An Autopsy of the Enlightenment.
There can be no private language, and therefore no private mind.
The above outlines the topic, and serves as a preliminary description of the corpse. Now some might wish to argue that "... modern Western liberalism: secular, pluralistic, rule-of-law-based, with an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms". is not dead yet. But as this is only a virtual autopsy, and has to take place before the wretched corpse is buried for good and all, I can assume the death from various words and deeds of Western leaders, who find it convenient to pay lip-service to enlightenment principles whilst undermining them in practice. And with that assumption declared, I shall say no more about how the enlightenment lives on in modern politics, but assuming its death, proceed with the dissection.
Here is my scalpel; it is an ancient one, but still sharp.
Science is all about measurement, and measurement is all about ratios. For one to be 6 foot tall, is to have a ratio between height and foot length of about 6:1. And from 'ratio' is derived the terms 'rational' and rationalism. Now Socrates counters Protagoras in a way neatly summarised in the comments
here. {Please read this link, it's very short, but important to understand.}
This is an early version of the conundrum that still haunts us in the form of a dispute about subjectivity and objectivity, but what the enlightenment did was to come down firmly on both sides. It carves out a realm of physicality that is entirely separate from the mind of man and calls that the objective world, and relegates morality to the subjective world of Protagoras, where all is relative to man and thus a matter of opinion. The 'is/ought' separation begins here.
Science will tell us what is nutritious and what is poisonous as a matter of objective fact, but which is better is subjective. To those who want to survive for a while, it may seem to be that nutrition is good, and poison is bad, but if someone wants to die, the opposite is true. A familiar position; how can one argue against it?
The problem, is that I might decide that nutrition is good for me, but poison for you is also good for me. Your counter that you want to live carries no weight with me, that's just subjective. And science, objectivity, rationality are unable to adjudicate; they have abdicated from ruling this realm. Our disagreement is a matter of your life or death, and there are no means of resolution available to the enlightened mind.
You might be a little concerned about this. You might wonder how this division arose in this form. You might wonder how the Socratic argument got to be defeated in the moral realm, and was victorious in the physical realm.You might wonder how come we live in these two incompatible and incommensurable worlds simultaneously. But likely not. Science works, and that's the way it is - shrug.
It's all Descartes's fault! His meditations are an attempt to escape the limitations of the phenomenal world. The method of doubt rejects the reality of phenomena as illusions and fixes on thought as the one undeniable reality. Man is a thinking thing. Well you can read the argument from there if you want, but my main concern is with the manner of his construction of sceptical doubt, which is the foundation of his philosophy and is in diametric opposition to the Socratic tradition of dialogue. That is the revolution in philosophy that he inaugurated.
And what this does is establish for him the isolated individual mind as a world of its own, and a separate realm of matter, and the third realm of God. The sovereign individual is born of his meditations, may he rot in hell. The mind is sovereign in its own world of thought, and indirectly contacts the material world and can form true thoughts about it, because God is good or some such.
It is this isolated yet undeniable self, that now constitutes the subjective realm, undeniable and unarguable because isolated, and the material world becomes shared and objective, because it is not the phenomena that are shared, but the ideas and thoughts we have about the phenomena. If this is sounding upside down and inside out, well you are not alone!
Because we do not start alone, but within a (m)other, within a family, within a community, within an already minded world. The thoughts that Descartes takes for his indubitable private realm, are handed down and taught him by that minded world, right down to the very idea of scepticism - not French at all, but ancient Greek. We post, we argue with and against each other. And that is why I remain unenlightened. Doubt the self, not the community.
So there is my crude autopsy of the system of thought that I think we have already outlived, but perhaps not by very long, You can fill in the details, offer corrections, or tell another story altogether. But I am going to take a break from this site, so I won't be responding for now. Instead, to bring the topic back to the present, and by way of some sort of personal explanation of my motivations, I offer this interview with David Suzuki. Is it too late? Of course! (The video does not seem to like being embedded so I offer the Youtube link and the blatently gay interviewers' podcast instead. The video is called, "the Brutal Truth About Climate Change ft David Suzuki."
Have loads of fun, and farewell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab1ePZHF1dQ&list=TLPQMTQxMTIwMjUB66KeuKxdwQ&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/sidenotepodcast
The Enlightenment was the age of the triumph of science (Newton, Leibniz, Bacon) and of philosophy (Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu). Unlike the Renaissance philosophers, they no longer sought validation in the texts of the Greco-Roman philosophers, but were predicated more solidly on rationalism and empiricism. There were atheists among them, and devout Christians, but if there was a common belief about the divine among Enlightenment philosophers, it was probably deism.https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/01/whats-the-difference-between-the-renaissance-and-the-enlightenment.html
The political philosophy of the Enlightenment is the unambiguous antecedent of modern Western liberalism: secular, pluralistic, rule-of-law-based, with an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms. Note that none of this was really present in the Renaissance, when it was still widely assumed that kings were essentially ordained by God, that monarchy was the natural order of things and that monarchs were not subject to the laws of ordinary men, and that the ruled were not citizens but subjects.
The above outlines the topic, and serves as a preliminary description of the corpse. Now some might wish to argue that "... modern Western liberalism: secular, pluralistic, rule-of-law-based, with an emphasis on individual rights and freedoms". is not dead yet. But as this is only a virtual autopsy, and has to take place before the wretched corpse is buried for good and all, I can assume the death from various words and deeds of Western leaders, who find it convenient to pay lip-service to enlightenment principles whilst undermining them in practice. And with that assumption declared, I shall say no more about how the enlightenment lives on in modern politics, but assuming its death, proceed with the dissection.
Here is my scalpel; it is an ancient one, but still sharp.
Protagoras:Man is a measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are and of things that are not, that they are not.
Science is all about measurement, and measurement is all about ratios. For one to be 6 foot tall, is to have a ratio between height and foot length of about 6:1. And from 'ratio' is derived the terms 'rational' and rationalism. Now Socrates counters Protagoras in a way neatly summarised in the comments
here. {Please read this link, it's very short, but important to understand.}
This is an early version of the conundrum that still haunts us in the form of a dispute about subjectivity and objectivity, but what the enlightenment did was to come down firmly on both sides. It carves out a realm of physicality that is entirely separate from the mind of man and calls that the objective world, and relegates morality to the subjective world of Protagoras, where all is relative to man and thus a matter of opinion. The 'is/ought' separation begins here.
