dance, only that the standard one is aiming for is still one’s own version of the ‘correct’ Charleston.
You have a dangerous metaphor for culture of
you assume that the mutation of the dance need not be understood from the point of view of each dancer. Otherwise you will fail to understand why there are so many micro-cultures within a larger culture , and why a the red states and the blue states are at war even though they are all supposedly part of the same larger 21st century western dance.
I like psychologist George Kelly’s view of shared culture.
In Kelly's approach, even when someone lives in a culture which is tightly conformist, one neither passively absorbs, nor jointly negotiates the normative practices of that culture, but validates one's own construction of the world using the resources of that culture.
“Perhaps we can see that it is not so much that the culture has forced conformity upon him as it is that his validational material is cast in terms of the similarities and contrasts offered within and between segments of his culture. “ (Kelly 1955, p. 93).
“It may be difficult to follow this notion of culture as a validational system of events. And it may be even more difficult to reconcile with the idea of cultural control what we have said about man not being the victim of his biography. The cultural control we see is one which is within the client's own construct system and it is imposed upon him only in the sense that it limits the kinds of evidence at his disposal. How he handles this evidence is his own affair, and clients manage it in a tremendous variety of ways.”
One can see how the ‘tremendous variety of ways' that participants are capable of interpreting the ‘same' cultural milieu makes any attempt to apply a group -centered account of social understanding pointless.
Kelly(1955) says: “You can say [a person] is what he is because of his cultural context. This is to say that the environment assigns him his role, makes him good or bad by contrast, appropriates him to itself, and, indeed, his whole existence makes sense only in terms of his relationship to the times and the culture. This is not personal construct theory...”
Kelly (1955) opposes personal construct theory to perspectives which see a person “helplessly suspended in his culture, and is swept along with the tides of social change”.
“....no psychologist, I think, is all that he might be until he has undertaken to join the child's most audacious venture beyond the frontiers of social conventions and to share its most unexpected outcomes.”
It is true that each party's participation in interaction changes the other's way of being, but the question is whether there is not an underlying thematic consistency that is maintained in each person throughout all their interactions , a self-consistency that resists being usurped by a larger self-other ‘system'. For Kelly a mutuality, fusion, jointness cannot be assumed simply because each party is in responsive communication with the other. One party can be affected by the interaction by succeeding in subsuming the other's perspective and as a result feeling an intimate and empathetic bond with the other. At the same time, in the same ‘joint' encounter, the other party may become more and more alienated from the first , having failed to subsume the first party's way of thinking and finding the first party to be angering, upsetting and threatening.
In my dealings with other persons, I would be able to discern a thread of continuity organizing their participation in dialogue with me, dictating the manner and extent to which I can be said to influence their thinking and they mine. My thinking can not properly be seen as `determined' by his response, and his ideas are not simply `shaped' by my contribution to our correspondence. The extent to which I could be said to be embedded within a particular set of cultural practices would be a function of how closely other persons I encounter resonate with my own ongoing experiential process. I can only shape my action to fit socially legitimate goals or permitted institutionalized forms to the extent that those goals or forms are already implicated in my ongoing experiential movement. Even then, what is implicated for me is not `the' social forms, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which are unique to the organizational structure of my ways of thinking; what I perceive as socially `permitted' rhetorical argumentation is already stylistically distinctive in relation to what other participants perceive as permitted. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history, even when they believe that in moving forward in life their behavior is guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their community.
In a way, yes, but the point of a single name is to indicate an abstraction.
Quoting Joshs
You are trying to make a point using logic, yes? That feels like taking 'for granted the correctness and primacy of a standard or norm.'
Quoting Joshs
I think you are projecting or worrying too much about political ramifications. To put it playfully, I know that we are all irreducible non-fungible snowflakes. But rational inquiry (philosophy, science) seeks for some kind of truth about our shared situation. To deny this is to demonstrate it, for what can such a denial mean if it does not pretend toward the truth of our shared situation. Metaphysical attempts to specify this vague truthy stuff and this vague shared situation end up containing contradictions and possibly ineradicable ambiguities. One of my pet theories (inspired by Peirce and others) is that our signs have only as much 'precision' or 'resolution' as we have needed them to have for practical purposes. I think of how rich the 'concept' of 'the world' is in ordinary language. Or take 'truth' or 'real'. We are never done trying to figure out what we mean by these marks. What 'meaning' means is itself elusive.
This is my model of the aim and capability of science. It is a relativistic pragmatist way to keep a certain notion of progress without assuming a ‘real’ world independent of our construals of the world.
In my view , the aim of truth is anticipative
consistency. As human beings we are always already in motion( experimental not physical ). So it’s not about nailing down any unchangeable facts but doing our best to construe events such that the next minute’s changes appear inferentially compatible with the previous. We could then say this is teleological, that over time our revised constructions of the world produce anticipations that allow us to anticipate events as more and more intricately, multidimensionally and assimlatively consistent with our precious knowledge. Note her that this is not a mere mirroring of intransigent external
world but a continually refashioning of the world in more an more self-consistent ways. The way the world appears is always exquisitely responsive to the ways we construe it. So the only assumption being made here about some a priori nature of reality is the at it is endlessly amenable to reconstruction in more and more intimate ways.
I agree with this constant experimentation (usually against a background of repetition.) This 'construal' is not so badly approximated by 'nailing down unchangeable facts.' The point of finding enduring structure is to exploit it in the future.
Quoting Joshs
A sophisticated view. The 'real world' lingers here perhaps as the possibility of a surprise. We might ask why we must anticipate, and look for the source of our care. We are mammals that evolved from simpler less-anticipative forms of life.
Quoting Joshs
I can related, but I note that a normed critical discourse that strives toward consensus seems to be implied.
Quoting Joshs
Reasonable. This downplays the everyday difference between 'facts' and 'interpretations.' I mean to say that the 'top layer' (philosophical blah blah ) is more amenable than daily practical talk (talk of hands and eyes and ears and trucks and puppies.)
This isnt formal logic. It is the logic of construing not conceptualization in the traditional sense of the term. The difference is that the presuppositions that are in play in the above paragraph aren’t assumed to be sitting there statically in some mental conceptual file, to be drawn on and placed within a propositional logical form. Instead, the presuppositions (imperfection implies a standard or norm) are formed afresh, and only mean what they mean within the specific context of the argument I am presenting to you. They work freshly within the current context of meaning. Do I believe these freshly working constructs are ‘correct’ or the ‘norm’? They are normative in that they are a way of organizing new events on the basis of likeness with respect to previous events. That is, they allow me to recognize patterns within events. But the constructs which organize events into such patterns only retain their ‘primacy’ to the extent that new events dont invalidate them. That is to say , as long as they retain their effectiveness in anticipating new events. So the world tells me when my constructs are valid or invalid. But this ‘world’ that fits or doesn’t fit my expectations is world that comes already pre-interpreted by me It is my version of the world that can reward or disappoint me. So there is a radical circularity here, what I believe Heidegger called the hermeneutic circle.
Is this the statement of an unchangeable fact?
I basically agree, but do you see the indirect realism peeking out this? You say 'my version' of the world, which is your perspective on the one world we share. Yes, these 'perspectives' are hardly only geometrical. We all see the world in terms of projected futures constructed from our unique histories, but the philosopher seeks to transcend such bias and incarnate something like an ideal perspective. As Hegel might say, we are bearers of historically evolved software. I study the great thinkers to download the 'best' version of this softwhere and hope to add to it. The movement is toward some ideal community, toward wisdom-power-grace, toward 'God' if you like, which is maybe a projection of an ideal mind, an end of inquiry, point at infinity.
It is a construct that must expose itself to potential invalidation by events at every moment that I make use of it. It only continues to be ‘true’ to this extent. If in some way the world as I interpret it suddenly no longer appears to me to change relative to the previous moment , then I would have to attempt to alter my axes of understanding. In the meantime I would have to suffer through the experience of confusion and disorientation in a world that has become less structured for me.
Sure. I think Quine allowed even logical principles to be put in doubt by experience. Neurath's boat. The dance can mutate in lots of ways, but such mutation must be continuous or gradual for intelligibility to be maintained. This is one way to understand the necessity/existence of time in Hegel/Kojève. We can't jump to the in. We can't jump to the summarizing thesis. For all the words change their meaning within or upon that journey. The thesis only makes proper sense if one follows the evolution of those meanings within the dialogue. I can only critique current norms within the framework of those norms. Language is received like the law. If I want to rebel against a time-worn conceptuality, then that rebellion must take place within or as that same time-worn conceptuality. The system tries to climb out of itself. To be human is to try to be superhuman.
That smells like a falsifiable hypothesis, which is not a bad thing !
:up:
Smooth functioning ceases and troubleshooting begins. (This is an oversimplification, but what aphorism isn't?)
But isnt my version part of this world? And every time I elaborate or revise my version I am contributing another piece to the world. The question then is how is a world shared by participants who are each constantly contributing new elements , but new elements which mean different things to different persons who interact. The image is more one of a multitude
of worlds , and each of us can only describe things from within our own sphere. There can ever be anything ‘same’ between two or more people, just as there can never be anything same within one person’s perspective. So really my own experience is already that of expereincing slightly different worlds from moment to moment.
I would have to conclude that there doesnt seem to be anything pragmatically useful to gain by the notion of a shared world. I prefer to ‘sharing with others’ the idea of subsuming another’s perspective from my own vantage because that is all that I can ever experience.
Would it make sense to say that I share the world
with myself moment to moment? If not , how can I share it with others? And why can’t I share it with myself? Isn’t it because the effect of being in time is that of altering who I just was a moment ago?
So I don’t share myself with myself moment to moment, I divide and transform myself. It seems to me that my experience of ‘others’ must be understood in this way also. World isn’t a space that can be shared , it is a ‘worlding’.
Yes. I can't remember who it was, but some thinker said that each movement of every fly is part of history. What if Joyce had expanded Ulysses to 50000 pages? I think Andy Warhol messed with just letting his tape recorder scoop up all the babble of him and his friends.
We hunt for density. We like models with more bang per buck, perhaps as we like nutrient-dense food. 'Most' art and 'most' philosophy is bad, repetitive, devoid of invention. Too much 'realism' (no filtering, no selection ) is a bore.
Quoting Joshs
Well, that's as you like, but I find this retreat back to the 'I' somewhat questionable. The symbolic ego is part of the OS, as I see it. It's just grammatical habit. The solipsist wouldn't turn around because everything was always in front of him anyway.
Come down from the theoretical clouds for a moment. Consider a murder trial. I think it's a crisp enough empirical matter to ask whether Jones shot Smith. In the real world, the shared world, not just in your dream or my dream. Or one can ask whether Jones is the biological father of Smith. I don't think what I gesture toward with the formal indication of 'shared world' can be finally and happily specified. It's not just 'atoms and void' or 'medium sized dry goods.'
Quoting jas0n
Yuck. Now you are truly testing my resolve not to be so routinely dismissive of PoMo. But this is dreadful stuff. Abstract word salad. :sad:
Quoting jas0n
I can't recommend a single good source on Peirce. There are the collections of his scattered works, but they leave out much of the good stuff.
But for example - given your maths background - I loved this Kauffman paper.
And Peirce was sharp on real numbers - an example of the secondary literature on that.
But on the Saussure vs Peirce difference, I should have added that Peirce was offering a completely general model of semiosis, not just a model of human language. So he went well beyond language games to a theory of modelling relations that applied to any kind of biological modelling system, and then jumped the epistemic cut to apply this systems analysis to a pansemiotically self-organising Cosmos itself.
So the difference in metaphysical ambition is simply vast.
Then on the dyadic-triadic distinction, the point of Peircean semiosis is that his triad of Thirdness incorporates both the dyadic (as Secondness) and the monistic (as Firstness).
So yes, all metaphysics finds itself grounded in the dichotomy, the dialectic, the unity of opposites. The concrete secondness of a relation that is a reaction. But the Peircean triad includes that business of symmetry breaking and follows it all the way to its stable conclusion as a realm of stably broken asymmetry, or hierarchically organised Thirdness. The Cosmos as it becomes once regulated by the fixity of its developed habits.
Again, Peirce was arguing a triadic view of causality at the cosmological level. Saussure was only talking about linguistics, and splitting the world into a simple twosome of the modeller and the modelled. So - in the over-simplified retelling - Saussurean semiotics was easy to collapse back into the dualism of Cartesian cognitive representationalism. The great historical mistake in metaphysics that Peirce was doing everything to overcome with his semiotics and pragmatism.
As I said, Saussure was not in fact such a dummy. See Becoming A Dominant Misinterpreted Source: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure in Cultural Sociology, Dustin S. Stoltz (2019).
Well thanks for checking it out and giving an honest reaction.
I'll check those links out soon and get back to you. Exercise time.
Here I can’t help thinking how Wittgenstein would respond. What would be of interest to him is not simply the fact of the matter ( whether Jones shot Smith), as if that has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria, but how the context determines the particular way that a ‘fact of the matter’ has its sense.
But doesn't it in fact predict that humans will cook themselves to death rather than voluntarily giving up on accelerating the fossil fuel burning?
It is rather a mystery that humans could be so stupid. The writing was on the wall concerning climate change even in the 1970s. But if entropification is its own cosmic imperative, then it becomes easier to see why humanity acts as if entrained to the will of fossil carbon.
It wants its release. It doesn't care about us except as vehicles expressing that burning ambition. :grin:
So if you want personification or subjectivity, we can grant that to the dead bulk of prehistoric trees and planckton. This is there unfinished business we humans are doing here. We are completing the biomass recycling that has been frustrated by accidents of geology for so many hundreds of millions of years.
We owe it to this past, even if it greatly shortens our own future.
Quoting Joshs
Sure, you want to bend your metaphysics to suit a socio-political agenda. Pluralism wins, or whatever.
