Intelligibility Unlikely Through Naturalism
I don’t really know what I think about this, so I’m putting it out there.
Some thinkers in the classical theist tradition (e.g. David Bentley Hart) argue that the intelligibility of the universe requires more than a naturalistic explanation.
The claim is not simply that the universe exhibits regularities, but that reality is knowable in principle: that human thought can be about the world, grasp abstract truths, and uncover law-like structures. On this view, the apparent alignment between reason and reality is not accidental but reflects an underlying rational source (often identified with the Logos or God) which grounds both being and understanding.
Those sympathetic to this position suggest that this is a metaphysical, not merely empirical, problem. If minds and meanings arise from purely blind physical processes aimed at survival rather than truth, then the fact that our thoughts reliably refer to the world and track its structure appears contingent or unexplained. Naturalism can describe how cognition functions, but it seems less able to explain why cognition should be about reality at all, rather than merely useful for navigating experience.
By contrast, grounding both the world and human rationality in a single rational source allows intelligibility to be treated as a basic feature of reality rather than some fortunate coincidence of human cognition. I take this as roughly how the argument is meant to work.
A contrasting, more "post-modern" response might hold that intelligibility does not belong to reality itself but to human cognitive and linguistic frameworks. On this view, language and concepts are tools for navigating experience rather than mirrors of an underlying rational order. What we call intelligibility is therefore contingent, perspectival, and historically conditioned, rather than evidence of a mind-like structure built into the universe. This can get messy.
What do others think about the notion of intelligibility? Does the apparent fit between human reason and the world require grounding in some kind of greater mind or God, or is intelligibility better understood as a feature of human interpretation rather than of reality itself? No doubt there are other options.
I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes. Some naturalists will react to this idea, and I fear the discussion may end up in the somewhat tedious “how is consciousness related to a physical world?” type of threads.
Some thinkers in the classical theist tradition (e.g. David Bentley Hart) argue that the intelligibility of the universe requires more than a naturalistic explanation.
The claim is not simply that the universe exhibits regularities, but that reality is knowable in principle: that human thought can be about the world, grasp abstract truths, and uncover law-like structures. On this view, the apparent alignment between reason and reality is not accidental but reflects an underlying rational source (often identified with the Logos or God) which grounds both being and understanding.
Those sympathetic to this position suggest that this is a metaphysical, not merely empirical, problem. If minds and meanings arise from purely blind physical processes aimed at survival rather than truth, then the fact that our thoughts reliably refer to the world and track its structure appears contingent or unexplained. Naturalism can describe how cognition functions, but it seems less able to explain why cognition should be about reality at all, rather than merely useful for navigating experience.
By contrast, grounding both the world and human rationality in a single rational source allows intelligibility to be treated as a basic feature of reality rather than some fortunate coincidence of human cognition. I take this as roughly how the argument is meant to work.
A contrasting, more "post-modern" response might hold that intelligibility does not belong to reality itself but to human cognitive and linguistic frameworks. On this view, language and concepts are tools for navigating experience rather than mirrors of an underlying rational order. What we call intelligibility is therefore contingent, perspectival, and historically conditioned, rather than evidence of a mind-like structure built into the universe. This can get messy.
What do others think about the notion of intelligibility? Does the apparent fit between human reason and the world require grounding in some kind of greater mind or God, or is intelligibility better understood as a feature of human interpretation rather than of reality itself? No doubt there are other options.
I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes. Some naturalists will react to this idea, and I fear the discussion may end up in the somewhat tedious “how is consciousness related to a physical world?” type of threads.
Comments (303)
But in this reality, things are consistent. And our brains - as well as everything else in the universe - came to be, and are founded, in those consistent principles. Why would our brains [I]not[/I] recognize them?
Certainly our experience of the world suggests patterns, but it’s unclear to me how these reflect the universe itself versus how we function as observers, our cognitive apparatus. That, however, may be a separate matter.
Hart seems to argue that the problem with naturalism is that even if the universe produces conscious beings, it doesn’t explain why they can understand the world. Physical processes create neurons and behavior, but not meaning, truth, or reference. That our minds can grasp concepts and form true beliefs points, Hart argues, beyond mere material causes.
I was hoping someone could unpack this and elaborate.
Hart is a metaphysical realist of a classical persuasion. That means that he thinks reality is objectively real, intrinsically intelligible, value-laden, purposive, and metaphysically grounded in God. Human reason isn’t a matter of trial and error representations we place over things, reason is formed by the world’s own intelligible structures acting directly on the mind. In other words, the mind is inclined naturally to grasp the truth of the world. This is a very different from Kant, who argued that categories of human reason are purely subjective in origin, not given to us directly by way by the truths of a divinely ordered purposeful world. Postmodernists
believe that reality originates neither in the world as already ordered in itself, nor from subjectively given categories of reason imposing themselves on the world, but from an inseparable interaction between us and the world.