Science will tell us what is nutritious and what is poisonous as a matter of objective fact, but which is better is subjective. To those who want to survive for a while, it may seem to be that nutrition is good, and poison is bad, but if someone wants to die, the opposite is true. A familiar position; how can one argue against it?
The problem, is that I might decide that nutrition is good for me, but poison for you is also good for me. Your counter that you want to live carries no weight with me, that's just subjective. And science, objectivity, rationality are unable to adjudicate; they have abdicated from ruling this realm. Our disagreement is a matter of your life or death, and there are no means of resolution available to the enlightened mind.
You might be a little concerned about this. You might wonder how this division arose in this form. You might wonder how the Socratic argument got to be defeated in the moral realm, and was victorious in the physical realm.You might wonder how come we live in these two incompatible and incommensurable worlds simultaneously. But likely not. Science works, and that's the way it is - shrug.
It's all Descartes's fault! His meditations are an attempt to escape the limitations of the phenomenal world. The method of doubt rejects the reality of phenomena as illusions and fixes on thought as the one undeniable reality. Man is a thinking thing. Well you can read the argument from there if you want, but my main concern is with the manner of his construction of sceptical doubt, which is the foundation of his philosophy and is in diametric opposition to the Socratic tradition of dialogue. That is the revolution in philosophy that he inaugurated.
And what this does is establish for him the isolated individual mind as a world of its own, and a separate realm of matter, and the third realm of God. The sovereign individual is born of his meditations, may he rot in hell. The mind is sovereign in its own world of thought, and indirectly contacts the material world and can form true thoughts about it, because God is good or some such.
It is this isolated yet undeniable self, that now constitutes the subjective realm, undeniable and unarguable because isolated, and the material world becomes shared and objective, because it is not the phenomena that are shared, but the ideas and thoughts we have about the phenomena. If this is sounding upside down and inside out, well you are not alone!
Because we do not start alone, but within a (m)other, within a family, within a community, within an already minded world. The thoughts that Descartes takes for his indubitable private realm, are handed down and taught him by that minded world, right down to the very idea of scepticism - not French at all, but ancient Greek. We post, we argue with and against each other. And that is why I remain unenlightened. Doubt the self, not the community.
So there is my crude autopsy of the system of thought that I think we have already outlived, but perhaps not by very long, You can fill in the details, offer corrections, or tell another story altogether. But I am going to take a break from this site, so I won't be responding for now. Instead, to bring the topic back to the present, and by way of some sort of personal explanation of my motivations, I offer this interview with David Suzuki. Is it too late? Of course! (The video does not seem to like being embedded so I offer the Youtube link and the blatently gay interviewers' podcast instead. The video is called, "the Brutal Truth About Climate Change ft David Suzuki."
Have loads of fun, and farewell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab1ePZHF1dQ&list=TLPQMTQxMTIwMjUB66KeuKxdwQ&index=3
https://www.youtube.com/sidenotepodcast
Comments (100)
It’s a common story told in a common way. We literally start “within” a mother, within a womb. This fact gives the argument a little force. But then for some reason we have to switch to our figurative voice. We’re “within” a community, figuratively, as if a community was a thing within which we can contain ourselves. This figurative language is used routinely in arguments against individualism.
Of course, you wouldn’t mention that the umbilical chord is cut shortly after birth. Our individuation is a brute fact most of us will face for the majority of our lives, and the “minded world” has yet to come to terms with it. All it can offer is metaphor.
Take care!
:100: Very similar to the points I've been trying to make in the Predicment of Modernity and Idealism in Context.
Quoting unenlightened
I know how you feel, I took all October out. Pity you won't be around to see how much I agree with you.
Quoting Understanding the Present, Bryan Applyard
Here’s key claims about the limits of science from Appleyard, and my critique of them:
Appleyard argues that rather than being a neutral method, science has turned into a kind of “mysticism” that only it can address its self-created questions. Pre-Newtonian worldviews (Aristotelian/Christian) provided meaning and moral grounding; the scientific revolution replaced that with a mechanistic cosmos ruled by universal “laws.” Human beings are increasingly viewed as biological machines (genetic coding, deterministic systems), which undermines the sense that we have free will, purpose, or a “soul.” Appleyard doesn’t call for abandoning science. Rather, he argues science should be “humbled”: recognized as one way of knowing, not the only or supreme one. He suggests we need a worldview that allows for meaning, value, and humanity beyond what science currently offers; a balance between scientific insight and spiritual/moral depth.
Appleyard focuses on science, but what he’s really attacking is a range of philosophical worldviews supporting the scientific approaches he disapproves of. Physicalism, mechanism and determinism (which seem to be his targets) belong to an older era of philosophy and science, but have been put into question by more recent philosophical and empirical approaches.
Yes, and a deeper look can be seen by looking at Simpson's comments on Hume's historical importance (cf. Goodness and Nature: Supplement on Historical Origins, 91-112).
Quoting unenlightened
Incidentally, I wrote a post to @Wayfarer about .
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, although Descartes self-consciously distinguished himself from the Pyrrhonists (cf. Myles Burnyeat, "The sceptic in his place and time.").
It's worth asking why ancient Pyrrhonism did not lead to same outcome if it is so similar to Descartes' theoretical skepticism. I think a big part of the reason is that both were using the same tool, but for a very different purpose. Descartes desired certitude and usefulness vis-a-vis the material world. Sextus wanted ataraxia.
:up: :up:
You called this an autopsy, but I don’t think that’s what it is. It’s not even a eulogy. I’m not sure enlightenment values are dying and I can’t really imagine what they would be replaced by.
Quoting unenlightened
I think this is misleading. To nitpick—as far as I can find, the word “rational,” meaning, established by reason came first and the meaning as a ratio of two integers came much later.
Quoting unenlightened
I think “subjectivity” is the wrong word here, and I think that’s important. As I understand it, before the enlightenment, the universe was seen as infused with meaning. That meaning was not seen as subjective, although I’m not sure objective is the right word either. I think what you’re calling “subjectivity” is something that humans were supposed to observe and understand through our experience and reason.The world and it’s meaning come first, and our subjective understanding comes afterwards.