But you miss the critical point in talking about obeying laws - as if Nature has that kind of Newtonian/Cartesian structure.
The point is that the laws of thermodynamics encode the most general cosmic constraints ... and so, reciprocally, also its most generic local degrees of freedom.
What isn't constrained is free to be the case. It is a possibility that can be concretely expressed.
So the cosmos isn't ruled by laws that determine every "free" action. It is ruled by constraints that - due to their limited reach - underwrite actual creative freedom.
Of course, how you exploit the absolute freedoms granted to you by the fundamental laws of the universe are up to you. That will just be judged in the long-run in terms of your ability to maintain some chosen identity as an autopoietic dynamical balance.
As an individual, the Laws of Thermodynamics don't restrict your heroin intake or love of jumping off 10 storey buildings. As a society, they don't restrict us to remain entrained to the more mindlless entropic desires of fossil carbon.
But in the long-run, the statistical outcomes rule. How an organism spends its freedoms gets judged by history. How long did it last? How far did it spread? What was the spatiotemporal span of its particular state of coherence and persistence?
So you make the usual socially-expected statement about "being a free thinking and feeling individual, not a mindless entropy dissipating machine". You shake a fist at the very notion of fundamental constraints.
Yet the bigger picture is still the fact that constraints and freedoms are reciprocally yoked together as the two poles of being which make for a cosmos in the first place. Without general limitation, there is no possibility of there being any particular reaction against those limits.
How could you personally feel free unless you also imagined there were laws to break? This would be why you need a totalising discourse as something to react against. How can you imagine living in a world of maximum social pluralism unless you have also the backdrop of a maximal social conformity to kick against?
Even if facism didn't exist, the anti-facist would have to absolutely invent it to make sense of their socially-constructed community. The threat of facism would have to be made real, to make the anti-fascism more than some kind of solipsistic and meaningless PoMo gesture.
The Proud Boys must make Antifa real, and Antifa must make the Proud Boys real. We saw this social dynamic playing out in realtime over in Trump's amerika.
Meanwhile - behind the smokescreen of civil outrage - business continued as usual for global heating. Trump's handlers pushed through all the regulatory changes needed to maintain the prevailing rate of fossil fuel burning.
But consider:
...as if 'has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria' has any meaning outside of agreed on criteria...
Consider also that such 'criteria' are tacit and received like the law, so that 'convention' (a word I use) is somewhat misleading. The sign system has its 'meaning' in the world of revolvers and juries and bodies called 'Smith' and bodies called 'Jones.'
Far as Wittgenstein goes, I think On Certainty points at the same abyss/ground as Popper's swamp does. 'Doubt' occurs 'within' or against a background of non-doubt or automatism. I manifest trust in the intelligibility in the most radical questioning I can manage by asking the question, just as stepping out of bed manifests an expectation that the floor will catch my feet.
I wouldnt say agenda. I’d say the eternal transformation of agendas. Is that still an agenda?
Quoting apokrisis
So freedom is play within an overarching frame? Free variations on a theme?
Quoting apokrisis
So ‘underwriting freedom’ are the objective constraints that allow for a statistical calculation of historical probabilities. History as pre-assigned boundary conditions of behavior, within which there is freedom to excel or screw up.
Quoting apokrisis
A Romantic free-thinking and feeling individual implies more oppressively severe fundamental constraints than an entropy dissipating system. Such a Cartesian subjectivity is only free to think what it already knows at some level. A Nietzschean free-thinker is also free to think within a value system that constrains him, and is free to eventually destroy and replace that value system, but it is no longer the same ‘him’ that replaces the prior values , for he is changed along with the system. So the I that espouses my freedom is not the same I that overthrows my current values. The ‘I’ is thus finite, and along with it history in general and anything else that can be considered ‘general’ , ‘generic’ ,‘universal’ or even ‘pluralistic’ or ‘conformist’. The world of maximum social pluralism and the world of maximum social conformity (authoritarianism) are two poles of a binary, a general economy of relations thought from the vantage of a particular system of values(multiculturalism, liberal tolerance). But that makes the pluralism-conformity binary a finite, historically contingent formation. So there are the laws one breaks within a system of values , while remaining within that system:
Quoting apokrisis
And then there is the overthrow of the system of values:
Quoting apokrisis
An even bigger picture begins with the overthrow of a value system which depicts a cosmos structured by specific objective laws, and a history that can be probabilistically calculated. It proceeds from this overthrow to what Nietzsche called a revaluation of all values, not a tolerant pluralism or celebration of subjective freedom but a yoking of current self and value system to a non-calculable other history and other self-to-be, an eternal return of the same , always different self, history and values.
These ‘hinge propositions’ are not meant as irreducible grounds for all my deliberations. They are the preconditions for language games, but that does not mean that they are situated outside of the the context of the game as general types or categories. There is no element of language that is situated outside of the immediate context of the use of words for Wittgenstein. So these ‘ automatisms’ , types, categories are themselves freshly determined by immediate context of use.
Popper, on the other hand, believed that such ‘non-doubt’ automatisms stand apart from the contingency of the context of use.
Your reading of Witt here reminds me of Hacker’s, which is critiqued here:
“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-object relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.” (Hutchinson and Read)
Actually saw some of this in Spencer-Brown. I like the circle notation (negation and conjunction simultaneous, clever...).
This stood out too.
Quoting apokrisis
I like the battle over the continuum. Recently I looked into nonstandard analysis, and I might get around to smooth infinitesimal analysis (which is maybe more what Peirce had in mind.) I also like Bishop's constructivism (which makes the real numbers countable, since each is basically a specified program.) Brouwer's choice sequences are psychedelic. In any case, the tension between intuitions of the discrete and the continuous has fascinated me for quite a while.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the part that's hard to grok. I can understand viewing an organism from the outside and contemplating the way it materially encodes a model that expects and shifts attention, etc. I can't understand where the 'camera' is positioned when the Cosmos looks at itself, since the inside/outside framing seems to no longer apply, unless it is some kind of Hegelian thing where the stuff on the other side of the concept is itself just more concept and the mental/physical distinction breaks down. What's the relation of this idea to indirect realism?
I don't know exactly what you are getting at, and I'm not sure I agree with those interpretations. Perhaps you can elaborate or make more of a case.
I'm interested in describing reality (no small ambition!), and part of that may be clarifying what Wittgenstein or whoever 'really' meant, but sometimes I get the feeling that you are leaning on them as authorities, or at least trying to use them as crowbars against my own supposed reverence. That's within your purview, but that's water off a duck's back on this side. And (I say this playfully!) an 'epistemological anarchist' as far on the left as you are can't give me too much grief for it, since I can hardly get you to confess that we live in the same world.
https://foucault.info/documents/foucault.authorFunction.en/
I take what I can use from the famous windbags. My authority is a 'rationality' which is never done figuring out what it's supposed to be.
I have the first volume and never finished it, found it a bit tame and dry. I think my interpretation of Wittgenstein is pretty radical, or I know how to lean in that direction when called for. I really don't think our views are all that different. From my POV, you want to emphasize subjectivity-under-erasure, be more radical and open and free, push to the limit of intelligibly. I want to keep at least one foot on the mud. I find you pretty readable and respect your prose, but I detect in you less ambivalence than I feel in myself toward 'pomo' recklessness/indulgence. Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze.
Nice!
Quoting apokrisis
The knight and the dragon...an enduring structure.
There are ways to mitigate against that haze. When in doubt, consult the empiricists, or those who at least have one foot in naturalism. My list of favorite pomo types who fit the bill include Shaun Gallagher , Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs, Matthee Ratcliffe, Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela, Michel Bitbol and Joseph Rouse. I find Rouse particularly valuable for his ability to connect philosophy of science, Heidegger , phenomenology and postmodernism.
Are you familiar with any of these?
One can say that language does not refer at all. I understand the case for that. 'Jones shot Smith' is not a 'picture' of reality-in-itself in any simple way. Other metaphors have their virtues. I don't pretend to have some sharp metaphysical description of what it means for a fact to be a fact. I don't have some final theory of truth or the real. All such theories tend to have holes in them, bite their own tail, run around against other 'necessary' assumptions. Specification reveals tensions in the network of blabber. It may be impossible to weave a totalizing coherent discourse, but is that itself an incoherent thesis?
Yet I'm fairly confident that our fancy theories are 'parasites' on a practical reality and its hazy ordinary language where Jones shot Smith or he didn't (admitting edge cases.)
Haven't looked into them, no.
I want to make a list too: Henry Miller, Nobby Brown, Cioran, Bukowski, Suetonius, Gibbon, Hobbes, Houellebecq, Dawkins, Dennett, Feuerbach, Cantor, Knuth, Freud, Braver, Kojève, Popper, Hofstadter, Lakoff, Bacon, Celine, Saussure...
I omitted authors I know you've looked into, like Nietzsche, Derrida, Heidegger, Wittgenstein ...
I don't get how Wittgensteinian philosophers can be so certain of their claims when they simultaneously also assert that the very thing they're making the claims with - language - is inadequate for this purpose.
If they say they've achieved clarity, then they're wrong about language, oui?
If the opposite - things are as hazy as before - why put stock into their statements? Nothing has changed.
Well that begs many questions. The erosion of all definite distinctions only leaves behind the generalised pluralism of all the differences that don't make a difference. Thus this is the very same kind of card that the thermodynamic concept of an equilibrium state plays.
But it certainly lays claim to being a totalising meta-agenda. :up:
Quoting Joshs
What? Is this too Wittgensteinian?
Yes, everyone has to end up in the same place. Peirce built his probabilistic view of metaphysics out of the notion of individual propensities. Intentionality by another name.
Every degree of freedom that composes a system - as its pluralistic many - is in turn entrained to its overarching intentionality, the oneness of the systems finality.
Necessity and contingency are thus united in actuality. Or good old Aristotelean hylomorphism.
Quoting Joshs
Yep. One can play the game or cheat the system. And it is the fact that you can play the game that creates the counterfactual that would be instead cheating the system.
If there is good, then you can be bad. Etc.
But look closer at Nature and you find that it seeks the win-win. Life for the sadist is no fun unless complemented also by the existence of masochists.
Or more to the sociological point, individual choice is optimised in the form of the binary of whether to compete or cooperate. Or still more importantly, how to do both within the one long-run frame.
So when I challenge you to a tennis game, I both mean to run you off court and to agree with you when the ball is actually in or out. And afterwards, win or lose, we shake hands and declare it all to be so much fun we must do it again, same time next week.
So don't look for the win-lose in this metaphysics. Understand this is how Nature arranges for the win-win.
Quoting Joshs
Of course. Nothing could be more remote from the consciousness of Amerikan youth in cultural conflict than that they may be the modern neoliberal/climate denying incarnation of Debord's Society of the Spectacle - a CNN/Fox New curated storm in a teacup while US fracking wells flare 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, just because ... well, who the hell cares?
Quoting Joshs
Absolutely! Be the change!
[But how much can you in fact change about anything in this world? I've seen politics and economics up close. I've seen how unequal the stakes are.]
Quoting Joshs
Again, my point is that you want to maximise both within the constraints of a win-win optimisation algorithm.
In ecology, the different balances are theoretically modelled as the three natural developmental stages of immaturity (or explosive, weed-like growth), maturity (or steadier mixed state ecosystem), or senescent (which sounds bad, but simply means something so rich with wise habit that it has become brittle to sudden unpredicted perturbations - like the asteroid that did for the perfectly well adapted dinosaurs).
So in the explosive growth phase, it is youthful exuberance that a society would want to optimise. And Homo sapiens even made extra allowance for that, both in the explosive synaptogenesis of the newborn infant, and in the development of the teenager as a further stage of neural plasticity. Adolescents are tuned by recent evolution to be reckless and exploratory because their frontal lobe impulse over-ride machinery is on hold, giving them more time as junior society members to discover the errors of their way.
Likewise senescence is a further evolutionarily-tuned phase in Homo sapiens - part of the neurobiological adaptation for being a linguistically cultural creature. Women don't shrivel up and die after the breeding is over. Being a wise elder is an important part of social inheritance in a creature organised by oral tradition and living memory.
If you let nature take care of things, it can evolve for the win-win.
But with climate change, suddenly we can look up and see the asteroid.
Oh but wait, someone on the internet said something offensive to my values. I must mount up and joust the dragon once more.
Quoting Joshs
Yeah. Fighting about values is far more important than, for example, getting into the street and making violent noise about ... today being just another day that US fracking flares another 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas into CO2 ... because at least all that energy going to waste isn't entering the atmosphere as still more problematic methane.
Oh wait. Has anyone been counting how many cubic feet of methane these fracking rigs also leak?
Quoting Joshs
Well maybe there is only the one actual existential issue of the day? Maybe everything else pales into insignificance?
:up:
Have you come across Norman Wildberger's dissident maths? He has retired now and is going full rogue. :cool:
Quoting jas0n
Yep. There has to be some deeper connection. Which is where Peircean vagueness comes in as that to which the PNC does not apply and thus that which can ground the dichotomised as the two oppositions that then get related in the synechism of Thirdness.
So its not a choice between either the discrete, or the continuous. It is how to see the discrete and the continuous (or the infinitesimal and the infinite) as the reciprocal thing of a dichotomy - a case of the mutually opposite and jointly exclusive in logic terms.
The discrete = 1/continuous, and the continuous = 1/discrete. Each exists as the limit of the other. And both exist only to the degree that it is pragmatically useful to keep forcing the issue.
Maths and logic traditionally come from the other metaphysical angle. Reduction to a monism must rule. Mathematical reality can only admit the one grounding choice. Pick your poison. Don't get caught up in nonsense talk about departed Cheshire cats and their still lingering grins.