Patterner’s approach is pre-Kantian but post-Hart. He allows for a direct apprehension of the real through empirical investigation, which ignores Kant’s argument that empirical causality is not a direct property of the world but is already built into our reasoning about the world as a subjective condition of possibility. But Patterner’s view also requires humans to figure out what is true about the world through total and error, which Hart believes is not necessary because we are naturally inclined to directly see such divine truths.
Cognition enables us to successfully navigate reality, and that's why (or how) we know it's about reality.
In case we'd never navigate reality, only experience, then we'd be blind, and our navigation would certainly fail.
Quoting Tom Storm
What is the argument? What are the premises?
Naturalism does not assume that we never navigate reality, only experience. On the contrary! The experience is the navigation of reality. That should dissolve the argument (if there ever was one).
Yes, that seems to be right. My sympathies these days are with the latter.
Can you sketch out the argument being suggested that naturalism can't explain intelligibility and intentionality? How are they (Hart) arriving there?
Quoting jkop
I’m not sure I follow this. The claim that experience constitutes reality is what Hart is arguing, but he sees no reason why naturalism can support this. I don’t have the premises laid out; I’m hoping someone familiar with the argument can supply them. All I can find is Hart stating what I’ve already summarized earlier.
Quoting Patterner
I’m certainly aware that this is a commonly held view. I don’t know whether it’s correct.
P 1: Naturalism explains everything solely in terms of physical causes, laws of nature, and emergent phenomena.
P 2: Intelligibility (the fact that the universe can be understood or grasped conceptually) cannot be reduced to physical causes or emergent processes.
P 3: Any naturalistic account that relies only on physical mechanisms cannot explain the conceptual, law-directed, and rational features that make understanding possible.
P 4: If a phenomenon cannot be fully explained by physical/natural mechanisms, naturalism is inadequate to account for it.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain the intelligibility of the universe.
Someone with better philosophical insight and who agrees or better understands with this argument could improve on this account.
By that last one, I mean an archae would not survive if its archaellum (flagellum) didn't act consistently to the signals it receives, or it receives inconsistent signals. On another level, we would not survive if we did not react consistently to the visual stimulus of approaching cars, or the signals from our retinas regarding approaching cars was inconsistent.
I have no expertise in metaphysics or ontology, but my sympathies have led me toward simple-minded anti-foundationalism. Exploring this is for another thread. What I really want here is a clear account of this argument at its most articulate. I’m not interested in debunking it or making a counter-argument; I'm just hoping to understand it better.
I'd say the argument misrepresents naturalism. There are varieties, and here's a quote from the Wiki page on Naturalism.
Quoting Wikipedia
Quoting Tom Storm
Hm, doesn't seem right. How could experience constitute reality? I don't see how any philosophy could support such absurdity. For example, my visual experience won't constitute these words, I don't have such magic powers, I had to type them with my computer and click the post-button.
Back to your OP on Hart:
Quoting Tom Storm
We survive by aiming at truth, and our success in survival shows that our thoughts reliably refer to the world.
One might ask the guy whether the supernatural explains something, anything?
Thanks. As I said, I’m not trying to debunk the argument. I’m trying to get a better account of it. What you’re doing is reading over my very elementary summary of the argument, and I’m not surprised that my version is wonky.
What I'm hoping is for someone to restate the argument properly and then supply some further reasoning in support of it. I’m looking for a clearer philosophical account of why some philosophers reason that intelligibility and intentionality cannot be accounted for under naturalism. I don’t want to have to buy Hart’s book. :wink:
Naturalistic replies (e.g. jkop) often emphasize evolutionary utility: cognition tracks what matters for survival, not truth. That story can explain why certain representations work, but it doesn’t obviously explain aboutness—why representations are of the world rather than merely correlated with stimuli in ways that happen to be useful. After all, reptiles and birds of prey have survived for millions of years without any concern for whether their perceptions or internal representations are true. That preoccupation seems uniquely human, and it is not clear that evolutionary biology, as such, is equipped to explain it.
This is where the classical argument bites. If cognition is fundamentally geared toward fitness rather than truth, then the remarkable reach of human reason—abstract mathematics, cosmology, modal reasoning, counterfactuals—looks explanatorily extravagant. Every other species gets along perfectly well without them. One can always say “it just turned out that way,” but that response functions more as a dismissal than an explanation. The question isn’t whether evolution can produce brains that adapt successfully, but why beings like us can uncover deep, non-local, non-obvious structures of reality at all—necessary truths, in fact. And such truths are not contingent in the way sensory experience necessarily is.
But notice that in even posing this question, you’re already stepping beyond the explanatory limits of naturalism. Naturalistic explanation ultimately trades in empirically tractable causal relations, whereas the issue at hand—how thought can be about reality, or why reason should have normative authority—cannot be captured in purely causal terms. Whenever you start to ask what must be the case, and why it must be so, I say you’re already appealing to facts which are strictly speaking beyond the remit of naturalism (and which I and others say points to a deep contradiction in naturalism.)