Quoting unenlightened
I certainly don’t want to go back to the pre-enlightenment world, the world of the divine right of Kings. That doesn’t mean I don’t recognize some of the issues you highlight. I have made the argument here a number of times in several different contexts that man is the measure of all things. That’s right at the center of my understanding of what Lao Tzu has to tell us. Taoism recognizes both the human and non-human worlds without conflict. As I sometimes put it—the world is 1/2 human.
So, do we reform rationalism? I am not at all sure that’s possible. On the other hand, I don’t want to go back to the values of the old way, as if we could.
Isn't one of the first things the Dao de jing tells us that 'the Dao that can be named is not the real or eternal Dao', essentially indicating that logos or reason cannot be primary.
You have similar ideas in most of the oldest creation myths where the formless, the indeterminate Chaos, often symbolised by the sea (for instance Tiamat), almost uniformely comes before order.
With Greek philosophy and later Christianity the West took another turn, where the eternal forms and the logos became primary.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"
It seems to me that Descartes and the enlightenment is merely downstream from this essential (mis)valuation.
And so a 'reform of rationalism' would come from putting it in it's propper place, a recognition that reason is not the be all, end all.
Have ever leaders followed any principles in their actual actions? Grand speeches are different as are the high-minded reasons given for real-politik or de-facto imperial aspirations.
One could have written off also religion even at the time of Nietzsche, but religion and faith is still important even in this Millennium. So no need for the autopsy of religion either. Philosophical views and ideologies die only when they are thoroughly replaced, not when they are generally accepted, have achieved their main objectives and are old textbook stuff that no current university student gets excited about. Yet they aren't replaced, they just seem very bland as they aren't new ideas. What likely happens is that when the main objectives have been achieved and the thinking has been generally accepted, the orthodox believers come up with a next wave, which in the end is likely something hilariously stupid.
With liberalism it's I guess the libertarians with the most vocal being perhaps the anarcho-capitalists, who think that rights of the individual mean that everything collective is bad and everything can be handled by the market mechanism. And some of them come even to this forum to share their enthusiasm when their first "philosopher" they've read has been Ayn Rand. We now how that will go.
The death of Enlightenment and it's values is even more dubious. Not every Western country has a Trump administration chipping away the institutions that make Western democracies themselves and filling the void with corruption and a police state. I think there's a lot more focus on Enlightenment values because of what is happening in the US.
Short answer—yes. Longer answer—yes, but. The line after the one you’ve quoted goes—“the name that can be named is not the eternal name.” As I understand it, naming is what humans do—conceptualization, reason. In a sense, Taoism is an anti-intellectual philosophy. This is from Verses 70 and 71 of Steven Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
This is from Ziporyn’s translation of the Chuang Tzu, the second founding text of Taoism.
On the other hand, Taoism is full of seeming contradictions and paradoxes. This is from Verses 25 and from Mitchell’s translation.
Mystery and manifestations—as I understand it, the Tao and human conceptualized reality—come from the same place. The Tao it’s not above or better than the human world, they arise and return together.
As Wayfarer might be about to point out, this is the problematic Enlightenment notion of reason which is in question.
Yeah that's more like it :grin:
Sent me to sleep, that one. I may try again one day.
https://youtu.be/SkEWWdDWDBg?si=oLwi5aFDaFs6fAKp
https://youtu.be/8FEYm8ehaTE?si=UGZHgVDvIEviIrG9
I wouldn't say the Tao is above or better than human conceptualisation of it in a directly valuative sense, but prior ontologically... the human world is part of it. And insofar conceptualisation is only partial/perspectival, and presumably can lead us astray for that reason, maybe it is a reason to put a little less stock in it.
EDIT: To make the point a bit more salient for this discussion maybe, that is the issue with the Socratic view on Life, and Christianity consequently, that it presumes that it can box in Chaos, conceptualise the whole of it and make life entirely predictable and planable on the basis of these fixed conceptions.
From revelations, 2.1
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea (read 'no more Chaos'). 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’[b] or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Blinded by the light!
I think this is soothing contemporary boilerplate. As you say, it is what resonates with contemporary intuitions. It is also the overcorrection from Enlightenment rationalism.
Reason and universalization are more or less the same thing. To be fully situated and not universal or general is not to be reason at all.
The clearest problem with relativism is that it is self-refuting. When you say something like this:
Quoting Tom Storm
...Are you making a truth claim that is embedded in context, practice, and perspective, or not? If you're not, then you're engaged in a performative self-contradiction. If you are, then it's not clear how you can make a categorical claim about, "context, practice, and perspective," in the sense that your truth claim intrinsically purports to "stand over" such realities and account for them in a universal way. If one talks about a reality with the word "always," then they are "standing over" that reality in a universal way.
More simply, if you say, "Truth claims are always context-dependent," then you've contradicted yourself, because you are uttering a truth claim that you believe is not context-dependent. This sort of self-contradiction is inevitable for anyone who tries to make reason non-universalizing.
I want to say that anyone who holds that there is a "grand scheme" will tend to see reason as bound up in that grand scheme. Stoicism is a clear example of this, but it is also present in the various forms of Platonism and Aristotelianism.
You make a common enough criticism of Thompson's position (and I guess that of many pragmatists and post-modernists) and it is a good one. All I can say is I don’t see it as a contradiction, because I’m not claiming (nor would Thompson) to step outside all contexts while saying this. I’m saying it from inside my own experience, and the claim includes itself. For me, truth isn’t something we reach from a perfect, universal viewpoint; it’s something we work out from where we stand. So when I say truth claims are context-dependent, I’m also saying this one is too. That doesn’t make it collapse, it just admits that I’m part of the same situation I’m talking about. The supposed contradiction only appears if we assume every truth claim has to speak from nowhere and apply everywhere, and I don’t accept that assumption. I’m trying to identify how truth actually shows up for us in lived life, not to lay down a rule that pretends to escape that life.
My understanding is that Thompson sees reason as emerging from our everyday experience and the ways we engage with the world, not from a detached, universal viewpoint. We develop our thinking through action, conversation, and the practices we inherit. He rejects the notion that this makes him a relativist: being aware that reasoning is 'situated' doesn’t mean all ideas are equally valid or that anything goes. On the contrary, some ways of thinking are better than others, and we can test, refine, and improve our ideas through experience, dialogue, and careful reflection. Thompson would probably acknowledge that reasoning is grounded in context but this doesn’t weaken it, it makes it more honest, responsible, and connected to how we actually understand and navigate the world.