Quoting jas0n
In hierarchy theory, the "camera" is positioned at the reciprocal limits of the large and small, the most global and most local scales. This is where the invariance arises that can thus bound or close a world (of complex variation).
So to put it simply, we exist at a certain spatiotemporal scale of cogency. You and me can be at rest, be at equilibrium, within some shared inertial frame and lightcone.
But then, as we look up to higher levels of cosmic dynamics, eventually we strike a cosmic horizon. There is everything that happens outside the lightcone that can have no influence on us.
If the Sun went supernova right now, it would take about eight minutes for the bright light and sudden gravitational ripple to hit us. A bit of a delay in the news. But if the visible universe is right now beginning to collide with its antimatter double, it would take another 40 billion years or so for either of us to detect anything untoward.
So the point is that the upper bound constraints on our reality can be both dynamic, and yet changing on such a vast and slow scale that they are larger than our local point of view. Like the frog cooking in the pot, nothing seems to change. The global bound of invariance is created where the view completely fills our vision - like standing too close to a blank wall.
Then the lower bound of local degrees of freedom become a cosmic invariance for the reciprocal reason. From a sufficient distance, a highly dynamical small scale of action - like the quantum vacuum filled with virtual particles - will just blur into its own form of continuum. A solid looking ground of invariant being.
So look up, and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constraining laws of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical symmetries.
Then look down and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constructive degrees of freedoms of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical constants.
Stan Salthe wrote the best two books on all this from the hierarchy theory point of view - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution - probably the two most important books I ever read.
I would go so far as to add that the only signal I can pick up from the word salad noise is the distress call of folk stuck in a misunderstanding of dichotomies.
Every PoMo argument ever boils down to saying this thesis leads dialectially to its own antithesis. Therefore ... paradox! Self-contradiction! Logical breakdown!
But then let's not get all AP about it and just dismiss the dichotomy out of hand as (ugh) metaphysics. Let's dance around the corpse of logic in a mad jig of delight, proclaiming now the victory of ... the irrational, the pluralistic, the absurd!!!
Saussure does imagine signs as cutting into an otherwise undifferentiated continuum of thoughtstuff.
////////////////////////////////////////
Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.
...
Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance.
...
The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality — i.e. language — as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas and the equally vague plane of sounds.
...
Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound.
...
In addition, the idea of value, as defined, shows that to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it in this way would isolate the
term from its system; it would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that
one must start and through analysis obtain its elements.
...
Linguistics then works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine ; their combination produces a form, not a substance.
https://archive.org/stream/courseingenerall00saus/courseingenerall00saus_djvu.txt
I think you're being a little too hard on it (it's not all wordsalad to me, albeit at the limit of intelligibility a little too often), but I enjoy the sarcasm nevertheless.
:lol:
A little bit. I respect his passion for the meaning of mathematics. Errett Bishop had the same fire.
I like Chaitin's ventures in such philosophy too. Are the real numbers real? Yes yes we have axioms. We have constructions. And yet actual computation is done with a subset of the rationals (actually there are infinities in the floating point system too, which is nice. ) That the incomputables have measure zero is ... troubling, though one can ignore it and return to manufacturing widgets. (Quoting apokrisis
One might argue that mathematics is biased toward the discrete in the pursuit of an ideal if not actual machine checkability. You end up using a finite alphabet of symbols when talking about towers of differing uncountable infinities.
Quoting apokrisis
That quote was pretty good. Group theory comes to mind. Its theorems apply to any system which satisfies certain criteria (intuitively I like to think of finite groups as sets of permutations.)
How does one measure certainty ? As a matter of style, there are only so many qualifications and timidities that can be justified. 'Language is received like the law' is something that is obvious once noticed. You were born into a certain way of doing things, just as I was, and it's only after learning these contingent noises and marks that we can turn around and articulate that contingency which is nevertheless forced upon us if want to be understood. It could have been other marks or sounds, but it wasn't.
Your critique might apply to some exaggerated pomo-monster that claims that meaning is impossible, that truth is impossible, and so on...without any irony. Playfully, I can ask why a defender of private language might ask such a question. If words mean whatever we want them to mean, then logic is helpless or everyone has their own.
I think 'pomo' is as baggy a term as 'metal' or 'country' or 'jazz.' I like some metal, some country, some jazz. But of course not everything in the genre is good. And even the same writer might become more/less interesting as their thinking develops.
The whole anglo-versus-continental thing sucks.
I don't know. Shouldn't you be the one telling us how to do that? After all, you come off as being very/quite certain about what you're saying, compared to me at least.
Quoting jas0n
Then you go on to ask me how we measure uncertainty.
I don't mean to offend you. Maybe the metaphor is obscure. The point is simple. You didn't choose the sounds you chew when you have to talk to strangers and deal with the business of life. You didn't....invent the English language....or do I need to prove that? Am I so bold to be quite sure that neither of us forged the code we are currently employing?
A more generous rendition, which maybe only applies to good examples, is that following the implications of a text or system often reveals otherwise unnoticed conceptual tensions in that text or system. 'Text deconstruct themselves.'
Hegel has been described as showing how systems/personalities fail in their own terms and only then change. Rinse and repeat. Pile up determinate negations, a stack of informative failures. You can imagine a personality/system deaf to external criticism (because it unintelligible or lacks authority to/for him) without being able to ignore failure in terms of his/its own criteria/goals.
Yup, I didn't choose my language, but I can speak/write it, not that well but enough to get by. I find the concepts/words I use relatable at a very deep level i.e. I understand/know them fairly well. The same is true of you I bet.
What's your point though?
Not sure how to translate that. But from my Vygotskian/social constructionist perspective, language was the new medium that structured the "undifferentiated continuum" of the language-less animal mind.
So to actually characterise the difference language made to animal consciousness, we have to also be able to accurately characterise what kind of consciousness that was.
From there, we might tend to judge the animal state as either remarkably undifferentiated, or already remarkably differentiated. So either animals were already thinking as we generally understand that in folk psychology way, hence they just need words to express a worldview already formulated. Or indeed, the logicism built into syntax was such a big revolution - an entirely novel level of semiosis - that we might as well say animals just don't think in the way we would understand thought.
That is, they aren't self-objectivising, past-reconstructing, present-narrativising, future-formalising, emotion-socially framing, etc, kinds of creatures. In all these key regards, we would judge them strangely undifferentiated.
But I may misunderstand your drift.
That is reasonable - if you step back from an animal which is merely living in the flow of the present. And then also unfair to the vividness of living in the flow of the present.
So it again is a point of view whether one sees a flat continuum or a fractal roughness.
Find the unifying dichotomy to dissolve the problem of defending one or either pole as the preferred monism!
Ok. So you are quoting from the text that Stotlz points out is problematic as a representation of Saussure's views....
But anyway, treating this as the Sassurean viewpoint, is this too strong when of course there is something that is both the same in being neurobiological semiosis, and yet is quite different in being now neurobiological + socio-semiosis?
So the animal brain is a self~world modelling system - an example of biosemiosis. And then humans are something extra in that language is a further, more logicist and abstracted - level of semiotic organisation.
If we are alert, we ought to be able to spot the trend towards the complete abstraction and God's eye view that mathematico-semiosis would eventually usher in. It was inevitable - given the presumption of the pragmatic payoff - that humans would take the next step of reducing words to numbers, and grammar to logic.
Words evolved to describe possible social worlds - capture those as thoughtstuff. Then number anchored the capacity to describe possible material worlds - capture the sacred realm of Platonia as a thoughtstuff.
With words, we large construct our selves as social selves. With number, we can dare to construct the physical worlds as if it too were an anthropic reflection of our "inner being".
We can domesticate a planet, fill it with the pigs, cows, sheep, dogs and cats which best reflect the what it means to be "human". Or turn the geography of the world into signposted networks of highways and carpentered, interior decorated, habitats.
This seems to go the long way round and never reaching the destination - which is the fact that the human vocal tract imposed a syllabic serial structure on our normally holistic neurobiology. In making emotionally expressive noises - very important in any social creature - there evolved a new facility for injecting some song-like structure into the vocalisation. (Darwin's singing ape hypothesis indeed.) And from there, is was a short step from making nonsensical yet still emotionally interpretable sounds (ouch, eek, yuck, arrgh) to logically-structure speech acts involving grammar and reference.
So a less fluffy exposition would cut to the chase of how serial vocalisation evolved as an extension to primate emotional communication and became the surprise exaptation that opened the door to human rationalised thought patterns.
Again, too vague and fluffy. This is the epistemic cut issue. The switch (as the physical instantiation of a sign) must bridge the divide between the logic of the model and the material actions of the physical world.
So yes, this is Janus faced. The switch has a foot in both worlds. But the thought is the logical model - which in the Bayesian brain view, sets the switch in advance as best it can, then discovers the degree to which reality has tripped it the other way, spelling some error in the prediction.
So what can't be divided is the three way deal of the model, the switch or sign as the interface, and the world. The mind predicts, the world corrects, the switch mediates this triadic interaction.
Thus you can see that if this is the Saussure that informs Derrida's own further rewriting of what Saussureanism ought to mean, then yeah, just give it the flick. Start again with Peircean semiosis.
Well I was justifying my 'certainty' that language is received like the law. But take it from a linguist.
[quote = Saussure]
The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary.
The signifier, though to all appearances freely chosen with respect to the idea that it represents, is fixed, not free, with respect to the linguistic community that uses it. The masses have no voice in the matter, and the signifier chosen by language could be replaced by no other. This fact, which seems to embody a contradiction, might be called colloquially "the stacked deck." We say to language: "Choose!" but we add: "It must be this sign and no other." No individual, even if he willed it, could modify in any way at all the choice that has been made; and what is more, the community itself cannot control so much as a single word; it is bound to the existing language.
No longer can language be identified with a contract pure and simple, and it is precisely from this viewpoint that the linguistic sign is a particularly interesting object of study; for language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.
[/quote]
I'm genuinely curious as to what you can get out of it except a bemused poetry? It poses as something that ought to be intelligible, but I am certain that it leads nowhere deep.
This week I've been dealing with GUT theories of Big Bang symmetry breaking - whether leptoquarks would be SU(4) or SU(5) theories. Now that is at the edge of intelligibility for me. But then also, every day brings waves of insight. You can see when something is going to lead somewhere as it has a basis in mathematical rigour.
I agree that it makes more sense to think in terms of evolution. Humans weren't dropped into the garden with undifferentiated thoughtstuff.
Quoting apokrisis
Well one can get the different copies of student lecture notes, but yes I have the fusion (Course) and a book by Culler, which gives some background and is pleasantly to-the-point.
Quoting apokrisis
I like your presentation of the triadic approach above. Model/switch/world.
Saussure had different priorities ? Shows his age? Note that he thought in terms of 'form not substance' on both sides.. The phonic 'image' is something like an equivalence class of actual pronunciations. It's not sound.
In end the sounds themselves don't matter for the system at all. All that matters is the difference between them. This difference is unheard. Each signifier is 'essentially' the negation of all the others. It doesn't matter what the chess pieces look like. Only relationships mater. This is in the phonic realm. In the conceptual realm of the signified we have something similar. Mental is not-physical, male is not-female, etc. Switches. As opposed to the meaning of 'male' or 'true' or 'real' being immediately grounded by something other than difference (an intuition in the mind of god or the 'same mental experiences' of Aristotle, a beetle in the box, the 'transcendental signified.')
I would indeed argue the same. God invented the integers, as they say. Or at least the identity elements of 0 and 1 around which arithmetic swivels.
So what works as maths is the ability to cash out the continuum - Peirce's synechism - as another atomism. And hence another mechanics.
Peirce and other systems thinkers protest that reality at the fine grain is naked fluctuation. There is no certainty as a base, just the continuous blur that is the vagueness of an uncertainty.
But maths just swoops in and say we will turn all the uncertainty into certainties by axiomatic fiat. We will turn every entropic microstate into a bit of information. Every fluctuation gets its own number.
This seems madness to the organicist. The world can't be treated as a machine!
But then this mathematical mechanics turns out to work. It is a view of reality which lets you treat it very much as just a machine. And bugger the organic niceties.
Quoting jas0n
OK. And I just said this week I've been delving into the murky depths of permutation symmetry as the very thing that generates the Cosmos we all know and love. The ontic structural realist revolution in metaphysics (which seem to have been born and then died within the space of the publication cycle of its one manifesto). :rofl:
Funny old world.
I'll check out more of Peirce. But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy. The aspect of that prejudice which I tend to focus on is the supposed presence of some kind of sign-independent pure meaning stuff before the gaze of a pure subject. This is maybe the 'deepest' ghost story of them all.
I understand Derrida to call out the play/ambiguity of our signs. Since they primarily refer to one another (describe the blur of reality with a set of finite switch-positions like mind/matter or male/female), they aren't grounded in anything but our flexible reapplication of an old sign in a new context. This allows for drift. I read him with Wittgenstein, as a linguistic philosopher I suppose.
:up:
I have nothing at all against Saussure. He was indeed influential on me when I was looking into why language made such a difference to the human mind.
So within the linguistic space - which was the space he was aiming at - it was all good stuff.
Quoting jas0n
Yep. That is how I would argue it.
The perfect switch implements the laws of thought. Everything divides into A and not-A. And even if it doesn't in fact divide so crisply and easily, the switch is the Procrustean bed that forces such a division on the world.
Language - verbal or numerical - reduces the analog reality to a digital recording. But hey, digital recordings can be as good as the real thing for all practical purposes. And they can be better if you don't like the scratching and hissing of vinyl, or you want the most compressed recording possible.
That's what I take to have been inspiration for the difference that Derrida misspelled and generalized. But it's already in Saussure.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly! Yes. And you can see how Saussure's own distinctions are not erased but at least destabilized. If the signifier 'actually' refers to other signifiers and not to a signified, then the dyadic sign is not so dyadic after all. One has instead a system of 'traces,' neither mental nor physical, but that which makes distinction possible in the first place. A trace is like a sum of negations of other traces, hence the metaphor.