You might object that science itself makes constant use of such modal notions—and that’s true. But science does not explain logical or mathematical necessity; it presupposes it. In securing its proofs and models, science relies on principles that stand to reason: inference, consistency, implication, and mathematical structure. Although science introduces new mathematical formalisms, these are not confirmed or disconfirmed empirically in the same sense as empirical claims. Yet they are among the constituents of scientific discovery.
So the question simply reappears at a deeper level: where, exactly, is this necessity to be found? Not as a contingent feature of the empirical world, and not as a causal product of it either. Yet without it, the enterprise of science would not even get off the ground. I agree in some ways that these arise as constituents of our experience-of-the-world, as some postmodernists would put it, but this was already anticipated in the participatory dimension of classical metaphysics.
I note that Hart's position has a relationship to Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).
I don't have enough expertise to thoroughly assess this but I find it an engaging idea. One can see how one might go on to argue that reality is intelligible only because it is already configured in terms of mind and language, which are inseparable from one another.
I always thought that is what Nietzsche meant when he said we hadn’t got rid of God because we can’t get rid of grammar, although I’m not much of a Nietzsche fanboy. But I agree with the way you put it in your last sentence.
Ha! This is exactly what I was saying about this to a friend yesterday. I always paraphrase it as, “If you believe in grammar, you’re a theist.”
Imagine the sense of privilege that can be evoked by the mere speculation that human cognition might have an element of something that is supernatural or connected to god or spirits or anything but the natural world. It serves the interest of theists, mystics or the like. Hence their recurring misrepresentations of naturalism as explanation of survival rather than truth.
They omit the better explanation, that in order to survive you've gotta see what there is to see, and analyse what you see, not only what you need or wish to see. How else could you navigate, test, analyse, make the decicions and act in the ways that increase your fitness?
Truth enables survival and fitness, and as the ability evolved, we gained access to platonic realities such as math, music etc. Their structures are not human constructs, they're natural, or what shapes the natural world, but we can access them and use them in our own constructions.
Intelligibility is not just knowing things, but also understanding and solving the problems in practicality of life. There is limit of human knowledge on the world and even human mind, and knowing the boundary of intelligibility is also an intelligibility.
We must admit that not only there is clear boundary of our knowledge, but also there exists large part of the unknown universe. The limitation is due to lack of data on the type of abstract existence such as space and time, the origin of the universe, and God rather than human intelligence itself or naturalism.
The post-liberal politics of Victor Orban, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio draw from the classical metaphysical thinking of John Millbank and David Bentley Hart, which completely rejects Kantianism and all of the subsequent developments of philosophy which have flowed from it, including the phenomenological work of Bitbol and the Hegelian-Piagetian ideas of Vervaeke. If Kant was a correction of the limitations of Enlightenment thinkers from Descartes and Spinoza to Hume, the post liberalism of Hart turns its back on this whole era and retreats to pre-Enlightenment theological sources. If phenomenology opens up to the postmodern, Hart’s approach is decidedly pre-modern.
I am confident your thinking does not ally in any substantive way with this radically conservative turn. But I wonder if you have sympathies with the pre-Kantian mathematical neo platonism of figures like Michael Levin, Kastrup or Tegmark. I say this because you write:
Quoting Wayfarer
For the mathematical plaronists, mathematics isnt merely a language science happens to use; it is the deep structure of reality itself. When science relies on logical implication or mathematical necessity, it is latching onto features that exist independently of human cognition, culture, or conceptual schemes. On this view, the fact that mathematical principles are not empirically confirmed is not a weakness but a clue to their status: they are discovered, not invented, and they constrain reality precisely because they are reality’s form. Science presupposes logic and mathematics because logic and mathematics are more fundamental than empirical facts. They are part of the furniture of reality, not merely the rules of our engagement with it.
By contrast, Kantian and post-Kantian thinkers read the same situation in almost the opposite direction. Kant fully agrees that science cannot explain logical or mathematical necessity empirically, but he denies that this licenses Platonism. The reason science presupposes these necessities is that they arise from the conditions under which objects can be experienced at all. Mathematics and logic are not discovered features of a mind-independent realm; they are expressions of the a priori forms of intuition (space and time) and the categories of the understanding. Their necessity is transcendental, not ontological in the Platonist sense. They bind all possible experience because they are the rules by which experience is constituted.
On Kant’s view, mathematical formalisms are indeed constituents of scientific discovery, but not because nature is secretly mathematical in itself. Rather, nature as an object of possible science is necessarily mathematizable because our cognition imposes spatiotemporal and logical structure on whatever appears to us. Science presupposes mathematics because without those forms, there would be no objects, no laws, no empirical regularities to investigate in the first place.
Post-Kantian thinkers deepen and fracture this picture in different ways, but they retain the basic reversal of Platonism. Hegel internalizes necessity still further: logical and mathematical structures are not static abstract truths but moments in the self-unfolding of rationality itself. Scientific concepts presuppose logical necessity because they are expressions of reason coming to know itself in nature, not because they mirror an external mathematical realm. Neo-Kantians recast mathematics as a regulative framework internal to scientific practice.