Now I understand well that if a person holds an essentialist view of the world, in which reason accesses certain universal truths, then this view will be unsatisfying. This would be your view?
I’m not a philosopher, and I don’t mind being a creature of my time. Can you explain in simple terms why Thompson might be wrong? I suspect we don’t share certain key axioms, which might make a discussion difficult to navigate.
Perhaps you’ve noticed I talk about intuition much more than I talk about reason here on the forum. I generally say that much more of what we do, what we think, the decisions we make are done based on that intuition. Looking at my own experience, formal, systematic reason happens rarely and usually as a check on what I’ve come up with my other methods
I write the things I write here directly onto the “paper.” It’s when I go back and edit them that I have to deal with them more formally, at a distance, rationally.
Isn't it that the meaning of a sentence is context dependent? And both the sentence structure and its meaning emerge from social practices. It's confusing to say the truth claim is context dependent, because that suggests that the meaning of the sentence remains fixed, but it's truth varies depending on context.
Rather, make the meaning variable, depending on context, and truth is a property of propositions or statements, however inflated or deflated you take truth, that's a connected, but separate issue, right?
I’m tempted to get into a rational, nitpicky non-Taoist discussion of the intricacies of what Taoism means, e.g. The human world is not part of the Tao because the Tao doesn’t have parts. All
I can tell you is it doesn’t feel that way to me. There is the Taoist idea of return. The Tao continually manifests as the 10,000 things—the multiplicity of the human world—which then continually returns to the Tao. It’s all happening over and over again all the time.
I don’t think I’m really disagreeing with what you said though.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don’t know enough about the Socratic or Christian view of life to make an intelligent comment on this.
I think this is exactly right, and I think it shows what’s wrong with philosophy. If you can be doing this for thousands of years and not recognize where reason really stands, what its role really is, what’s the point?
It can be all that and still a tool
But if you are speaking from a single context, and that single context does not encompass all contexts, then you are not permitted to make claims about all contexts. And yet you did.
You contradict yourself because you say something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent." This means, "Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent." It is a claim that is supposed to be true in every context, and therefore it is not context dependent. If you want to avoid self-contradiction you would have to say something like, "Truth claims are sometimes context dependent." But that's obviously less than what you want to say.
Quoting Tom Storm
This looks to me like platitude-language, and it is very common. My point is that the relativist contradicts himself, and that is the argument that is relevant. I don't know what these supposed, "detached, universal viewpoints," are, nor do I know who is supposed to have promoted such things (apart from some moderns, who I also reject).
It is a form of strawman to say, "I reject a detached, universal viewpoint, therefore every truth claim is context dependent." For my part I don't see that I am permitted to contradict myself, regardless of what I wish to reject. I think we should be less willing to contradict ourselves than we are desirous to reject some particular doctrine. Of course if someone thinks they cannot affirm that language is partially relative to culture etc. without also claiming that every truth claim is context dependent (and thereby contradicting themselves), then they are surely in a pickle. But I would suggest they examine their conditional premise to see whether it is actually true.
Quoting Tom Storm
My point is that the person who says, "Truth claims are always context dependent," is engaged in a form of relativism, and that form of relativism is self-defeating.
Quoting Tom Storm
Hopefully I did this above.
I started a thread on introspection once and I’ve included discussions of intuition in a number of other threads. I don’t remember any discussions that were specifically on the subject of intuition by either myself or others.
Sure. It pains me to agree with Leontiskos, but he's right that this theory about human life suggests a fixed, transcendent vantage point. That's just how the mind works. If you call something transient, you're situating yourself at a point that being identified as stationary.
But saying “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” doesn’t mean we’reclaiming to stand outside of all that. It actually denies that anyone can stand outside it.
Doesn’t this objection get contingency wrong? Calling something “contingent” doesn’t mean you’re looking at it from some perfect, fixed viewpoint. You’re just using the language and ideas that come from within the same messy, changeable world you’re talking about. You don’t need a god-like perspective to say things are contingent.
We now arrive at the question, is antifoundationalism itself a foundation?
Thanks. Nicely articulated. I’m not done yet, but I have a meeting.
Quoting Tom Storm
It would be a bit like the fish saying, "Everything is water." If the fish knew that everything was water then he would not be bound by water. The metaphor about fish and water has to do with the idea that what is literally ubiquitous is unknowable.
Spot on. I had the idea of writing an OP on disembodied cognition. Why? To bring out what was important about embodied cognition in the first place - what it was critiquing. I think that was largely focussed on intellectual abstraction, functionalism, physicalism, and many of the other popular 'isms' of the academic philosophy. So, I agree with you, I don't think Thompson's project is relativist, but it's also //not// hanging off philosophical absolutes. It's threading the needle between those kinds of dilemmas which gave rise to the whole project. Which is why it is not co-incidental that the whole of The Embodied Mind is pervaded with references to the Buddhist 'middle way'.
I'd say everything about human life is socially mediated, simply because language is a social phenomenon, and so I must agree with you that truths are always relative to contexts. This can be shown by asking anyone who disagrees to state a context-independent truth. Within our common life there are a myriad of contexts, and they are all nested within the human context itself, which in turn is nested within the context of biology?the context of life that we share with other animals, and even plants, fungi and microbes.
Social and cultural evolution are preceded and underpinned by biological evolution. At the most basic level we perceive the world in the way our evolved 'embrained' bodies determine. As the study of animals shows language is not necessary for perception, and it seems absurd (to me) to say that if we had not been enculturated we would not perceive the same world that we do as enculturated beings, just on account of our human physiology.
From our observations of animal behavior it is undeniable that animals perceive all the same things in the environment as we do, but we can safely infer in (sometimes very) different ways according to the different structures of their sense modalities.
I don't think we disagree either, it's just difficult to speak about. Language fails to some extend, hence that what can be named is not etc...
About the human world being a part, I was looking for the right words, but I'm not necessarily committed to it being an actual quote unquote 'part' of it. What I think I would commit to is that the Tao is ontologically prior to our conceptions of it.
The idea of returning to "the source" is important IMO, that is to some extend what is missing it seems to me in Western tradition where we get hung up on fixed conceptions without returning.
Quoting T Clark
That's fine, it's basically Nietzsches idea of how nihilism was already inherent in the Greek and Christian root of the Western tradition and the reason why we eventually ended up with the "dead of God". It do think he's onto something, though it's probably only part of the story.