Yes indeed. And I think of reality being modeled by digital simulations with tiny step sizes. I've programmed stochastic gradient descent in various ways. It's based on a pure math proof. Or so it seems. One could empirically discover a good algorithm. A proof in pure math is not obviously/simply a proof about the world or actual computation. We have our symbol games which primarily prove themselves practically.
Quoting jas0n
You are managing to make Derrida seem like a reasonable guy. The question is what kind of sociology would encourage the torture of the accepted PoMo academic style?
It is a first principle of clear writing that global or abstract statements are then always anchored/evidenced in the conviction of supporting particulars. You give the general principle and offer the specific examples that support it.
But both your PoMo texts were all abstractions, no particulars. They never touch the ground and just flu along unchecked by material fact.
As a hierarchy theorist and pragmatist, this can be criticised on formal structural grounds. Understanding is the dance between the local and the global, the detail and the whole, the concrete and the abstract, the measurement and the theory.
And in PoMo, I see no such dance on the whole. Again I wonder what sociological advantage that gives PoMo texts - except to play the poseur too clever to be understood by the likes of me and you,
But hey, you clearly value it. Which makes me curious as to how you don't appear to have had your thoughts scrambled by it.
Well, given how disliked he is, I'm motivated to defend my own appreciation for him and to prove to myself that I'm squeezing some juice from those indulgently difficult texts. Looking at some revealing video interviews online, it seems Derrida was inspired/gripped (lots of emotion!) when he came up with his big first idea. It came out hot. So he was maybe like a French Nietzsche at the time. Do you like Nietzsche at all?
Oh, I was thinking of that as the feature and not the bug. :gasp:
A monkey randomly bashing a keyboard will in infinite time surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with the Tractatus and 50 Shades of Grey in even shorter order.
Or like DNA coding for proteins, any kind of nonsense polypeptide chain could be produced. Finite means can produce infinite variety. And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning.
So the greater the scope for an endless recursion of sign, the more meaningful it is when we can say almost everything in a remarkably few words.
At the wedding ceremony: "I will".
Chaitin's algorithmic complexity and semantic content as data compression.
Maybe this is because the dyadic switching is understood by me not as a linear chain but hierarchical recursion? That is a further assumption built into my Peircean semiotics that is worth making explicit.
Again, it is the 20 questions thing, so is also in fact built into Shannon information.
A taxonomy is a hierarchy of switches. Ideally, the throwing of a switch at each level bisects the space of probability with 50/50 Bayesian exactness.
So I have in my box here a ....? Well, you already know its got to be that small. So its it animal or mineral? Is it rocky or metallic? Is it shiny or dull? Is it more gold or silver? Is it globular or toroid? Aha, I can guess it is the wedding ring. "I will".
A linear chain of distinctions is how you have to encode messages. You have to break the holism of a thought, a protein, a percept, a mathematical object, into a string of digits. Only a chain of switches can reduce its material cross section to the point where it "escapes" the 4D constraints of the real material world.
But then the trick is the switches can encode the holism of a hierarchical order. Each switch can either expand or contract the space of possibility in logarithmic steps while keep the cost of any step strictly linear.
So a linear code gives you hierarchical holism for next to no computational cost. I can't talk as gaily about the Big Bang as the fleck of dust I've just noted on my screen. In 20 questions I can cover almost any space of semantic possibilities that I might practically have an interest in.
I agree! That's an ideal way to go. Examples, examples, examples. But apparently some subcultures consider that a buzzkill.
Quoting apokrisis
The super-clever mystification game is definitely out there, IMO. It happens on the religious side (which denigrates the limitation of concept) and on the PoMo side (which denigrates the pursuit of objectivity as passé ).
Quoting apokrisis
Probably helps that I studied math formally: graduate real analysis, Galois theory, some crypto, as much computability theory as the school offered. Also learned lots of stats, and I got to (and had to) teach, which forces one to clarify.
Not clear on this. Derrida transforms Saussure's signs into traces. You like signs or traces more?
Yes. And 'the world' (an otherwise vague continuum) constrains our use of signs, I'd think. So frequently used signs will be short/cheap, etc.
Quoting apokrisis
This also emphasizes the importance of context. The meaning of the sign is in its position relative to other signs (the minister, the bride, ...)
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, this makes sense to me. I studied a little of Shannon's work.
Quoting apokrisis
Over my head at the moment.
Quoting apokrisis
OK, I think I get that. Nice point about the linear cost. I've studied a little complexity theory, but I haven't put it in such a context before. Thanks!
I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. I am already presuming that a signs need to be understood as switches, and that switches already deal with the negative space issue - the not-A - by implementing the logic of the LEM.
Again I come back to Peirce who reduced all logic to the switch that was his amphek - the discovery of the NOR logic gate long before it got officially discovered.
I think that Kauffman paper references that. But anyway, the nature of the sign as a binary switch, and so already including the not-A as the not not-A, is already mathematically presented in Peirce’s writings.
It is another thing I just take for granted and forget to mention.
This is enactivism or ecological perception in a nutshell. Another argument against Cartesian representationalism is that real brains leave as much information out in the world as they can get away with.
The context is always out there in brute physical fashion. So start by trying to predict and thus already ignore it. Let it then intrude on your world conception to the degree that it feels it must.
It doesn't matter much. The big issue is whether one thinks the meaning of a sign is grounded in some kind of pure mental stuff or instead in the relationship this sign has with others signs and objects in the world.
Quoting apokrisis
:up:
Thanks for the reference. I'll check into these.
The way this makes most sense to me is that a network of linguistic signs is a syntactical network of semantic switches. And this is lain over the neurobiological substrate of an animal level of consciousness, so as to enforce a further sociocultural level of constraint.
Thus it is neurobiology that is indeed “the pure mental stuff” here - even if one wouldn’t want to use such a dualistic, Cartesian substance, term.
And the network of signs has a rather mechanical aspect in being a structure of syntax that only constrains the state of the brain so as to put it into some state of interpretance that it wouldn’t otherwise be able attain.
So for example, I can say to you: “The fat and hairy caterpillar with a ring it’s nose and purple shoes.”
And you can take that sentence and construct some image - a visual anticipation - of what it would be like to actually see such a thing in the real world.
Take 10 people. Everyone would imagine something both similar, yet also randomly different. One hairy caterpillar might be far more hirsute than the next, or whatever. But the point is that the words can whip up a structure which puts you in mind of a certain thing, which is also completely imaginary, utterly contingent, quite impossible in fact.
So a constraints based approach says the syntax glues together a set of semantic switches. We have to think of the hairy caterpillar, and not the bald or scaly or feathered or clothed caterpillar.
But there also has to be the neurobiological capacity to form anticipatory images just as part of normal perceptual processing. Even animals can form search images to shape their states of intentionality.
And this seems to be where the confusion in where the meaning of words lies.
It doesn’t lie in the words - and yet they form the very necessary structure of constraint. Nor does it lie in the neurobiology - even though that is the equally necessary plastic potential which can take on some constrained state of interpretance.
Clearly, the meaning lies in the way a constrained state of interpretance then has some pragmatic relevance to the job of living in a world where being able to form such states of intentionally - like being able to anticipate fat hairy caterpillars with nose rings and purple shoes - might be a meaningful thing to do.
Even if right here, it is the very nonsensicality of such a perceptual expectation that is what hopefully makes my example instructive.
That is then the Peircean view. You can chase the meaning all over the place. But it is to be found in the holism of the self-world modelling relation. Words are just another level of constraint on our existing neurobiology, which already has to be doing a pretty robust self-world modelling job.
That's helpful. Curious what you'll make of my concerns.
I'm a bit of a 'consciousness denier.' I don't mean that I don't have the usual 'sensations' and 'emotions.' But I suspect that the idea of an inaccessible interior is epistemologically useless. You've probably seen this, but for convenience and whoever else is reading, I'll quote the classic analogy. I doubt the following will be new to you, so perhaps I'm measuring whether/where exactly we might differ.
Perhaps you can see that Wittgenstein is 'deconstructing' the two-sided Saussurian sign in folksier language. With Witt, I like to take the POV of a biologist watching a group of animals trade material signals to organize their behavior. Such a biologist can interpret a certain cry of a vervet monkey as a warning about a nearby eagle (because/from 'flight' that follows the cry). One can try to imagine the what-it's-like-to-be-a-vervet-in-that-situation. But this what-it's-like is vague until cashed out or operationalized. If imagined as an inaccessible interior, we're stuck. So we let the sign collapse into the trace. The cry is a 'cheap' movement of the air that flicks a switch in the group's nervous system. Now we just try to view human language this way.
Quoting apokrisis
This makes sense to me, but I'm tempted to cash out 'think of' in terms of tendencies to behave this way rather than that way, where this behavior is public (back to the Popper's fog.) I very much count speech acts as 'public,' and, along those lines, multiple choice surveys would be a cheap way to detect or articulate a postulated 'consciousness space' in which there are mental images. We could choose random variations of adjectives for this caterpillar and ask questions about it, etc.
I've dug out my ancient notes to refresh my mind on where I felt Derrida fits in here. I see that he was dealing with the very Peircean issue of the origin of rational structure.
So he was pointing to the question of how all things - whether we are talking of cosmic structure or human phenomenological structure - could arise from some pure and simple source when structure is already itself, something irreducibly complex. (That is, a systematic, triadic or hierarchical relation.)
Because ordinary thought can see no bridge between some raw simple ground of being and its production of the very first irreducibly complex structure, that creates a foundational issue that can only be endlessly deferred.
It is exactly the same as asking the question of what could be the first cause of the Cosmos. If existence can't just pop into being as irreducibly complex structure, then the only alternative appears to be infinite regress. It was never created and always existed.
But Peirce fixed that by adding the further metaphysical resource of Vagueness (also known as Tychism and Firstness) to his logic of structure.
The ultimate ground of simplicity could be just ... the vague. Neither a this or a that. A complete lack of dichotomy, dialectic, contrast, or relation. A "realm" as lacking in identity as it is in difference. A state that was formally "less than nothing". And a state that was already contained in the laws of thought by being defined as the nullification of the PNC (just as Peirce cleverly derived the opposite of the vague - the crisply general - from the nullification of the LEM).
So in the "beginning" was the vague. And from that most general nullity could spring its other of the dichotomy that was already well on its way to the fully expressed triadic structure that is a hierarchy.
In physics, we would call it symmetry breaking. But the symmetry breaking of vagueness itself.
Yes, there are still ontological difficulties with using a logic of vagueness to ground the irreducible complexity of first beginnings, or originary events. I've spent a lot of time on that issue.
But Peirce's trick does at least take the metaphysical debate to a whole new level, making redundant much of the everyday metaphysics that people still obsess over.
On a related note, I see that Kauffman paper only talks about the Sheffer stroke and not Peirce's amphek.
Again Peirce got there first.
So what this is is the identity element for all logical structure - a self-dual relation which already packs all possible structural elaboration.
Sounding familiar yet? :grin:
If vagueness is Firstness - the most absolute form of constraint in being an Apeiron, an absolute absence of constraint - then that already is also the nullity that guarantees the existence of its "other" in the form of the first primal actualisation of a constraint, and hence the full triadic irreducibility of the secondness of dyadic relations, and thirdness of enstructured habit.
It is the symmetry breaking which reveals the symmetry by being able be the breaking. First there was less than nothing. Then there was already a complexity only needing to unpack itself.
And Peirce found that story in a way that grounded logic - the amphek as the identity element - along with everything else.
Of course I would agree. But also, I would add that this view of consciousness - a little soul inside the physical body that has freewill and is responsible for everything the body chooses to get up to - is socially constructed and has great pragmatic value for the social level of the human organism.
Why was the Catholic Church so historically powerful? Because is fostered precisely this image of the human condition.
If you make everyone self-conscious of their need to constantly watch over their every impulse and weigh it against a culturally-defined norm, then you indeed own their "souls".
Modern neo-liberalism just continues this epistemological tradition. If you can make every citizen guilty for their failures to be self-actualising entrepreneurs, then again you own their "souls" and they become the building blocks that creatively strive to make the social hierarchy that your "consciousness model" embodies.
This is the problem with phenomenology. It is already culturally weaponised. Whether you are a PoMo socialist or right wing think tanker, you want to take advantage of the possibilities that exist in owning the discourse that frames our Cartesian notions of selfhood.
Who needs to enslave the masses when the masses can be trained up to enslave themselves?
Quoting jas0n
Yeah sure. But this is the Kantian throat-clearing level of the discussion. It should be the bleeding obvious. How many times can one kill the corpse of Cartesian representationalism?
But yes, I realise that is a rhetorical question. Every second post on this forum demonstrates that the grip of this zombie metaphysics is as strong as ever. And I've just said why. Humanity - as a social organism - depends on Cartesian representationalism as its standard operating system.
Quoting jas0n
Yep. That is a nice way of putting it.
Quoting jas0n
Again, precisely my view. Evolution of language and human cognition was where my researches started. Language starts first out in the tribal space to co-ordinate tribal action. Then it became internalised as inner self-regulatory speech once the value of that trick became culturally apparent.
It's Vygotskian psychology 101. But Vygotsky is another Peirce. Someone totally brilliant, yet caught out by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They both wrote down all the answers, but their manuscripts remained lost to the world until little groups began to rediscover their existence in the 1980s and 1990s.
:up:
I totally agree. So it's only about 'seeing around' this invention when appropriate, recognizing that it's not some absolute starting point for inquiry.
I think 'the vague' is excellent as the undifferentiated continuum. A first distinction would perhaps install/create/be the self-world dichotomy. This 'self' might be the individual organism opposed to non-body stuff. It might be the thought-stuff opposed to the 'material' or to 'sensation.' And so on. The idea is that the vague is the continuum on which or from which a discrete structure is imposed/composed.