For Bitbol, mathematics and logic are indispensable not because they are universally binding in all possible worlds, but because abandoning them would amount to abandoning the very project of sense-making we currently inhabit. Their necessity is pragmatic-transcendental rather than apodictic.
Husserl locates mathematical logic in acts of idealization, abstraction, and meaning-bestowal. Mathematical objects are neither empirical nor merely subjective; they are ideal objects, constituted through conscious acts but valid independently of any particular act once constituted.
Where Kant treats logic as a fixed formal framework and mathematics as grounded in space and time, Husserl insists that both emerge from pre-theoretical, intuitive practice such as counting, collecting, comparing and iterating, which are then progressively purified into exact, ideal structures. Logical and mathematical necessity is not imposed by an innate cognitive grid but arises from the eidetic invariants of these acts.
For Vervaeke, mathematics and formal logic emerge from ongoing processes of sense-making and relevance realization in embodied, situated agents. They are not grounded in pure intuition, transcendental structures, or ideal acts, but in adaptive cognitive dynamics that stabilize over time into normative constraints. Logic and mathematics are late achievements of a self-correcting ecology of practices aimed at reducing error, increasing coherence, and enhancing problem-solving power.
From this vantage, necessity is not metaphysical or transcendental but ecological and functional. Mathematical and logical norms bind us because they have proven indispensable for navigating complex problem spaces, not because they legislate the form of all possible experience. Vervaeke would say that Kant over-intellectualizes the origin of necessity: what really grounds it is the way certain patterns of inference and formalization reliably track affordances and constraints in the agent–world coupling. Mathematics is powerful because it sharpens relevance realization to an extreme degree, not because it reflects a priori forms of intuition.
I think that the deepest difficulty for strict naturalism is not whether evolution can produce reliable cognition—it clearly can—but whether it can account for normativity. Evolutionary explanations trade in causal success, whereas inquiry operates under standards of correctness. Science itself presupposes distinctions between true and false, better and worse explanations, and valid and invalid inferences. These are not empirical discoveries; they are conditions under which empirical discoveries can count as knowledge at all. As emphasizes, science presupposes logical and mathematical necessity—it does not explain it.
In that sense, I agree with the spirit of Hart’s argument: intelligibility cannot be treated as an accidental byproduct of blind processes without undermining the authority of reason itself. Where I would differ is methodologically. I think the argument is strongest when it proceeds from the structure of inquiry—error, correction, and judgment—rather than from a thick metaphysical or theological picture at the outset.
With regard to the concerns raised by ’s , I think his reconstruction of Hart is directionally right but overstated in ways that muddy the waters a bit. I wouldn't agree with the characterization of Hart as a naïve pre-critical thinker who believes we simply “see” divine truths without mediation, error, or inquiry. He rejects constructivism and representationalism, but that does not commit him to an infallibilist or anti-discursive epistemology. Portraying him that way makes it too easy to dismiss his position as a retreat to pre-Enlightenment dogmatism.
In my opinion, framing the options as pre-Kantian realism versus Kantian/post-Kantian constructivism versus postmodern correlationism forces a false dilemma. There is a post-critical position that preserves what is valuable in the classical tradition—the claim that intelligibility belongs to reality itself—without lapsing into naïve realism or reducing intelligibility to historically contingent sense-making practices.
So from my perspective, the core issue can be stated simply:
Once that question is in view, the debate is no longer about science versus theology per se, or about evolutionary psychology, but about whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely a contingent feature of how certain organisms cope with their environments.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Did you have Schelling in mind here, or is there another group of philosophers you can point us to who expound this post-critical position?
If Schelling , then the gap between Schelling and Hart should be mentioned. From a post-Kantian perspective, Schelling shows how intelligibility emerges from being’s own inner dynamics, rather than presupposing a fully luminous order guaranteed by divine intellect. He accepts the Kantian critique of dogmatism but tries to move through it, not around it. Hart, by contrast, largely refuses the transcendental demand altogether, treating it as a historical detour rather than a philosophical necessity.
For Hart, intelligibility is grounded theologically and metaphysically in actus purus: being is intelligible because it proceeds from divine intellect and goodness. Participation explains how finite minds can know truth, but the structure of intelligibility itself is already complete and perfect in God. Mediation occurs, but it occurs within a fully determinate metaphysical order.
Hart and Schelling both reject Kant’s subjectivization of intelligibility, but Schelling does so by internalizing critique into ontology, whereas Hart largely bypasses it by appeal to classical metaphysics. Hart is a theological Platonist retrieving classical participation, Schelling is a speculative post-Kantian rethinking intelligibility as dynamic and self-grounding.
By being theists.
By default, a theist starts off with:
There is God.
God created man.
Man has the characteristics and abilities as given to him by God.
Naturalism is wrong because God exists and man is created in the image of God.
Nicely put here:
Quoting Joshs
Yes, he identifies as a neoplatonist.