Indeed although they clearly don’t understand them the way we do, so while they might recognize the same shapes and perhaps risks as us, I’m not sure what that tells us about shared meaning. Thompson is not an idealist as I udnertand him.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is getting very meta. :wink:
Doesn't your fish and water objection assume that being immersed in something makes it unknowable? Doesn't Thompson’s view suggest the opposite? That our immersion is what makes understanding possible. We are always situated within social practices and contingent factors, but this situatedness doesn’t block insight, it creates or enables it. (I assume this is basic to phenomenology?) Recognizing that “everything comes from social practices and chance factors” is a reflective awareness that arises through our engagement with world, not from standing outside it. Being “bound by water” does not make the water invisible; it is the medium through which we come to know it. Or something like that?
I'm now getting dizzy with the curlicues of argument.
The broader question to me seems to be, is anti-foundationalism a foundation? Is it a performative contradiction? I suspect it isn’t on the basis that anti-foundationalism is more a lens or a stance toward foundations than a foundation itself. It discourages the search for an ultimate grounding, but offers no ultimate principle to stand on.
I'd be interested to hear your take on this particularly.
I think there are commonalities of understanding. A dingo will see a wallaby as potential food source, just as we might (if they were not protected). We observe birds dipping into water, perhaps to cool off, or wash themselves, just as we do. Birds and bees get nectar from flowers, and we also can do that with a certain limited range of flowers. Birds nest in trees and up here in Nimbin, there are actually some treehouses. I like the idea of "affordances" and it seems clear that many things in the environment offer similar kinds of affordances to animals as they might to us.
Let's not lose sight of the central argument which is this:
Quoting Leontiskos
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Quoting Tom Storm
Do you think water is visible to a fish?
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, what do you mean by "anti-foundationalism"? Is it just something like, "Truth claims are always context dependent"? If so, then we're right back to the original argument.
That there is no final or ultimate ground for our knowledge, meaning, or justification. I think that's how philosophers like Rorty, Lawson, or Brandom might have it. And I appreciate that anti-foundationalism is disparaged by many.
Quoting Leontiskos
As I understand it, this objection misunderstands the claim. Saying "truth claims are always context-dependent" is a way of describing how claims function within particular social, historical, and conceptual contexts. This description is itself situated and arises from those contexts. I'm, nto sure there's a contradiction in making this statement because it does not claim to exist outside or above context. The objection only seems persuasive if one assumes that all claims must be judged from a perspective beyond any context, but anti-foundationalism does not make that assumption.
My problem with that, and I’m not joking, is that ontology is one of the 10,000 things. On the other hand, when I’m in my human form, I call Taoist principles metaphysics too. That’s one of the things I like most about Taoism—you often have to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
It took me a long time to get a feel for what return is about in this context.
Quoting Leontiskos
I agree with you that if the relativist-postmodernist is treating their assertion that “truth claims are always context dependent” as itself a truth claim, then they are attempting to achieve a view from nowhere. You might then ask how else one could mean such a statement except as a general claim. The answer writers like Heidegger, Deleuze and Derrida give is that what they are doing is not asserting or claiming but enacting. What’s the difference? A truth claim purports to encompass within its purview a transcontextual temporal span. What I claim to be the case at this moment must be assumed to hold beyond my immediately present experience. Enactment, by contrast, is the experience of the present moment itself as ‘fat’ or specious.
In noticing what takes place right now, I simultanously notice the passing of the previous moment and anticipation of a future moment. If I then draw from this experience of the fat present a notion of primordial ‘contingency’ I can only rely on the present as it repeats itself to confirm and reconfirm this notion of contingency. How do I know the next moment and those that follow it will not lend themselves to truth claims which validate themselves? I only know this by attempting to think such a conception and then notice whether it unfolds itself as self-identical or as self-transforming. Enaction is speculative and experimental, not assertoric.
My submission of your utterance of a truth claim to enaction does not result in a contradiction or refutation of your assertion. It allows me to understand the meaning of your assertion and at the same time to experience it as being buoyed by a current which allows it to remain the same always differently. When I then express this to you, I am reporting gmy experience as it renews itself moment to moment and extending an invitation to you to experience something similar. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t this does not make your belief in truth claims false. It simply means you will not likely be inclined to participate in the community ofnrelativists who together, each in different ways, are exploring the implications of their experience of the specious present.
No, they are merely noting that no one has ever produced a context-independent truth claim. And that noting is itself not context-independent because it is made in relation to and within the context of human experience, language and judgement.
Philosophy is divided into camps - some of which believe humans have access to facts or truths outside of human experience (eg, Platonism) and those who think we don't. How do we ground our knowledge? I don't think we can except though communities of intersubjective agreement.
Thanks. Jesus, it's bloody complicated.
Let me explain. The principle of objectivity revolves around the idea that things exist in a particular way irrespective of whatever you or I might do or not do. The objective sciences endeavour to discern 'the way things are' outside of or apart from any subjective biases or pre-suppositions that we bring to the study of them. This also extends into subjects other than science, insofar as disciplines like history and jurisprudence strive for objectivity.
But it's interesting to reflect that in earlier philosophy, it was not things or objects that were considered to be independently existing in this way. The Platonic ideals of goodness and beauty were by no means objects in the sense of being 'objects of scientific analysis'. in the classical philosophical tradition, what was regarded as independent of the individual mind were not objects but principles: the good, the beautiful, the just, the true. They were intelligible measures, realities that could be participated in but not possessed. Access to them was understood to require a transformation of the knower — metanoia, the philosophical “ascent,” the cultivation of detachment (the original meaning of 'apatheia').
This is the part that, I think, becomes almost invisible within the post-Enlightenment frame. Once the Enlightenment redefines mind-independence in exclusively objective terms, normative principles lose their perceived standing. They are no longer something we discover through moral-intellectual formation but something we construct, negotiate, or inherit. And so the communities of practice that once embodied those principles inevitably begin to weaken.
When principles cease to be experienced as realities that make a claim on us, they can no longer act as shared horizons. What remains is a plurality of individual perspectives, each valid “for me” or “for us,” but without a binding force that earlier cultures assumed. This is not moral collapse — it’s simply the logical outcome of shifting the locus of reality from intelligible principles to empiricism.
Seen this way, the Enlightenment tended to undermine the forms of life and communities of practice in which normative principles were embedded. It gave extraordinary intellectual freedoms, but it also left us without the structures of meaning that were grounded in a very different understanding of what “mind-independence” really means.