I don't know much about the physics of the beginning of the universe. I'm interested in thermodynamics and information. I did learn Newtonian physics pretty well once.
Funny point, but this is as dense and elusive as anything Derrida wrote. I think you know what you are talking about, but I confess that I can't parse it...yet. Probably because I don't know Peirce's terminology more than anything.
I think this is what Foucault was getting at.
Another similar idea is that the subject is an effect of language, a kind of ghost created by/as patterns in our sign-trading.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. The ghost has been killed or at least dethroned (for what is the hard problem of consciousness all about?) but most can't/won't follow the critical conversation far enough to grasp this. A picture tends to hold us captive (Wittgenstein), also called 'interpretedness' (Heidegger) or 'prejudice' (Gadamer.) The 'soul' is a piece of technology, something 'contingent' (which is not to say unmotivated) but mistaken for necessary (as that which is initially given, as if an 'internal monologue' in French or Latin or English could make sense without a background of others in a shared world.)
Quoting apokrisis
Wow. That's how I see it. Or that's how I understand things from the POV of the camera positioned above the tribe, watching them deal with their environment. A sign-system (including self-regulation) accumulates/grows/differentiates within their brains/interactions. Their environment is simultaneously differentiated with their economy and tools.
Something you've probably already touched on and seems relevant is the difficult distinction between sign and non-sign. If a sign is not grounded in a 'mental content' (a signified), then it's just 'out there' in the environment. In other words, what separates a salute from wiping the sweat off of one's forehead? The answer is probably something like the 'play' or 'ambiguity' of the sign/non-sign or trace/non-trace distinction. This is why I say the Cartesian 'ghost' is dethroned perhaps rather than annihilated. Our mentalistic language, however misleading, almost needs to remain legible. This is determinate negation, writing under erasure, etc. Less pretentiously we might talk of switching between language games or perspectives.
Yes, Peirce is jargon-ridden. The difference is that Peirce is thinking mathematically. Just check out the amphek as the epistemic cut switching device that makes possible the whole of Boolean algebra - a fact known to Peirce in 1880 and not rediscovered until Sheffer in 1913. And even Sheffer got no credit until Bertrand Russell stumbled across it in the 1920s and was compelled to incorporate it into the second edition of his Principia Mathematica.
So Peirce is mathematical rigor underneath all the neologisms. Derrida and PoMo in general are more like the blind people in a dark room giving the elephant a good touch up and feeling moved to poetic outbursts.
Quoting jas0n
I meant to add, given your interest in the real numbers, a physicist would these day say that the complex numbers are more foundational than the reals.
If quantum field theory and its commutativity is basic, then nature counts in complex numbers rather than real numbers. The ground of being is where the dichotomising starts. And that dyadicity is what the complex plane encodes as the dimensionality where rotations and translations share the same unit 1 starting point.
Which leads neatly to....
Quoting jas0n
And what was Newtonianism founded on but the (Noether) symmetry of rotation and translation. Or angular momentum and linear momentum.
So you can spin on the spot or roll in a straight line as an inertial degree of freedom. They are the two reciprocal faces of the same unit 1 identity operator that then let you start counting accelerations and decelerations within a coordinate-stabliised inertial reference frame where even being at "rest" is made a strictly relative state of affairs.
Reality is dichotomies, or switches, or ampheks, or signs, or quantum operators acting on infinte Hilbert spaces, or symmetry breaking in general, all the way down to ground. Which is then defined by the Planck triad of constants - that stand in their own final set of reciprocal relations. That becomes the Big Bang cut-off that says you can't go any smaller or hotter as the fabric of reality now becomes just a vagueness - the dissolutoion that is Wheeler's quantum foam.
Quoting jas0n
Well Peirce addressed this for language by making a triad out of the steps towards full-blown semiosis. The most hesitant sign is iconic (a relation of Firstness), the more definite sign is indexical (a relation of Secondness), and the fully realised sign is symbolic (the fixity of a habit, or Thirdness).
For example....
And I also addressed this in a more general way by echoing the usual observation that a mark can be granted extrinsic meaning precisely because it lacks intrinsic meaning.
I press my stylus into the wax. It makes a dent. It certainly draws attention to itself as a distinctive physical fact - a small and yet curiously precise effort someone has just made in a world where marks are distributed across the landscape with the maximally generic unconcern of a fractal or scalefree probability distribution.
And then you learn that the mark is in fact part of some larger mental structure - some community-level habit of interpretation. As more marks get made, you might start to think you could crack this cuneiform code.
So at the level of some single mark, it could be "just physics" - a complete material accident in a world composed of material accidents over all possible spatiotemporal scales. Or it could be "all mind" in being a purposeful act of encoding information.
A mark could be a switch. Or not a switch. And so it sits there right at the epistemic cut as an information bit that might also be understood as an entropic microstate.
Shannon and Gibbs formalised the probabilistic maths that made the two kinds of things equivalent - once you strip reality down to its own natural Planck scale cut-off to discover the Boltzmann constant, k.
Again this is why I would sound impatient with Wittgenstein or anyone who wants to just deal with language alone as the metaphysical issue. It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic.
And computer science, quantum holography, thermodynamics, and all the other new information theoretic approaches to foundational physics now show that semiosis is not just about the actual codes employed to fashion organisms with life and mind, it also can be given the pansemiotic twist where it becomes a physicalist description of nature in its own right.
Nature is switches or signs all the way down to the ultimate primal dichotomy that is encoded by the intrinsic reciprocality of the Planck constants.
One metaphysics to rule them all. :smile:
Ha. Well you know I think you are oversimplifying, but I recognize that you don't seem to need them. It's like starting from either the inside or the outside and ending up pretty much in the same place.
If meaning evolves dialectically/historically, then obscurity is often just a function of how embedded or not one is within a subculture. According to Braver, one famous continental philosopher found a famous anglo philosopher incomprehensible (can't remember the details.)
Derrida and Peirce on genesis and structure make an interesting comparison. To throw my two cents in, not to state a preference for one over the other , but just to delineate Derrida’s position on origins, his is binary hinge rather than a triadic dynamic.
For him , in the beginning there was the mark , trace , gramme, differance ( these terms are interchangeable).
They refer to an identity , subject or ipseity divided within itself in the very act of returning back to itself to repeat itself. Put differently, in order to constitute itself , the ‘I’ must borrow from what is other than itself. In this way there is at once a formal, transcendental , structural aspect to the mark ( that a meaning is being carried forward by being repeated or reflected back to itself) and an empirical, genetic aspect( in the very act of repeating itself or turning back around to glimpse itself it is exposed to alterity). This origin is not a vagueness or an indeterminacy but an undecidability . The mark is undecidable because there is no question of choosing between presence and absence, genesis and structure, form and content , the ideal and the empirical. Both are indissociable in a single mark. This is the complexity of the origin, its hinged articulation.
Derrida writes:
"The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(LI53)."
“Iterability makes possible idealization-and thus, a certain identity in repetition that is independent of the multiplicity of factual events- while at the same time limiting the idealization it makes possible:broaching and breaching it at once...the possibility of its being repeated another time-breaches, divides, expropriates the "ideal" plenitude or self-presence of intention,...of all adequation between meaning and saying. Iterability alters...leaves us no room but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say) (Limited, Inc,p.61)... It is not necessary to imagine the death of the sender or of the receiver, to put the shopping list in one's pocket, or even to raise the pen above the paper in order to interrupt oneself for a moment. The break intervenes from the moment that there is a mark, at once. It is iterability itself, ..passing between the re- of the repeated and the re- of the repeating, traversing and transforming repetition.”
Oh it's a nice piece of technology. I have an old switching theory textbook. It's beautiful stuff. And Peirce had the spirit of a scientist. That's clear from the subset of his stuff that's influenced me for years ( which is also there in James, however adulterated with other stuff.) For instance:
He doesn't want to babble about something unmeasurable. He moves toward what we can be objective about.
I'm not fully equipped to grasp this, but I appreciate the economy of principles involved. No small feat, grasping the life of the universe at all scales....My journey was (roughly) literature => philosophy => math, but I never abandoned any of stepping stones. My bias has been toward interpersonal sense-making (personality as a lens). I've loved programming since I was a kid, so it's natural for me to think of physical models as simulations (simplified worlds which we can watch evolve, with or without 'randomness.')
A Derridean point, by the way. Phonocentrism is 'bad' because it prioritizes speech as uniquely close to 'meaning stuff.' There is no privileged medium. The idea of a code is roughly that of the iterable token, something that can function in the absence of the 'intention' traditionally postulated to ground it.
Quoting apokrisis
That is the goal. Why? Is an appreciation for economy something basic? Informed or determined biologically? The single self ghost that haunts the body, the god ghost that haunts the sky, the unification of a body of knowledge, the necessity that a theory be consistent and comprehensive....
I love the theme you are touching on, and Limited Inc is one of D's books I've studied and enjoyed, but...the exposition (yours and his in the post above) is indulgently gnarly.
In other words, we don't ground/fix the 'meaning' of our sign in some private intention or unboxed beetle. It's a 'token' which is implicitly iterable. But signs have their [s]meaning[/s] only differentially (in relation to other signs), and the entire context/system drifts, so that the 'same' salute or secret handshake is not quite the same, anymore than the 'same' knight on a chessboard maintains some constant 'meaning' as the game advances.
Derrida is a bit confusing here by suggesting a gap between what we meant to say and what we actually said. This 'what we meant to say' is a kind of fiction or concept under erasure, seems to me. It's part of the view/picture that's being challenged. But we have no choice but to work within the prejudices we are challenging, as we drift on Neurath's boat.
Or that's my improvisation, which can never say an all that's always slipping away.
I think it really matters which path you take to arrive at the centre. Each path trains your brain in different sets of habits.
As I see it, both PoMo and AP are essentially reductionist and never escape that monism - whether they fetishise the monism of the one or the many.
So I say that the holism of pragmatism is the best path to approach metaphysics. Natural philosophy, systems science, etc. That gives you training in the habits of thought which are actually required to grasp the whole that is meant to be at the end of the trail.
My criticisms might sound light-hearted - as no professional philosopher is actually a dope. But also, I'm deadly serious about the systematic intellectual shortcoming of both the left and right of philosophy. They both want to start in simplicity to reach the complexity. And even PoMo's pluralism is a monistic simplicity in being merely structureless complication - unpruned variety.
I say you have to get the core idea - that reality has the irreducible complexity of a holistic relation - to get to the destination that metaphysics has in mind.
Quoting jas0n
My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; followed by a return run through the sciences and humanities. So picking up from a semiotic view of complexity => fundamental physics, geopolitics, and a catch-up with biology now that it has got interesting again.
Quoting jas0n
So the medium ain't the message then? :razz:
I would say there are good arguments why vocalisation beat, say, hand gestures as why language could in fact evolve.
Signing is perfectly fine as a medium for language now that the vocal version exists. Likewise writing.
Even the same parts of the brain are pre-adapted. It is convincing to argue that the hominid brain became both lateralised and got a new "articulate" motor planning area so as to make Homo habilis the first tool user, with nimble fingers and opposable thumb. But then a million years past and no evidence of a gesture based symbolic culture.
Then along comes Homo sapiens with a sudden change to its vocal cords. The throat and mouth had changed so that it was equipped with its own new dexterity - the ability in fact to dichotomise sound into vowels and consonants, and thus chop up the flow of noise into crisply bounded syllabic units.
Couple that trick - evolved for increased emotional expressiveness - with the already existing Broca's area specialised for handling fiddly finger actions, and grammatically structured symbolic speech was all ready to take off.
So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so.
But then even more privileged mediums showed up, like writing, printing, emojis, Tik-Tok?
Quoting jas0n
Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.
Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.
:up:
Underlined part reminds me of Gadamer.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#PosPre
I remember liking Gadamer.
Good points, so maybe Saussure wasn't such a bastard after all. Probably the medium independence idea is aimed at possibility more than actuality, such as another lifeform with different sense organs evolved on a different planet.
Quoting apokrisis
I did start with a big dose of pragmatism, which might be why I can appreciate thinkers on both sides. I'm not sure an end of the trail is possible. At the moment, I think that most systems have some blindspot or some thread that can be tugged until half of it unravels. I'm not committed to this view. I just tend to find that the elaboration and specification of a system reveals internal tensions. I do postulate an ineradicable ambiguity in all thinking.
Quoting apokrisis
Quite a journey! For better or worse, I'm am or at least have been as much an artist/musician as a laborer in the realm of concept. I'm an ex-Romantic, you might say, so I am not put off by Nietzsche or Derrida or even DADA manifestoes. Clearly you are more the pure scientist type.
I tend to agree, but the sign 'utility' only gets it meaning from other signs (or in the spaces between.) I read a few Dawkins books lately, so I'm tempted to read utility that way. But this points away from meaning altogether perhaps. I'm guess I'm OK with that, and with the coming heat death. Dark sense of humor, I guess.
I love his idea that our exploration/interpretation of the object is always also self-discovery. We 'are' our prejudices in a certain sense, and we are mostly invisible to ourselves. We are revealed in our revelation/interpretation of the other.
I don't know if you include Hegel in PoMo, but Braver's charting of the journey of 'anti-realism' from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Derrida features holism prominently. I can't help but think you are politicizing PoMo, and no doubt some of these thinkers have been applied to politics. To me the big theme that starts with Kant is mediation in terms of an impersonal concept scheme. This 'lens' or 'mirror' metaphor evolves from thinker to thinker. For Kant it was fixed and ahistorical. For the rest, not. In Saussure, every language user has an (imperfect) copy of the language system in his brain. For Feuerbach, thinking is not a function of the individual. I think in terms of a distributed, self-updating operating system...