Quoting Joshs
Interesting. Although Hart identifies as a socialist, he mocks MAGA and openly disparages evangelicals which he calls a heretical. He writes amusingly about how much he dislikes all forms of conservative politics (even if he supports a form of Christian nostalgia). He can be quite a bitch.
This is an entirely different subject. Again, I'm not much interested in how the argument might be used by some, nor in refutations of it. Hart would openly mock idea that evolution or complexity produces consciousness. He is a trenchant critic of emergence and is deeply read in neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.
I’m still trying to understand his specific argument, but I fear I may need to buy his book and attempt to negotiate his baroque prose. Life is too short.
Do we know this? Isn’t the question of consciousness still a contested space? But yes on the normativity issue.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Nice work. Yes, I think this touches on some key points.
But I’m still looking for a statement of Hart’s reasoning I can follow. Some of CS Lewis’ essays seem to come close but that old polemicist irritates me.
Is there a substantive argument that attempts to demonstrate why intentionality and subjectivity can’t originate via naturalism?
No that’s a reductionist account, Hart arrives there via philosophical arguments not dogma. He is a Neoplatonist.
Can you post them here?
You tell me.
Premise 1: Naturalism explains everything in terms of physical causes and effects.
Premise 2: Physical causes and effects, by themselves, have no meaning or “aboutness.”
Premise 3: Human thoughts, beliefs, and concepts are intentional—they are about things and can be true or false.
Premise 4: Intentionality (aboutness, meaning, truth) cannot be reduced to or derived from purely physical processes.
Conclusion: Therefore, naturalism cannot fully explain intentionality; the intelligibility of thought points beyond purely naturalistic causes.
Premise 4 would be the most controversial one. It's actually this premise I want elaboration on. It’s interesting because, instead of obsessing over consciousness, this argument treats a single attribute as foundational to a rather complex argument.
Thanks for pointing that out. It’s fascinating how Hart’s and Milbank’s metaphysics are so close, yet Milbank is sympathetic to economic and social conservatism while Hart rejects both. I don’t know enough about non-Marxist versions of socialism to clearly understand his arguments, but perhaps he sees conservatism as relying on secular
Enlightenment notions removed from divine truths and moral directives.
I found more on this. The middle ages offers plenty of examples of a pre-Marxist socialism. Benedictine, Cistercian, and later mendicant monasteries practiced common ownership, collective labor, and distribution by need. Thinkers like Aquinas affirmed private property only instrumentally, arguing that goods are privately administered for the sake of order but remain morally common. In cases of necessity, the poor have a right to the goods of the rich—a claim that directly contradicts Enlightenment property absolutism.
Also, guilds regulated production, wages, training, and pricing not to maximize efficiency but to preserve social cohesion, moral standards, and mutual obligation. Competition was restrained, not celebrated. Labor was dignified as participation in a common good, not commodified as an abstract input.
So it seems that Hart really is drawing from pre-Enlightenment models to produce his notion of socialism.
Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose very component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.
So if physical reality is intelligible, the potential existence of an intellect is requied from an essential feature of physical reality. This would be indeed an odd thing to say in naturalistic views.
Do you call these sorts of position 'nostalgia projects' or is that too reductive?
Yes, that's my read too.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don’t know if you saw my edit. I wrote:
Can you see why Hart rejects naturalism? Kantians and post-Kantians look at the idea of a clockwork universe made up of little universal bits with assigned mathematical attributes interacting on the basis of a pre—assigned causal logic, and the say, sure, the universe looks that way becuase we set it up on the basis of these pre-suppositions. Hart says the same thing, but rather than arguing that we need to investigate how the subject imposes these schemes, or how they arise and change historically through subject-object interaction, he says we need to open our eyes to how the universe is put together, not as components of a giant, ethically neutral machine or clock (naturalism), but as a moral system whose every component has a vital moral role to play in its purposes.
In sum, Kantians and post-Kantians reject naive naturalism because it ignores the contribution of the subject. Hart rejects naive naturalism in favor of an even more naive divine naturalism.
I don’t think the break is as radical as you’re suggesting. The deeper difficulty, it seems to me, lies in how the reality of number—using “number” here as a stand-in for intelligibles generally—is being conceived. As soon as numbers or logical forms are described as objects, a fundamental error has already crept in: reification. That framing immediately generates the familiar but unproductive questions about what kind of objects they are, where they “exist,” and whether they inhabit some special realm.
This is why I’m drawn to Husserl’s way of handling the issue (even though much of him remains unread by me). But it seems to me that on his account, idealities are neither empirical entities nor mind-independent objects in a Platonist sense, but neither are they arbitrary constructions or merely subjective projections. hey are constituted in and through intentional acts, yet once constituted they possess a form of objectivity and necessity that is not reducible to any particular psychological episode. Their validity is not invented, even if their articulation is historically and conceptually mediated. This is where I think the crucial insight lies: intelligibles as being mind-independent in the sense of independent of your or my or anyone's mind, but at the same time, only being perceptible to reason. So they're mind-independent in one sense, but not in another, and more important, sense. (Have a look at this review of a text on phenomenology and mathematics, the highlighted passage makes this point.)