(This is very much the ballpark of Alisdair McIntyre ('After Virtue'), Charles Taylor ('A Secular Age'). And also Pierre Hadot ('Philosophy as a Way of Life'))
I am not one who thinks there are no foundations?on the contrary I think there are many foundations, namely all the different presuppositions our diverse domains of enquiry and worldviews are based upon.
Is there one overarching foundation for nature itself? I'm not sure the question makes any sense. The only "foundation" I think it makes sense for nature to have is chaos?the incomprehensible no-thingness that everything takes form out of?a foundationless foundation.
Many people would say there’s a difference between holding some axioms as pragmatic foundations and having access to facts or truths which transcend our quotidian lives. I guess for them the difference is between foundations which are provisional and tentative and ultimately evanescent, versus those which are eternal and True. You and I have doubts about the latter.
That would have been what the ancients designate 'logos'.
Yes, people have different views and some do believe in eternal, absolute foundations. The problem, as always, with different opinions, is the impossibility of independent arbitration between them to determine which is true and which false.
Quoting Wayfarer
If order is posited as basic, it suggests a universal intelligence or God. My personal belief is that order evolves?nature takes habits, as Peirce contended. Order emerges out of chaos.
Quoting Janus
I suppose it's inevitable to see it in those terms. But bear in mind, there is another Axial-age term which has very similar functions, namely 'dharma'. Both logos and dharma refer to:
In other words, each is at once descriptive and normative.
Logos (Heraclitus, the Stoics, Middle Platonism) is the rational structure, the measure, the reason, the intelligible order pervading nature.
Dharma is the law, the ordering principle, the truth of things — ranging from cosmic law to ethical duty to the basic structure of experience itself.
Both serve as the intelligible pattern through which beings have their roles and right relations.
But dharma is associated with non-theistic religions (Buddhism and Jaina). A big cultural factor is the absorption of Greek philosophy into Biblical theology and the subsequent identification of 'logos' with 'the word of God' or simply 'the Bible'. So it all tends to be rejected together with religion.
The Christian Logos isn't the Bible. It's Jesus.
The stoics thought of the logos as a kind of divinity. I don't think it was a re-interpretation.
I've always liked that passage and its metaphors.
Yes. It's a nice passage.
Yes, I'm familiar with those ideas. the Dao is another one. There are of course some commonalities given that all three were conceived of as eternal universal principles governing how things are and how they become, how they change.
So they are also understood as principles of intelligibility, and indeed, prior to modern science they were the only way that observed invariances could be understood. And, as you note, they were also normative, insofar as living in accordance with them was understood to be the way of harmony, while failing to live according to them was seen as the way of discord and strife.
We know they are ideas, and quite beautiful ideas at that, but we don't know if there is anything in nature that corresponds with them, whether they are anything more than human ideas. The picture science gives us of the evolution of the Universe suggests that the laws of nature have evolved as Peirce believed.
Is there any law at all that is absolutely fundamental to nature from the very beginning? The conservation laws: conservation of energy, mass, linear and angular momentum and electric charge as well as the second law of thermodynamics as well as the laws of logic and mathematics may be candidates. But again, we cannot be absolutely certain.
Quoting Tom Storm
I guess it depends on whether winning an argument or coming closer to what seems most likely to be the truth is the motivating desire. We can never be certain of the truth, so ideally we all should believe what seems most plausible to us, given that we have begun our inquiry with an open mind, or at least endeavored to do so to the best of our ability. That is what I admire about the scientific spirit. Even if we all achieved that impartiality it still wouldn't mean we will all agree, because plausibility is not something strictly determinable, just as beauty is not.
As sedentary civilisations and writing gradually became the norm, Chaos starts to disappear in these mythologies and notions of order become more primary.
The most straightforward explanation for that historical evolution seems to me simply that ideologies evolved in tandem with changes in the societal organisation, from oral nomadic groups based around movement to the more static hierarchical organisation of civilisations.
For those interested I got this from Thomas Nail who is writing a book on the subject:
But you're failing to address the objection. It can be set out inferentially:
1. If <Truth claims are always context dependent> then <Every truth claim, in every context, is context dependent>
2. "Every X, in every context, is Y," is a claim that is not context dependent
3. Therefore, <Truth claims are always context dependent> entails that there is a truth claim that is not context dependent
Your response is to try to tidy up Y, but the nature of Y is irrelevant to the objection. Again, it is the word "always" that causes you to contradict yourself. If "always" involves "every context" then you are contradicting yourself, regardless of what X and Y are.
(You are attempting to exempt yourself from your own rule, hence the self-contradiction. In effect you are saying, "No one can make claims of this sort, except for me.")
Another way to put it:
1. X is always Y
2. Therefore, every X, in every context, is Y
3. Therefore, the truth of (1) is not context dependent
The person who utters (1) is committed to at least one truth which is not context dependent.
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Quoting Joshs
Good, but note that my argument says nothing about a so-called "view from nowhere." The reductio does not arrive at, "there is a view from nowhere." It arrives at, "there is a truth claim that is not context dependent."
It seems clear to me that "learned" relativists still contradict themselves, they just do it with a bit more style and rhetoric. That @Tom Storm lacks the style and rhetoric to contradict himself more persuasively is not at all a bad thing. For example:
Quoting Joshs
Sorry, but this makes no sense. It is an attempt to have one's cake and eat it too. You are basically trying to assert without asserting, and then call this "enacting." One can have all the experiences they like, but the assertion of a predication is the assertion of a predication, whether or not it is believed to be based on those experiences. "Truth claims are always context dependent," is an assertion. Style, rhetoric, and neologisms don't change this.
Quoting Joshs
You are equivocating between experience and assertion. We could construe an assertion as, "Reporting my experience and extending an invitation to you to experience something similar," or the "foundationalist" could simply take your equivocations into his own mouth and respond to your objection with similar fiat, to the effect that he is "enacting" and not "asserting," so there is no problem to begin with.
The attempt to pretend that, "Truth claims are always context dependent," is not itself a truth claim does not even rise to the level of plausibility.
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Quoting Janus
If that is all they are doing then their argument is invalid:
1. No one has ever produced a truth claim that is context-independent
2. Therefore, truth claims are always context dependent
This is the same fallacy that you make regarding issues such as slavery. Even if we grant that you have never seen a black swan, or even that there have never been any black swans in the past, your conclusion still does not follow.