[quote=Richard Feynman]Philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.[/quote]
:chin:
Nice vid.
Maybe scientists don't care, but I want insight on whether to trust or not trust the emission from this or that institution. Also don't like to just settle for the drift of concepts (such as scientists is whatever people called scientists are doing just now.) A cynic might say that we can't help being seduced by technology that gives us what we want. Perhaps that's mostly correct. A certain kind of pragmatist might take technology as the essence of science/knowledge. Its objectivity would just be the fact that it works independently of its users' trust in it, while god-talk and placebo pills would be something else.
Anyway, I'd love to get your input on this thread...
Obviously I like that Hegel tried to take a dialectical approach and Kant was also a systems thinker. And there is the Naturphilosphie lineage, with guys like Schelling. But if anti-realism is just another word for idealism, then it’s not solving any problems.
My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three.
Quoting jas0n
How language structures thought is complicated. A subject for some other day.
This reads like utter gibberish. Can you give an explanation with a concrete example.
Start with the mark I just made by stabbing the spatulate tip of a stick into a wax tablet. What next?
Quoting Joshs
I thought it couldn’t get worse and it did.
Really. Please try and put the essential idea into an intelligible form with concrete examples.
Well I'm not really trying to talk you in to checking them out. I just think Braver found a nice way to string them all together. They're all talking about the tribal mind, you might say. And this tribal mind 'is' the intelligible structure of the world in some sense (like a discrete sign system imposed on an otherwise undifferentiated continuum.) I do plan on reading more Peirce.
This passage from Ari is quoted in Of Grammatology.
Loaded with ore. First we have pure-concept => speech => writing. We have the 'same mental experience' with suggests Kant, especially w/ the last part. Our experiences are 'images' of some other kind of thing.
I've only really looked at Ari's ethics and poetics. Liked the ethics, can't remember the poetics it's been so long.
Kind of , except that I’d say there no ‘entire context’ for Derrida. That’s a structuralist notion, the idea of a centered structure, or distributed operating system, a dance of elements a camera could
capture as some overarching logic. Context for Derrida begins and ends with the singular mark. The drift originates with time, not interpersonal language , from one element to the next to the next. What differentiates Derrida’s thinking of sign from authors like Foucault is not the differential relation between signs , it’s the spilt within the sign. The sign is already an in-between, a transit , even before it’s relation to other signs.
Let’s translate this into something more concrete. Using your metaphor of the dance or a distributed system, how would we parse the ‘dance’ that takes place on this philosophy forum among its participants, or just between you and me in the present discussion? Is it a dialogical ping-pong game, with your words affecting , shaping and changing my experience as I read them and my response doing the same for you? Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread?
Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective.
Yes please.
Quoting Joshs
Curious that you would answer me in this roundabout fashion.
Quoting Joshs
Well my presence in this particular dynamic is now most marked by its absence. And I must make sense of that by seeking some larger point of view - a judgement about whether this a deliberate act, even a provocation, or the opposite, some benign and contingent event. You simply forgot/didn’t read/meant to reply separately.
So I see nothing but a web of organisation dynamics that has the usual social complexity of any game. PF has some kind of rules of conduct, some kind of shared spirit and mission, to which all its participants would contribute in terms of their own contingencies of personality, experience and habit.
Even on PF, which is as about as informally structured in terms of “how to productively behave” as it gets, some larger pattern of engagement emerges over time. And the expectations and agendas of participants are reciprocally shaped by that.
Quoting Joshs
So does that mean the personal is always primary, and also never complementary, to the public? Is that the thesis you wish to defend?
Seems dead in the water to me. But I await the supporting evidence. Along with a stab at translating the difference between Derrida’s binary hinge and Peirce’s triadic switch.
As an analysis of how language functions, it is perfectly familiar. But as a diagnosis of the human condition it is wilfully perverse.
The structure of language is what makes us human. It is the species defining characteristic. So to deconstruct that structure as a way to reach some more authentic - because unconstrained - state is bonkers.
The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment taken to its next level. Irrationally opposed to rationality, and in the process, making the case for rationality ever stronger.
Didn’t mean to ignore you. Was dreading the task of simplifying Derrida’s verbiage. Quoting apokrisis
But it seems to me that the shared agreed on rules and shared spirit only really exists as it is animated and redefined each actual engagement at each moment of time by individual participants. It is not that the interchange that is now taking place is constrained by norms that it is placed inside of, but rather my overall sense of the identity of PF is reshaped as the current interchange unfolds. What the forum stands for may change for me in a good way or a bad way, making me more or less enthusiastic about wanting to continue participating, or may inspire me to change my strategies of argumentation, or become more or less intense or serious. I may become more or less
focused on politically or empirically or spiritually oriented topics on here due to the unfolding interchanges. Other participants, meanwhile, are forming their own changing attitudes and interests. Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective?
That is presumed by the structuralist metaphysics here. Nothing "exists" except as a persistent and self-sustaining dynamical balance. An autopoietic system. A process. A Peircean Thirdness of habit.
I've said it a thousand times. It is totally part of the metaphysics of structure that the whole shapes the parts. And the parts in turn - reciprocally, in complementary causal fashion - construct the whole.
So the internet carves out some space - the enclosure that has the dialogic structure of a discussion board. We all enter knowing what kind of thing to do. Say something ... that gets a response. Sparks up some chain of back and forth that keeps going until it peters out.
This internet space even has a name - a proud boast. It is "The Philosophy Forum". Not even merely "a" philosophy forum. Standards have been set. This is philosophy central ... for all comers.
And then folk arrive, attracted to the free (or at least, minimally regulated) possibilities for personal expression that such a space affords. Havoc ensues. Any kind of randomness gets expressed. But also then chaos exerts its own constraints. Patterns emerge.
If I enter passionate about Nietzsche, and you enter passionate about what you make for your lunch and the chooks in your garden, then some kind of thermalising equilibrium results. For both of you to persist in interaction within the one space, you have to make some kind of connection that is some balance of these two interests. At the very least, you have to be able to fake a tolerance for Nietzsche-speak and chook-speech while each takes turns. But also there may be some degree of interest in how the two topic intersect as some Venn diagram.
This is just like injecting a particularly hot or cold particle into a vessel of particles at some common equilibrium state of temperature and pressure. After a few dozen bounces of the other particles - which have some characteristic bell curve distribution of momentums states - the hot particle would have cooled towards the average, the cold particle heated up to the same general statistical distribution.
So even as whacky and "human" an example as this discussion board can be concretely reduced to the principles of thermodynamics - thermodynamics being based on the metaphysics of self-organising emergence or dynamical balance.
It is the same irreducible triadicity of Thirdness - of global constraint shaping local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom (re)constructing that global state of constrain - all the way down to the ground. The same metaphysical model accounts for existence as persistence, the top-down stabilisation of bottom-up contingency, whether we are talking of social systems or fundamental particles.
OK. Passionate feelings expressed for the 1001th time. :grin:
Quoting Joshs
Exactly. We agree on the self-organising dynamic. So let's get back to the question of why Derrida's deconstruction is a project worth entertaining.
Quoting Joshs
If you reduce all systems to a thermodynamic basis, that then gives you some simple metrics. We could seek the equivalent of the forum's temperature and pressure. We could look for whatever macro-quality labels the Gaussian average of its microstates. Or given this is the internet and we are also dealing with a space that is only weakly closed, we might have some further discussion about whether we ought to apply a more powerlaw or scalefree analysis to the phenomenon in question.
So yes, it is pretty easy to imagine how to start quantifying the forum's structure - its fabric of interaction - in a model theoretic way. The objective part of the exercise is what any competent social scientist ought to be able to do.
The question that is subjective would be "why bother?". That is, who cares? And what isn't already so obvious that it needs a more exact mathematical description?
I mean why are we all still here - given a discussion board is a crude mechanism for enforcing the aggressive back and forth of the normal academic machine?
Being an academic, being an intellectual, means operating the impersonal dichotomising device of dialogic argument. Lumping and splitting. Finding whatever counts as the "other" view that you can most disagree with - and thus defining your own position as the only truly agreeable one.
The whole set-up is meant to enforce the strongest kind of personal disagreements so that we can all then arrive at the safe harbour of our own certitude. By accident, we find we arrive at some point where differences and no longer be found. And so then further interaction becomes dull. We drift away.
Of course this commitment to eternal disagreement is very odd behaviour for an essentially communal creature like the average human. Folk stumble into PF thinking it should be a happy and agreeable party. You need to have that stern academic training to think precisely the opposite.
So what ought to be the right metric that would make PF the kind of place you would most desire? I'm sure you have some vague idea of what would "make PF great again". And it could be more a low conflict place - a place of education where students learn how to accept given wisdom. Or it could be a more high conflict place - more like the actual bleeding edge of intellectual research. Or maybe you want more human contact, more talk about hobbies and friends.
Again, it is no problem that each of us may have a meta-goal for the forum - something that would describe its Goldilocks ideal state. The range of those meta-goals can then be thermalised to define that equilibrium state (really, such wisdom in a fairy tale!).
There is already the standard academic dichotomy to pluck out of the air - the spectrum spanned by the opposing poles of teaching and researching. That would be appropriate to the bold "this is a philosophical academy" banner place above the clubhouse door. The place is also just an internet clubhouse, so you would expect a lounge and chill out zone for those not that much interested in being taught, or doing research.
Does that capture meta-level vantage point view of what animates PF - the general structure that sets up some persistence of interaction?
And did Peirce or Derrida say it better!!??!! That is the burning issue, the challenge you seemed to want to take on. :up:
A mere tautology?
Quoting apokrisis
Assuming this is correct, do you think their notion of 'use' is equivalent to yours? Is personal transformation or even mere pleasure a use in your book?
Seems legit. :up:
Not exactly. Since saying that knowledge, to be of any use, must be useful, is not really saying anything, but seems to indicate that you think knowledge must, or should, be useful, I sought an answer as to whether you considered personal transformation or pleasure to be uses or, if you like, to be useful.
But that is not what was said.
I said: One metaphysics to rule them all!
Jason said: Why? Is that level of metaphysical economy basic for some reason.
I replied: Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful? Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.
So here, the communal goal is defined as useful knowledge. And pragmatism is given as Peirce's univocal totalising answer that both dishes that up as epistemology, and also as a convincing ontology.
So rather than a tautology, it is a claim of maximal self-consistency. Metaphysics has its central dichotomy - epistemology and ontology. Peircean Pragmatism makes the two a mirror image, thus eliminating all other -isms.
And this shows in that even poetry is meant to be culturally instructive.
I mean, they even teach it in school. And no education authority feels it is there to spend good tax payer funds so you can sit in class pleasuring yourself.
The fact that you will reply that poetry is instead the radical device you chose to disrupt such an institutionalised notion of "self improvement", only goes to show how useful poetry might be in every sense. You too could be John Cooper Clarke speaking truth to power, using words to smash the system.
The fact that utility might be a two-way street is already the central feature built into my systems approach, as I now repeat for the 1002nd time.
The Establishment wants to mould you with its carefully chosen curriculum examples of poetry. It dishes up the poetry that wanted to smash the system of its own fondly remembered youth.
If you were a wild young romantic like me - and you, and Jason, and any kid with any balls at all - you would have dramatically refused to read a single set book, play or poem at school, while also showing them by still getting one of the best English marks in the country and nursing the ambition of shaking things down to the ground with your own artistic revolt.
I mean I was so proud of my art that I spent whole maths lessons carving and inking a design that covered the full desktop. My triumph was complete when I saw it sitting outside the woodwork class as some chore to be given a third former with a sander.
So sure knowledge is useful. Knowledge is power. And society is an organism that flourishes to the degree it is a win-win of top-down wisdom shaping bottom-up free creativity.
And that essential dynamic is something to be expressed over all scales of human organisation. Social democracies hope to strike a balance between a general state education - that includes poetry - and also a tolerance for individuals acting up in ways that seem anti-social, but in fact are the making of some of its most productive and creative citizens.
There is also nothing against an individual themselves combining both poles of the dynamic - being both wise and creative, habitual and exploratory, rooted in the past and focused on the future .... keep adding your own slogans ...
So yes. One metaphysics to rule them all! Why the hell not? It certainly looks to always work, never fail.
Whereas pluralism? Not so much.
Paradoxical click bait, which is not to say that such gnomic absurdities can't be transformed dialectically into either commonplaces or slight advances on the source material. This kind of rhetorical onanism is why people hate Derrida and company.
Quoting Joshs
Ah yes. This is our favorite point of disagreement. As I see it, you demand on implosion. Everything is self, self, self...while I insist that bodies in the same world are more or less foundational.
Quoting Joshs
There's just lots of bodies talking/typing, projecting themselves as candidates for partial assimilation. No one can grasp all perspectives or even a fraction of human knowledge, but philosophers battle against this finitude by focusing on the big picture, grand narratives, the master discourse. A continuation of theology by other means...
True or false or too ambiguous to decide, I can't help but read this as more insistence on the preciousness of the particular personality. I've granted that we are all snowflakes, that we can live alone in the woods and write manifestoes. But he we are trying to hammer out a consensus, impose 'ourselves' (fused inheritance) on that larger dynamic. We are showing off our dance moves, as if compelled. Movement is toward the other, the tribe.
Yep. In case you hadn't seen it, this is Peirce's theory of truth as the limit of communal inquiry.
And while I am at it, the Pragmatic Maxim:
And in regards to Derrida:
And in advance of Popper:
In fact this whole set of lecture notes on Peirce and his grave misrepresentation by the likes of Rorty and Russell makes a damn fine response to the concerns raised in the OP.
Catherine Legg is great.
Ah yes, I was influenced by that too. Our thinking seems to be directed toward an ideal community (a better version of the current one.) The very notions of rationality and truth 'demand' or 'imply' a community in the same world. What can it mean to be wrong or irrational if I'm alone ? And what is meaning itself supposed to mean if I'm alone?