Seen this way, Husserl’s position doesn’t strike me as radically anti-Platonist so much as anti-reification. What is rejected is not intelligibility as a feature of reality, but the idea that intelligibility must take the form of quasi-things standing alongside empirical objects. The Kantian and post-Kantian insight that intelligibility is bound up with the conditions of experience need not be read as a denial of reality to intelligibles, only as a rejection of a certain ontological picture. I’m tempted to locate it earlier, in the shift toward univocity, where intelligibles begin to be treated as objects rather than acts. In Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory: knowing is an act in which form is shared, not a relation to an abstract item. Once intelligibles are reified, the debate inevitably becomes about where they are located—mind-independent realm or transcendental constitution. Husserl’s resistance to Platonism looks to me less like a denial of intelligibility than a rejection of that reification.
This is where the 'error of empiricism' (per Jacques Maritain) becomes evident: it insists on the idea of a mind-independent empirical object, that reality is what exists independently of any cognitive agent. That's the deep contradiction in modern thought.
As regards politics: I'm aware of the connection between these kinds of critiques and conservative or reactionary political movements. You see it also in the connection between the perennialist and their hostility to modernity. I'm dismayed by it, and certainly would not want to be identified with any of the conservative politicians you mention, whom I generally despise. But, you know, 'modernity' as a state of mind really does have some gaping holes in it. But it's the water in which we swim.
That OP I drafted recently, 'the predicament of modernity', is basically about this. It says, there's a clearly discernable historical geneaology behind this problem. It is the 'Cartesian division', elaborated from and by the primary/secondary qualities, Galileo's quantification of nature, the split between mind and matter. All of which are fundamental to what Vervaeke calls 'the grammar of modernity', that is, they're sown into the way we think about 'everything', consciously or not (and most of us aren't.) Some of the best lectures in the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis are about exactly this point (the ones around 'Death of the Universe', Descartes, Luther etc.) So it gives us a world in which 'the universe' is vast, blind and indifferent, in which we, the sovereign individual, who is responsible for defining 'freedom' and 'happiness' on our own terms, are cast adrift like accidental tourists.
Speaking of D B Hart, an extended passage from his review of Daniel Dennett's last book:
[quote=D B Hart, 'The Illusionist'; https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-illusionist]In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.
The Cartesian picture, by contrast, was a chimera, an ungainly and extrinsic alliance of antinomies. And reason abhors a dualism. Moreover, the sciences in their modern form aspire to universal explanation, ideally by way of the most comprehensive and parsimonious principles possible. So it was inevitable that what began as an imperfect method for studying concrete particulars would soon metastasize into a metaphysics of the whole of reality. The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order.[/quote]
That pretty well nails it.
Aboutness is a feature of mind, but the object is not. Obviously the object cannot be derived from the physical processes that give the mind its ability to identify objects.
Therefore, P4 is false! :nerd:
I'll let you comment on this one, since I'm trying to understand Hart not criticise the argument.
Yep, I understand this part of his argument. I've even heard Chomsky talk about the idea of materialism as being incoherent for similar reasons, sans the theistic solutions.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, well, Hart argues that mind, language, and life share attributes and are aspects of the Great Mind (God), who makes all of this meaningful. A Neoplatonist would say that, right? It seems to me that he touches upon a lot of post-modern ideas aroudn language and meaning but resolves them instead with classical foundationalism.
Quoting jkop
But this is basically naive realism. It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object', as if we were assuming a perspective outside both 'our knowledge of the object' and 'the object'. But that is precisely what we can't do, for the reasons given by Kant.
Hmmm, well, isn’t expertise largely built from wide reading and remembering the right bits? For an average person like me, who often struggles to get through a paragraph, the amount of reading and comprehension required to actually make use of that knowledge is prodigious. I mean, I'd like to make use of Lloyd Gerson, but it's impossible.
I'm with you on Lloyd Gerson - I wonder if there would be a gap in the market for a book about Gerson for non-academic readers (although you'd have to be an expert to write it.) Have a read of Joining the Ur-Platonist Alliance (Edward Feser).
I like this and it resonates.
Quoting Wayfarer
The specter of platonism isn’t vanquished simply by denying number the status of object. The question is whether mathematical truths are true independently of any constituting act whatsoever. The question isnt whether idealities are “independent of your or my mind”, its whether they are independent of intentionality as such. Husserl’s answer is no. They are an effect of the projective noetic gesture of intentional synthesis.
For Aquinas, intelligibility is participatory because forms are grounded in esse, ultimately in divine intellect. Participation presupposes a metaphysics of being in which intelligibility is ontologically prior to cognition, even if not objectified as a “thing.” Husserl, by contrast, explicitly suspends any such metaphysical grounding. His idealities are constituted within intentional life without appeal to being-as-such. One cannot simply slide from Husserl to Aquinas by appealing to “anti-reification” without confronting that Husserl rejects exactly the metaphysical realism Aquinas presupposes.