(Bound up in this is the incoherence of induction within a Humean/modern epistemology.)
Quoting Leontiskos
How does "there is a truth claim that is not context dependent” not imply a view from nowhere, or sideways-on, or God’s-eye?
Quoting Leontiskos
I already agree with you that "Truth claims are always context dependent”’takes itself as a predicative assertion. The key word here is ‘always’, because it makes a claim to generality or universality. You see enaction as equivalent to predicative assertion. A relativist sees what you see ( a statement of generality) but sees something else there too, something that particularizes the general and predicative in such a way that they notice what the statement is doing right now. Whenever they encounter what would conventionally be called a general statement, claim or assertion, they cannot help but notice a new ‘how’; how the statement is working right now, in this immediate context. The particularizing ‘how’ isn’t added onto to something called generality, it defines anew what it means to be something like ‘general’, categorical or objective.
Quoting Leontiskos
I am making a distinction which is invisible to you, probably similar to the distinction between ‘continuing to be the same’ and ‘continuing to be the same differently’. But there are important implications for the difference between what a foundationalist is doing when they ‘enact’ and what the relativist is doing. The former is representational rather than simply presentational. Because what is enacted is supposed to represent something else, it can correspond to that something else correctly or incorrectly. A kind of ethical judgement is implied. Did the ‘enaction’ get it right or wrong?
By contrast, relativist enaction is not attempting to represent anything. It is instead bringing something new into existence. While the foundationalist uses the representationalist nature of their ‘enactivism’ as a cudgel to coerce conformity to what is ‘true’ in a correspondence sense, the relativist can only invite others to see things in a new light.
Here I am assuming I have avoided stating the relativist fallacy. Either I suck at expressing this or I failed to properly “tidy up” Y.
@Joshs is the account of antifoundationalism I sketched earlier too simplistic?
Nothing we justify ever rises above our own ways of justifying and that includes this statement.
I understand what you're saying. But the opposing point of view goes back a long way. Plato has Socrates say that all philosophers long for death because they yearn for a vantage point beyond life. In other words, the philosopher wants to be able to say something universal about life, but stuck in the midst of it, there's no way to justify anything we might say. The eye can't see itself.
Yet much of philosophy is that very thing. Even Wittgenstein did: after pointing out that we can't talk about life from an external viewpoint, he went ahead and did it.
But yes, the issue of self-reflexivity seems to be a real problem. Hilary Lawson, a minor British philosopher, argues that we can’t avoid the problem of self-reflexivity in modern philosophy, our theories and claims inevitably turn back on themselves. His reponse is to say, so what!
Quoting Tom Storm
I think Quine did something similar. After explaining that there's no fact of the matter about what anyone is talking about, he was asked to address how that impacted his own theory. He was like "meh." Or something like that.
Funny.
You can understand why people find theism attractive in all this, since it seems to effectively provide a grounding that resolves the confusions and tautologies created by anti-foundationalist views.
I think that's true sometimes. But I wouldn't necessarily line up foundationalism with religion. A naturalist is just as committed to an unjustifiable metaphysical scheme.
Yes, that's true. Have you come to any metaphysical conclusions yourself?
I had a reality crisis when I was young where I realized I have no way to determine if what I'm experiencing is real. It wasn't armchair philosophy, it was a psychological crisis. The way I recovered was to adopt a rule: I never deny the content of my own experience. Whatever I experienced, that's it. I experienced that. But explanations for what I experienced will always be in flux. Maybe my brain wasn't working properly, maybe I have a window into other realities, I really don't know. That rule has worked well for me for a long time.
How about you?
Interesting. I had a similar experience when I was 15 or 16.
My current position is that I have no choice but to accept the reality I’m in and that humans are sense-making creatures who use language (and other tools) to manage their environment. It's likely we don’t have the capacity to access a Capital-T Truth, and philosophy is perhaps best avoided, as it tends only to lead to 1) convoluted attempts to justify seemingly impossible beliefs or 2) endless confusion and self-reflexivity. :wink:
Thomas Nagel's 'The Last Word' is devoted to this topic.
Yes, and Nagel is fairly cognizant of the problem I am talking about. For example, he says this in his chapter on ethics, and there is an analogy between "subjectivism" and "relativism":
In general Nagel is good on the manner in which second-order claims cannot simply reign over first-order claims (and "Truth claims are always context dependent" is a great example of a second-order claim in the context of epistemology).
Or from the introduction:
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Quoting Tom Storm
You must argue rather than assume. You have made a claim of the form, "X is always Y," and yet you want to claim that this does not imply that X is Y in every context. I've given many arguments showing why it does imply that. Now it is your job to respond to those arguments.
Quoting Tom Storm
Fallibilism arguments suffer the same self-contradictory fate. See, for example, Simpson's discussion <beginning on page 103>.
I don't want to offer a new set of arguments against your new thesis, given that you have yet to answer my old set of arguments against your old thesis. If I do that then every time I respond you will just offer a different thesis, but Simpson's analysis should suffice for your new thesis.
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Quoting Joshs
Perhaps it does, but that is not my concern. I mostly think that people end up not knowing what they mean by such terms. They are just labeling and then morally distancing themselves from labels. Arguments become unnecessary.
Quoting Joshs
Okay good, we agree on this.
Quoting Joshs
Or are you making a distinction that is specious? And how do we tell?
I am well aware that you are trying to distinguish two different senses of "always context dependent," and thus object that my argument is equivocal between the two distinct senses. But I don't see that you have succeeded in that task. Indeed I grant that there are different conceptions of universalization, but I am in no way convinced that one of the ways of universalizing escapes the problem I have pointed up. So one could universalize in the sense of "continuing to be the same differently," but it's not clear how this form of universalization does not suffer the same fate. (Indeed, I think "continuing to be the same differently" is just what universalization means in the first place, and that your other conception is a strawman of the tradition of universals.)
Quoting Joshs
You are moralizing and you are introducing factionalist camps. "Foundationalist," "Representationalist," "Enactivist," "Cudgel," "Coerce," "Invite," etc. I've made an argument and I am interested in arguments, not labels and emotivism.
All you have to do is stop contradicting yourself. No one is asking you to become a theist.
The issue is realism vs nominalism, not theism vs atheism - as much as many of our members wish to make every difference of opinion about theism vs atheism.