Quoting apokrisis
I'll check it out. Nice final quote too.
Just as they went for Saussure over Peirce for their general semiotics, they went for Bakhtin over Vygotsky for their particular model of how speech is the tool that structures thought.
Bakhtin pushed the open-endness of personal dialogue, Vygotsky was about the social closure of communal habits of thought.
So Saussure and Bakhtin weren't wrong about the half of the elephant they were describing, but they failed to give the full holistic account like Peirce and Vygotsky.
But then as a I said earlier, even until the 1990s, you really had to dig to discover the writings of Peirce and Vygotsky. The manuscripts were lost in the back of a Harvard library, or were untranslated Soviet era books that had already fallen foul of Stalinist politics.
Samizdat like Vygotsky's attack on Piaget that had to be dragged out of the bowels of the British Library, arriving on the clanking trolley three days later.
:lol:
Yep. Everyone wants to be an influencer. TikTok is truly the crucible for the development of your "more ideal community of tomorrow". :rofl:
The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand.
And PoMo always played that same influencer card in French society after all. Rebels without a clue ... but looking Parisian cool in a craggy old geezer way as they baffled a nation's TV audience on late night black and white.
Nothing changes, even as everything changes.
Exhibitionism. It seems like one of the ingredients even in the scientist/philosopher. TikTok has a mystical subculture, conspiracy theory subculture, and so on.They understand themselves to be truth-seeking and truth-sharing. What do we make of that? A universal urge to weave myth/science ?
Maybe. But I remember that folks were even afraid of pragmatism once. McLuhan's World city is new. The algorithms keeping us in bubbles is new. As far as Pomo goes, it has to be simplified to the usual vague rebellion in order to affect anyone outside a tiny bubble. Nietzsche is as radical as any of them and readable (which does not mean easy to understand, any more than the later Witt is.)
It's probably the stupidities in political extremes that are the most threatening.
The 'self-knowledge' of the 'distributed operating system' is also distributed. The 'subject' with 'experience' is a body plugged into a 'dance' with other bodies using language and technology. The 'minds' of these subject/bodies are themselves bundles of memes and habits (another level of distributed operating systems?). 'Perspective' is parasitic on the singularity of the body. It's only contingently true that each body 'plays' just one handle here. It'd maybe be better to have at least two, and to methodically exercise differing approaches with each. As 'a' philosopher, I feel like a team of explorers. But folks are confused if you switch gears/masks to quickly. Folks are maybe too attached also when forced to play a single mask.
The website echoes the culture at large in assigning one name, one locus of address and responsibility, to some projected ghost that lives in each body. Is the notion of perspective not dependent on the everyday experience of eyes aimed at the world from different positions in space?
Sometimes I think you are willing to dissolve the subject. Other times you seem to want to make it foundational.
Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...?
Isn’t it a case of the science answer becoming too complex and sounding much more like nonsense than the “facts” one can make up to justify one’s own theories. Plus the clear understanding that knowledge is power and so conspiracy theories are the only way for society’s powerless to reclaim power? To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme.
Quoting Agent Smith
Hell no. It’s game over for a species that depends on toilets that flush, energy, food and lighting at the click of a button or app.
:up:
Folks hate math and love interpersonal drama. As you know, some people like the weird stuff about QM woven into their new religion of virtuous aliens and channeling and so on.
One of my big interests in philosophy/psychology has always been the stories individuals tell themselves to navigate the lifeworld. I think of a practical base (don't play in traffic, pay your rent) on which an elaborate often-unpractical (relatively optional) self myth is built (which includes the self heroically in a world myth, naturally.) The dominant constraints on this self-myth are social. Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics, might be optimal for a young person trying to climb up the social ladder, get money, mate, and feed babies. This works as long as a specialized class invents and runs the machines...and suffers/articulates/navigates the ever-present constraints of nature (like the second law, working away, mostly ignored.)
Yeah, your well-reasoned positions, apok, seem very consistent with this "line" (genealogy). :cool:
Likewise, I'm confident with these tres hombres Epicurus => Sextus Empiricus => Spinoza.
:up:
Our knowledge as a species is so great (mirroring a super-differentiated economy) that the individual is forced to blindly trust a system which no one can see in its entirety...hence simplifying fantasies of heroes and villains with simple motives, with a real grip on the controls.
I sometimes feel my body's a machine and there are things, like lighting up my coffin nail, I can do apparently as easily as clicking a button. I dunno. :chin:
Systems thinking connects my three. What connects yours? Ethics? Equanimity? How to live?
Even just being rational about public health choices, like the crazy anti-vaxx arguments from folk who are then only too keen to take horse worming tablets instead. Or the 5G conspiracies from folk who think a diet of industrial corn syrup and seed oil is not going to kill them faster.
Doesn't this require a theory that others exist and write stuff down for you to then read later? How is that any different than trusting scientific theories? Seems to me that many here are using scribbles they see on some paper as the foundation of everything.
It's strange that we question our senses when doing science, but not philosophy, or at least in reading late philosophers' writings?
Quoting jas0n
It seems to me that language itself is a technology.
Quoting I like sushi
Right. Seems to me that a proper theory of consciousness would resolve this issue. But then how do we go about doing that if not by our own observations of our own consciousness and the reasoning that goes along with it? It would seem to me that if consciousness is real and in the world, then its functions are part of the world too, and possibly exist in other places in the world (as in other minds).
Meaning whether something ‘exists’ or is ‘imagined’ is of no concern from the phenomenological perspective as the experience (‘real’ or not) is still an experience.
Ontology (relational, actualist) and ethics (eudaimonia praxis) "connect" them for me. From this genealogy, as a consequence, deflation of epistemology (e.g. fallibilism, methodological naturalism, absurdism) preoccupies me.
Then Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the existence of experience. That is the starting point and from there it must be asked why it exists the way that it does - as an experience of an external world - if an external world doesn't exist (the external world is imagined).
It is a little like solipsism yet completely NOT that :D You just put things like that aside and notice objects of experience whilst not looking at them as necessarily there or not but investigating the experience.
He refers to ‘parts’ and ‘moments’. For example removing a leg from a table still leaves it as a ‘table,’ but to remove the mass of the table is simply not something comprehend. Or to think of a sound with no timbre … we cannot. Other views are to notice that things are what Husserl likes to call ‘pregnant’. Meaning when you see the table you understand it as having only a partial view of it yet you experience it as a whole object with inside bits and bits at the back.
Phenomenology lacks empirical measures. But phenomenology is a method of approach rather than a universal view. Its aim is endless.
So something like this from Merleau-Ponty:
” My friend Paul and I point out to each other certain details of the landscape; and Paul's finger, which is pointing out the church tower, is not a finger-for-me that I think of as orientated towards a church-tower-for-me, it is Paul's finger which itself shows me the tower that Paul sees, just as, conversely, when I make a movement towards some point in the landscape that I can see, I do not imagine that I am producing in Paul, in virtue of some pre-established harmony, inner visions merely analogous to mine: I believe, on the contrary, that my gestures invade Paul's world and guide his gaze. When I think of Paul, I do not think of a flow of private sensations indirectly related to mine through the medium of interposed signs, but of someone who has a living experience of the same world as mine, as well as the same history, and with whom I am in communication through that world and that history.”(Phenomenology of Perception, p.471)
“ In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are inter-woven into a single fabric, my words and those of my interlocutor are called forth by the state of the discussion, and they are inserted into a shared operation of which neither of us is the creator. We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world. In the present dialogue, I am freed from myself, for the other person's thoughts are certainly his; they are not of my making, though I do grasp them the moment they come into being, or even anticipate them. And indeed, the objection which my interlocutor raises to what I say draws from me thoughts which I had no idea I possessed, so that at the same time that I lend him thoughts, he reciprocates by making me think too. It is only retrospectively, when I have withdrawn from the dialogue and am recalling it that I am able to reintegrate it into my life and make of it an episode in my private history”. (Phenomenology of Perception, p.413))
Or this from Shaun Gallagher on ‘socially distributed cognition':
“To the extent that the instituted narrative, even if formed over time by many individuals, transcends those individuals and may persist beyond them, it may loop around to constrain or dominate the group members or the group as a whole.”
“Collective (institutional, corporate) narratives often take on a life (an autonomy) of their own and may come to oppose or undermine the intentions of the individual members. Narrative practices in both extended institutional and collective structures and practices can be positive in allowing us to see certain possibilities, but at the same time, they can carry our cognitive processes and social interactions in specific directions and blind us to other possibilities."
Or this from Gabrielle Chiari:
“In other words, it is possible to conceive the relationship between two or more persons not in terms of "interacting" individuals, but of elements of an inseparable system in which the relationship precedes the individual psychologies.”
Quoting jas0n
That’s because you’re noticing a very strange paradox or seeming contradiction in my thinking, an apparent move on my part to dissolve and deconstruct subjectivity while at the same time maintaining a peculiar emphasis on self-belonging, assimilative consistency and similarity, pragmatic relevance and thematic continuity.
How can one possibly claim the latter features as irreducible to ongoing experience without supposing an ideal , rationalist , solipsist, foundational internal gyroscope operating behind the scenes to accomplish such an order? Isn’t this the very essence of a Cartesian Subject?
So the assumption here is that the kind of order depicted by ongoing pragmatic ‘self-similarity’, or as Derrida says, continuing to be the same differently, must originate in a fat content specifying the basis of this order. If events of meaning are claimed to be self-similar, they must be similar in the basis of conformity to an extant context of meaning that dominates and dictates this order. That’s what Cartesian subjects do, they reify content. Put differently, they arbitrarily specify a certain content as the basis of a rational order. So there would seem to be a direct relation between the ‘fatness’ of a grounding content and the violence and dominating , arbitrary force and power it is assumed to harbor.
When we deconstruct classic notions of subject and object, we divest these concepts of their arbitrary, dominating , polarizing ethical power.
In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.
The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality?
Such a question led Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin to make the turn from language to temporality.
Quoting jas0n
Different positions that are synthetically correlated to
produce a unitary image in 3 dimensional depth.
The self is a synthetic achievement, not an a priori. The self can be lost though depersonalization, schizophrenia, etc.
It exists as the experience of something in a certain. mode of givenness, as recollection, fantasy , perception, etc. These are distinctions between what is directly and what is indirectly experienced. But even what is directly experienced in perception doesn’t tell you very much about the ‘real’ world, because it only exists as what it is for the instant of its appearance. We don’t see chairs and tables and quarks , we see a constantly changing flow of senses of the world. We construct out of this changing flow what we call real objects. But Husserl says this ‘real’ world of spatial things is relative and contingent. It could always turn out to be other than what we construct it to be. So the external world thought of as the empirically natural world of real objects does not exist for Husserl as an irreducible fact, only as a conjecture.
What seems absent here is the acknowledgement that yes, this distributed systems view of self-organisation and dynamical balance is correct. Even fundamental physics says the same thing in its attempts to create a grand unified theory, such as loop quantum gravity. As do neural network approaches to modelling the brain. So this is not just a now widely held view, there are many mathematical models of it.
But then also, all such models need some pragmatic goal or finality. They are maximising or optimising some value. It is this that determines the patterns of integration and differentiation, of the nodes vs the connections, of the particle excitations vs their vacuum backdrops, etc.
So if a culture is regarded as being deconstructable to its vacuum state - some level ground of pure reactivity; and that flatness would be the general potential that is language as a system of sign - a system that starts untextured by any meanings, and so is the originary state in lacking any intrinsic content, lacking any bumps and hollows or distinctions between what is a node, what is the network; then yes, we can imagine culture having the unbound plurality of that everythingness, that Apeiron which is a vacuum in its ground state.
Yet humans are already neurobiologically enactive systems, embedded in a world that imposes existential challenges on their integrity as organisms. The minute that symbolic language exists to originate a flat and endlessly open world of reference, it is already being closed by the pragmatic demands of negotiating a state of cultural relations that are fundamentally constrained by that prior existence of a body in an actual physical world.
Endlessly deferring reference and infinitely plural interpretation may exist in theory. But in practice, they become just an informational resource to be consumed. The business in hand for the social organism is surviving and spreading in the real world. That is the optimising function. And to the degree that is not being recognised in a culture's organismic economy, the organism is sick, pathological, dysfunctional.
Maybe you have the intention to recover this pragmatic functionality, this natural finality, once you have established the flat plurality of language as a new technology of reference or interpretance?
But that would be my point. The semiotic value of language is that it can indeed refer to anything. Yet there is no actual value in that until sharp choices have been made. The plurality of possibility is what the relevant optimisation function erases. Meaning arises via the constraint of all that is irrelevant. Signal is filtered from noise by the discard of information.
Yes. And I generally agree with the other quotes too.
Let me stress again the distinction of body and ego. The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention.* It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. Accounts dissolving the 'foundation' of bodies in a world tend to depend on what they dissolve and lapse into an absurdity that's hard to recognize in all the smoke.
I think we are both challenging the assumption that "reason is a cognitive faculty of the individual thinking subject that is employed as an instrument for apprehending truths." Feuerbach understands the alternative as "thinking is not an activity performed by the individual, but rather by “the species” acting through the individual....In thinking,I am bound together with, or rather, I am one with—indeed, I myself am—all human beings.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/
Of course different bodies have obtained different degrees of participation in 'one and the same' reason. Feuerbach's transitional account is still trailing clouds of glory from Hegel. So we can jump forward to Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida...or to any thinker who dissolves the subject (not the body) into culture or language or social habit.
*The issue of whether it makes sense to talk of a 'pure witness' is something else. I can only grok it in terms of a collapse of consciousness into being. 'It's not how but that the world is there that is the mystical.' A healthy brain in some external world is the condition of possibility for experience a world in which there are healthy brains.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip ?