For both Husserl and Kant, the point is not just that intelligibles are not objects, but that their necessity is grounded in structures of cognition or intentionality, not in being itself. Intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality independently of those conditions.
Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a radically different methodological framework—an earlier insight that was obscured once intelligibles came to be treated as existents. The decisive error is not realism as such, but reification: the assumption that universals must be objects of some kind—typically “abstract objects”—prompting questions like do they exist? and what sort of things are they?
Read differently, intelligibility does not concern objects at all, but a necessary structure of reason—necessary, objective, and invariant, yet accessible only in and through acts of understanding. In this sense, its being is inseparable from its givenness to reason, without collapsing into subjectivity or projection. Put that way, the position seems very close to Husserl’s own, once the misleading connotations of “constitution” as fabrication or projection are set aside.
This way of reading the terrain is also suggested by John Vervaeke, who has pointed to Thinking Being by Eric Perl as a model of participatory knowing (which is where I encountered it). Perl’s account makes explicit what is often missed in these debates: intelligibility is neither an object standing over against the mind nor a mere effect of cognition, but something disclosed in the act of knowing itself—where thinking and what is thought, knower and known, are formally united.
The only spectre that has to be slain here is the 'ghost in the machine'.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, what is structurally necessary can only be revealed
though acts, because this ground is itself the temporality of action. It is what returns to itself again and again identically through repetition; namely, the horizontal structure of time consciousness.
Formal ideas such as logic, mathematics, and natural laws can be understood as structures of consciousness—not in a psychological sense, but as necessary structures of rational insight. They are what Gottlob Frege meant by “the laws of thought.” After all, if someone asks you for a mathematical proof, you have no choice as to what answer to give.
But these “structures” are not objects, not inventions, and not projections. They are invariant relations disclosed through acts of understanding.
In deference to pre-modern philosophy, I don’t see the pre-modern intuition of an intelligible world as simply archaic or superseded. Rather, it reflects a genuine insight articulated without the later conceptual distinction between intelligibility as inherent and intelligibility as disclosed. For the Greeks and medievals, nous was not sharply separated from world; knowing was a kind of participation, not representation or “justified true belief”; form was something shared, not “in the mind”; and the order of the world was already meaningful, already articulate.
In that context, it was entirely natural to say that intelligibility inheres in nature. There was no felt pressure to ask whether intelligibility was “in the mind” or “in the world”—that bifurcation simply had not yet hardened. The emergence of that sense of separateness from nature is a distinctly modern development, and arguably a defining feature of the post-modern condition.
If you see the object directly, then you don't differentiate your visual experience from the visible part of the object. Your experience is about the object, it literally is the object. But ontologically, they're separate (experience in mind, object in the world). This matters below.
The claim in P4 is that naturalism can't explain aboutness, because aboutness is not caused by physical processes.
In other words, it expects naturalism to causally explain aboutness yet denies the possibility and blames naturalism for failing.
:yawn: .
Aboutness has a couple of closely related but different senses.
(1) It's a property of the experience, the property to be about an object. It arises with the experience from physical processes in the brain.
(2) the relation between the experience and the object.
Arises by virtue of seeing the object. Doesn't call for other physical processes than (1) and the object.
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It seems unarguable that those sensory organs developed in response to the possibilities afforded by environments. Eyes would not for example have developed in the absence of light. To say that the environment is intelligible is only to say that creatures with the right sensory organs and nervous systems can navigate successfully enough to survive. As an analogy to say that something is visible does not require that it be seen, but merely that it reflects light.
As I understand it, intelligibility is an attribute of events, not of objects. Objects are perceptible. Cognition and re-cognition of objects happens for humans and animals on account of gestalting and memory. We can say that animals "see things as", see things in terms of affordances, and we might say this is a kind of judgement, but it is not judgement in the conceptually reflective sense made possible by symbolic language.
It seems to me that aboutness is possible only on account of symbolic language. Chomsky says that words do not directly possess referents in the world and I take this to mean that words, being generalizations, do not strictly refer to particular objects, but rather to kinds of objects, which reference is a linguistic, not a worldly states of affairs. It is humans that use or take words to refer to particular objects in particular situations.
Quoting jkop
This might be merely a terminological issue (so much in philosophy is) but I think it makes more sense to say that experience is of objects and sensations and judgements are about attributes and relations.
I found this particularly interesting and your account of a necessary structure of reason makes sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
That’s good, and it’s a useful refinement of what I’ve usually read.
Quoting Wayfarer
Another useful breakdown.
I need a table that contrasts modern conceptions with classical or Neoplatonist ones, and maybe a third column for phenomenology, though there are various descriptions.
Do you think morality (at its best) could also be understood as a form of participation?