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Quoting Tom Storm
But is this a valid argument?
1. Nothing we justify ever rises above our own ways of justifying
2. Therefore, Truth claims are always context dependent
In fact (2) does not follow. So did you mean to support (2), or are you abandoning (2)?
The deeper equivocation at play here is between <truth claims always emerge from a context> and <a claim is never true beyond a subset of contexts>. If (2) means the former, then it is innocuous and easily admissible, not to mention not self-contradictory. But (2) does not mean the former. (2) is meant to limit the "power" of truth claims, not merely to explain something about them that bears in no way on their universal validity. What is at play here is Motte and Bailey.
(Else, if (1) is meant to support the substantive version of (2) then it must rely on the invisible and contentious premise, <...and our own ways of justifying/reasoning never achieve universality>. But in that case the self-contradiction applies not only to (2) but also to this premise which (1) depends upon.)
:up:
I’m arguing that in anti-foundationalism all justification occurs within our own systems, even for statements about justification itself. You seem to be saying that this implies that truth itself is context-dependent, which is not what I am claiming. Your point is valid but misdirected, my focus is on justification, not the nature of truth.
My wording may well have been sloppy, given this is not an area of expertise, only a matter I’m interested in and trying to articulate. As you said before, I’m also short on style and rhetoric.
@Leontiskis Seems to be conflating truth claims, which as you say, are always (or at least should be) justified within some context or other. and truth itself, which is in no need of justification. So truth claims are given in the context of language, and their justifications are given in the contexts of logic or empirical evidence.
Justifications relying merely on personal experience and testimony cannot be binding on others. Justifications in terms of authority, scriptural or otherwise, need to be underpinned by either logic or empirical evidence. If anyone disagrees they can cite some other criteria that serve to justify truth claims. I am yet to see anything of that nature offered here or elsewhere.
You say "fair enough", but I would like to know whether you agree or disagree or are uncertain and why.
Not sure. I wanted to say something more interesting...
The reason I find this interesting is that it flips the usual picture of science, so often used as the foundational justification for physicalist and narrowly atheistic accounts and offers a more interesting way to think about scientific knowledge and truth than the idea that they simply exist ‘out there' for us to discover.
I don't see how that follows. It also doesn't strictly follow that what we perceive reveals "exactly" what is out there either, but given our ability to navigate very successfully in the world I think it is most likely that what we perceive is in accordance with what is out there, including our own bodies, the structures of which are also, relative to conscious perception "out there".
It doesn't follow that things out there are exactly as we perceive them (naive realism) since we know by studying animals that their perceptual setups are different, sometimes very different, even though analogous, to ours. So, it seems most reasonable to think that we and the other animals perceive both what is possible given our various perceptual systems, and also selectively perceive what is of most significance.
So, I think constructivism goes too far, and is too human-centric. There is a distinction between the countless "Umwelts" out there, both human and animal, and the greater world within which all those Umwelts exist.
Whether it follows or not may not be the issue. Also, what is meant by “reveals nothing”? And what is meant by “out there”? I’m willing to entertain a constructivist view, though I haven’t spent much time thinking about it.
Quoting Janus
I don’t think this makes much difference. Animals respond to shapes, movement, shadows, and food sources, patterns trigger responses. But what does this really say about reality itself? We all evolved from a common origin and "materials", so we likely share similar hard wiring, even if it has been organized radically differently over time. I really don't know how much animal comparisons give us.
But I don’t want to pollute this thread with yet another round of the realism debate in philosophy. :wink:
:100: :up:
Sure.
Quoting Tom Storm
Then there is no possibility of saying that one system is better than any other, or that the claims of someone within one system are any better than the claims of someone in another system. See, for example, <this thread>.
Quoting Tom Storm
In order to do philosophy you really just have to be honest with yourself. You have to very honestly ask yourself, "What am I saying and why am I saying it?"
The motive in all of these "anti-foundationalist" projects seems quite simple to me. Some person or some group of people appear overconfident, and the goal is to cut them down to size. "I think you are overconfident, therefore I am going to set out some thesis to support this." The problem is that the theses of the folks on TPF "prove too much." They prove that the objector himself is working with undue certainty, given that certainty itself is abolished in the attempt to prove overconfidence.
When I say "it doesn't follow" I just mean that it is not deductively certain. "Out there" to me means outside my body.
Quoting Tom Storm
So, animals also see shapes. movement, shadows and food sources; in other words the same patterns we do. We see the fruit on the tree as food source and so do rats, bats, birds and insects as any orchardist can attest.
The story that says we all evolved from a common origin is a realist story. Also that we may see things in similar or different ways, says nothing about what things will be seen where and when. As the fruit example show, even insects see fruit as a food source. It is the shared nature of the world that points to realism, to the idea that there really are things out there which are perceived by us and animals in understandable ways. I am not concerned about the final, unknowable metaphysical explanation for why and how those things fundamentally exist. They might be material existents or ideas in the mind of God. How could we know for certain? The question is: which explanation seems the more plausible to me or to you.
I don't object to other worldviews...what I find objectionable is the dogmatic attitude that says that the alternative worldviews is self-refuting, that demands that you must see things the way I do, that there is only one right way to view the world.
This is not off-topic...the Enlightenment was a response to centuries of Christian dogma and persecution of dissenters. I find moral crusades objectionable because they fail to respect human diversity. Scientism is also a dogma...the pendulum always swings too far in the opposite direction it seems. The human condition is characterized by uncertainty.
From most perspectives, certainly. But Bernardo Kastrup, who is not a realist, believes in evolution and seems to address the apparent irreconcilability. Not that I hold his view, I’m just saying… (Don't ask me to summarise it, very tedious).
Quoting Janus
Fair. I’m just interested in the role human cognitive apparatus and values play in the construction of our world. How far it goes, I don’t know, but many philosophers think it goes pretty far. I'd like to entertain this notion for a while before I reject it (if that's what I end up doing).
I think we mostly agree.
That seems to me a fair-minded plan?I think I would probably agree with you about how far it goes. I used to say that the human world is a collective representation?a kind of shared Umwelt, and I still think that. That is one side of the story for me. The other side is that we also live in a much larger world containing countless animal (and perhaps even plant) Umwelts. It seems to me a strange, but apparently true, thought that without percipients the whole vast world is blind, deaf and dumb?a silent tale signifying nothing.