:up:
Quoting apokrisis
:up:
:up:
These qualities seem to apply to both the individual 'subject' and the tribe's self-understanding as a whole. That fits a distributed operating system metaphor. If 'I' am an experimental version of the tribal ego, then 'I' am going to be similar to 'us.'
Well put. This is social psychology 101 ... well, for some, like Andy Lock and the semiotic/symbolic interactionist/Vygotskian psychology crowd.
A useful resource here would be Andy Lock's summaries of George Herbert Mead, Jacob von Uexkull, and Lev Vygotsky.
I was just looking into Vygotsky, found some online texts. A summary will be helpful. Thanks.
Only two? I thought you had many more than that. And yet the approaches do not differ enough such as to be unrecognizable as one. Keep trying I guess.
How do you know I have trouble following a single thread?
I wasn't meaning to offend you; I thought that was what you were referring to; your multiple personas on this site. I have had only one, but it's true I did change the name of that one from John to Janus.
Why so upset, such as even to refer to me as "bitch"?
Two would be enough if we could force folk to be have both a self and anti-self. You would have to show a dialectical self-duality by being jasOn and anti-jasOn .... just like the only Superman plot twist that was worth a damn. :razz:
Researchers in enactive cognition like Evan Thomson and Ezekiel DePaulo define a living body as a self-organizing system that can be defined by a certain operational closure or autonomy with respect to its environment, and link this thinking with phenomenological work on intentionality and being-in-the -world by Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger. This same autonomy defines it as a sense-making cognizing system. Sense-making is intrinsically affective because it is normative. Behavior and sense-making is oriented on the basis of purposes and goals that define this autonomy. Events matter to a sense-making creature , which means its ‘self’, its ongoing synthetic identity, is not dissolvable into a reciprocal mesh of socially distributed discursive practices any more than its body is dissolved into a reciprocal interchange between it and its environment. Sense-making is embodied ina body which is embedded in a world. That mean that sense-making cannot be separated from body and world. But neither can body understood apart from world and from sense-making. The three aspects are indissociable, but assymetrical in favor of the embodied cognizer.
“Living as sense-making in precarious conditions is systemically generated, with living beings enacting environments that pull them along into certain rhythms, behaviours, and internal transformations. (This point becomes especially important when we remember that the environment is always an environment of other living beings—bacteria do not live in isolation but in microbial communities.) The organism enacts an environment as the environment entrains the organism. Both are necessary and neither, by itself, is sufficient for the process of sense-making.
But now comes the tricky point. What we have just said implies that the relation between organism and environment is reciprocal, for each acts as a control parameter for the other. But this kind of reciprocity does not imply that their relation is not also asymmetrical, in the relevant sense of asymmetry. Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living be-ings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.
Cognition is sense-making in interaction: the regulation of coupling with respect to norms established by the self-constituted identity that gives rise to such regulation in order to conserve itself. This identity may be that of the living organism, but also other identities based on other forms of organizationally closed networks of processes, such as sociolinguistic selves, organized bundles of habits, etc. Some of these identities are already constituted by processes that extend beyond the skull. But in any case, cognition is always a process that occurs in a relational domain. Unlike many other processes (e.g. getting wet in the rain) its cognitive character is given nor-matively and asymmetrically by the self-constituted identity that seeks to preserve its mode of life in such engagements. As relational in this strict sense, cognition has no location. It simply makes no sense to point to chunks of matter and space and speak of containment within a cognitive system. Inspect a baby all you want and you'll never find out whether she's a twin (Di Paolo)
So I am the only fully unified poster around these parts. I am fluent in the logic of both extreme points of view. I can speak for the mechanical and the organic while showing how they are also one and the same.
That may sound like it means a need for three identities, but really it means that I am the only person who could rightfully claim to be a monist - as I accept the irreducible triality of the Peircean system. :cool:
I cash this self-duality out on many occasions. Who else says the secret of the holistic organism is that it is indeed based on the very mechanical thing of a switch - Pattee's epistemic cut.
And I also say what a big surprise that has been. Having started out as a reductionist - top in the class for that - I then swung to the "other" of holism, and the history of how philosophy, science, logic and maths have been trying to imagine that.
But with Peircean semiotics and Pattee's epistemic cut, the loop is closed. And in spectacular fashion with the biophysics and biosemiotics revolution of the past decade or so.
I will repost my old note on how machinery was eventually found to be at the beating holistic heart of life and mind - a synopsis of Peter Hoffman's very readable Life's Ratchet.
Graph of the convergence zone: Phillips, R., & Quake, S. (2006). The Biological Frontier of Physics Physics Today 59
The move from one to two would be decisive. In the practical world, we need to track bodies, feed or age the right one, so merely changing one's legal name requires a preliminary public notice, almost nullifying this change, ensuring the legal name's function as a kind of toe-tag.
Of course going farther and performing opposed personalities is just madness. One is one around here, probably because it's an efficient way to integrate an organism into its group, and I'd guess there's even a biological basis as well at this point.
It seems norms proper to that realm are thoughtlessly dragged along into an online space that offers new possibilities.
Using two handles simultaneously violates the spirit and perhaps the letter of the rules, so I haven't and won't do it. But if the norms were different, I'd love to try to outdo some of my opponents at their own game, show them the opposition I'd love to see (because it'd force the best out of 'me.')
I'm aware that one can stretch the term. Recall that I've insisted on a perhaps necessary ambiguity when it comes to specifying the 'practical' foundation of bodies in a world. Some kind of hazy indirect realism seems implicit in the philosophical enterprise. We are either talking about the same world or writing poetry. If you tell me we are co-creating the world (which may be true if limited to the social world), then you are saying something that's true only if/because everyone believes it.
I don't deny that the body/environment boundary is blurry or imperfect, an abstraction. I'm just floating the radical hypothesis that we are animals on the same planet who communicate using sounds and marks, primarily for 'animal'/practical reasons (to feed, breed, safely crowd into cities...)
Do you mean to say that it is intrinsically affective as the body's physiology - ruled by the reciprocal economy of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system - must reset itself constantly so that the organism is not just perceptually or cognitively embodied in its world, but pragmatically in terms of the right physiological state?
The brain gives over as much cortical space to mapping the world in terms of orientation responses as it does to motor plans. And that is because the body need to marry its own variety of states to the variety of states it senses in the world.
We don't just see that a gang of Hells Angels are dressed in black and sat astride noisy bikes. We feel the tension and violence that is also "out there" in our Umwelt - because that is the physiological change in state we ourselves, as bodies, are rapidly making in anticipation of what actions to take and where next to look.
This may be "normative" in being a semiotic habit - buried deep down in the "reptilian brain". Is that what you mean, neurobiologically speaking?
Quoting Joshs
I must protest. To be reciprocal is the definition of an asymmetry. And it doesn't seem a tricky point.
Though it also becomes easier to appreciate when approached through the structuralism of hierarchy theory that shows the local~global scales across which the symmetry as very literally asymmetrically broken.
Quoting Joshs
Correct. :up: No point just having a dualistic division. It must be an enactive relation. An organism must model its world in the form of an optimising dynamical balance. Bayesian brain 101.
But again, that has surprises up its sleeve. The consequence is that the organism strives to be come a collection of habits and routines which - instead of being representationally conscious of the world - is in fact predicated on the effort to ignore as much of the world as possible. To function as an automaton.
Or to put it more believably, to already know the world in advance and so subtract that away and leave only the self - the model that just did the prediction - as the thing that might draw any attention to itself.
If in my mind I have already sweetly struck the tennis return, the only thing worth noting is that there was this "I" that imposed its will on nature. It is only when I then turn out to have fucked up the shot that instead the world exists in contrast to this "me", this locus of all will and meaning.
That is when "I" point to the divot that caused the bad bounce, or curse the small distracting noise in the crowd, or whatever else can take the blame, and so "other" the fuck-up as something external to my ego.
I like the idea of that challenge. Could I create a sockpuppet so convincing that it could never read as me? But practically speaking, I waste too much time here as it is.
I apologize for the insult, and I regret losing my temper. We've discussed this topic before, and it wasn't a terribly pleasant conversation, so your bringing it up again seemed hypocritically aggressive. If you review, I think you'll see that it was a misreading, that I was clearly talking about more than a mere name change.
Seems to me the distinction you’re pointing to here is between volitional and non-volitional self -awareness , not between an event lacking a component of ‘self’ and one that includes it ( or creates it). If ‘self’ is merely the thread of minimal continuity in ongoing experience that allows the world to be recognizable moment to moment as familiar in some fashion with respect to previous expereince, then deliberate vs accidental , willful vs passive , agential vs non-agential are just different modes of this ‘self’- continuity. Even the most narrow focus on an event , seemingly to the complete exclusion of all reference to a self , presupposes a hierarchy of interlinked background meanings supplying the event with a sense of relevance and intelligibility.
https://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/
Anyway aplologies for any misunderstanding.
I appreciate the friendly words.
It'd be great to hear your thoughts on Popper's swamp, which has hardly been touched. Observation statements are tricky! 'Experience' is pre-logical, one might say, since logic is about relationships between statements. Which statements count as basic (not needing justification by still other statements) is maybe unformalizable. Reminds me of On Certainty.
Compare with this.
https://hamandcheese.medium.com/what-makes-me-hegelian-99d329dbd136
But I was saying that both levels of response are levels of self-world modelling.
What is volitional in your neuroscientific understanding? In mine, the line you are talking about is between attentional and habitual levels of response. And both are implementations of the same self-world dynamic, just with different spatiotemporal scales.
My habit self is the one that has to do the real work in tennis. Years of habit formation means a set of skills that can be “thoughtlessly” emitted in a tenth to a fifth of a second. And then any attentional response must lag as that takes at least half a second to kick in. It is also the experimental mode where “I” must experiment and try out in a “volitional” way that - as any beginning tennis player knows - is as awkward and glitchy as heck.
So there are two levels of selfhood to go with the two levels of world-making. And the brain has two general levels of neurology - the midbrain striatum and the cortex - to split the chores.
The brain dichotomises, as all effective structure must. And then it integrates the two work flows so seamlessly that “you” get used to not even noticing. Until a divot less than a fifth of second from your ball strike makes it bounce in unpredicted fashion, and you find “yourself” half a second later already involved in making plausible excuses.
Quoting Joshs
Yep. And even when we are acting on automatic pilot, I am saying that is still acting from a self-centred point of view.
So “being conscious” is not even the point of having a conscious brain. The brain is trying to optimise you for efficient unconscious habit.
If we are to break with Cartesian representationalism and enter the happy kingdom of enactive cognition, this is one of the central paradigm shifts. I wasn’t sure that PoMo has understood that. And I’m certain Peircean semiosis was founded on the idea that the fixity of habit is the goal of cognition, not the endless free play of sign, or the plurality of viewpoints.
Catherine Legg is good on this very point…. https://core.ac.uk/download/29202694.pdf
What does it mean to investigate the experience if not to attribute some cause to the experience, or ponder why it is the way it is if there is no external world?
Quoting I like sushi
This all implies that there are tables that have sides and insides that are not part of our visual experience because we have to imagine that we are experiencing them when we aren't. There is a different in experiencing the visual of one side of a table and imagining the other side.
Right, so going back to what I said to you before, if you can't trust your senses then how do you know that you read Husserl correctly because words on a page are part of the 'real' world. You are making a special pleading for ink marks on a page that you are not making for everything else that you experience. How can we communicate if we can't trust our senses?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You can’t trust the contingent content of your senses, such as ink marks on a page, to the extent that they link to meanings that are relative to individual interpretation. But are all aspects of meaning contingent and relative , or are there certain universals that one can be ‘apodictically certain’ of, as Husserl puts it, like Descartes’ Cogito?
Husserl uses a method he calls eidetic variation to allow the contingent aspects of meanings to drop out and revel to us these unchanging primitives. So what are these grounding principles of phenomenology? They have to
do not with the specific content but with the formal
structural form in which all objects are given to a subject. Specifically, they deal with the universal
temporal structures of retention, presentation and protention which are presupposed by all sensory experience .
Quoting jas0n
Quoting jas0n
My initial thought is that statements which count as basic are statements which have come to be accepted because they reflect what is common, most universal, to all of human experience. Is this "ecosystem" of 'self-evident' experience rightly captured in the metaphor of "swamp"? A swamp has no firm bedrock (which was Wittgenstein's metaphor for the set of hinge propositions which form the terrain over which the river of human life flows) to be found. We can touch the stream bed as it is more or less firm.
So, the question seems to be as to what is the difference between the two metaphors. Wittgenstein (if memory serves) allows that hinge propositions might change (as the river of human experience and judgement erodes here and silts up there). A swamp is an ecosystem thriving on a bed of fathomless ooze. Unlike Kant's sharp distinction between phenomena and noumena. the observability of the life of the swamp fades into the mud.
It has been pointed out by Sellars, McDowell and Brandom (following Hegel?) that, if sense experience is to be counted as justification for any propositional claims, it must be "conceptually shaped" all the way down. But what could this mean?
We know, on account of our very ignorance, that we are affected by the world at a pre-cognitive level; this means that, despite our ability to analyze the function of the various sensory structures via which we gain access to experience of a world, we cannot become conscious of this very most basic affectivity. It is ineluctably vague and subject only to our most recondite speculations.
So it is not consciousness which is most basic to our experience of a world, but unconsciousness, a primordial unfathomable affectivity.
Statements are just scribbles on a page, or sounds in the air. It seems to me that logic pre-exists statements, as it requires logic to understand that things are being said with scribbles and sounds in the air in the first place. Logic is essentially the manipulation of sensory-data for the purpose of predicting and understanding future experiences. Babies logically (and naturally I might add) arrive at the notion of object permanence (abandoning solipsism in favor of realism) without the use of any statements.