From philosophical biologist Steve Talbott:
[quote=Steve Talbott, What do Organisms Mean?; https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/what-do-organisms-mean]The physicist wants laws that are as universal as possible, true of all situations and therefore unable to tell us much about any particular situation — laws, in other words, that are true regardless of meaning and context… Such abstraction shows up in the strong urge toward the mathematization of physical laws. [But] In biology a changing context does not interfere with some causal truth we are trying to see; contextual transformation is itself the truth we are after… Every creature lives by virtue of the dynamic, pattern-shifting play of a governing context, which extends into an open-ended environment. The organism gives expression, at every level of its being, to the unbounded because of reason — the tapestry of meaning.[/quote]
I wasn't thinking primarily of Schelling. The position I'm gesturing at is a bit of an eclectic synthesis across a number of thinkers and traditions, focally centered on American (neo-)pragmatism (Peirce, Sellars, McDowell, Brandom), but drawing heavily on transcendental Thomism, phenomenology, contemporary Aristotelianism, and certain strands of post-Kantian realism.
The unifying thought, for me, is that intelligibility belongs to reality insofar as inquiry is normatively answerable to being, rather than being either metaphysically guaranteed in advance or constructed by historically contingent sense-making practices.
Quoting Joshs
Agreed. And while I have sympathies with many of Hart's arguments against naturalism, I ultimately approach things from a different angle.
You’re right to push on the consciousness point—I didn’t mean to suggest that evolutionary accounts of cognition or consciousness are settled. What I take to be the deeper issue (and I think this is where Hart is really operating) isn’t whether evolution can produce reliable or even intentional states, but whether it can account for normativity as such.
To my knowledge, Hart does not present his argument as a single, formal “anti-naturalism proof.” His case is cumulative, transcendental, and often embedded in polemics. Probably the clearest presentation of his reasoning can be found in the early chapters of "The Experience of God".
That said, Hart’s argument isn’t a knock-down proof that intentionality cannot arise via natural processes. I understand it to be a transcendental claim: any explanation that treats truth, validity, and correctness as derivative byproducts of non-normative processes already presupposes those norms in the act of explanation itself. Scientific explanation depends on truth-apt judgments, valid inference, and reasons that count as better or worse.
The conclusion Hart draws is not that science fails, but that intelligibility cannot be ontologically secondary or merely instrumental. It has to belong to reality itself in some fundamental way. That’s where the metaphysical move comes in.
Some further thoughts for your consideration:
I think this is a helpful way of isolating the issue, and you’re right that premise (4) is doing all the real work. One small critique I have, though, is that the way the argument is framed makes Hart sound like he’s offering a genetic or causal claim about whether intentionality can “arise” from physical processes. I don’t think that’s quite his target.
Hart’s point, as I read him, isn’t that natural processes couldn’t in principle produce intentional states, but that any attempt to explain reason, truth, or meaning already presupposes intelligibility and normativity. Scientific explanation itself depends on distinctions between true and false, valid and invalid, better and worse reasons. Those norms aren’t themselves causal properties, and so can’t coherently be treated as merely derivative features of otherwise non-intelligible processes.
So, on my reading of Hart, the pressure point isn’t really consciousness or even intentionality as a psychological phenomenon, but the status of normativity as such. The claim is that intelligibility has to belong to being itself, not merely to our ways of coping with it, otherwise explanation undermines the very standards it relies on.
Nice. Yes, that's pretty close to my understanding of Hart.
Hmm... I've generally thought that naturalism and physicalism were more or less interchangeable, both having superseded materialism. I suppose Hart might say that God is supernatural. But I can see how what is natural may not be physical. Does science have a view about the existence of non?physical objects? How would you change that premise to retain the thrust of the argument? It's my approximation of Hart’s argument.
Interesting points, let me think on this. :up:
What is this supplementary "aboutness" which supposedly demands explanation? For a perception to be correlated to stimulli in a way that happens to be useful, it must disclose something about the world. Whether or not the organism consciously considers the stimulli as "true" or not, a signal derived from the world cannot be useful if it does not inform. A bird of prey does not consider the metacognitive question "are my perceptions true?" Yet, it is critically important that it's perceptions are accurate in the ways that are relevant to it.
We and only we are able to ask the metacognitive questions "are perceptions true? are they real? how can they be about the world?" Such questions can only be posed by language. Only language can carve out concepts like perception, and then that these concepts themselves as objects of consideration. If you believe naturalism can explain language use, then it can explain such questions.
This seems to be the meat of the issue. I don't see anything in your OP that seems to suggest its validity. In a hypothetical near-infinite Universe (such as the one we live in consisting of millions of light years) where basically any and every possible physical or non-physical interaction can and will occur, it becomes a simple matter of taking "a shot in the dark" only with a weapon that has not only an infinite capacity of ammo but a complete and total range of motion. Ergo, eventually you're going to hit something. That something being what can be described as a rational and coherent intelligence that seemingly defies anything and everything around it. At least, that's a plausible explanation your OP fails to place in a skeptical light, let alone disprove.
It's short, but it's not reductionist. A monotheist has the above as a starting point, as the ground from which he makes his "philosophical" arguments.
The point of Hart’s discourse on these matters is that he starts from reasoning and arrives at theism. Isn’t this why reason has been so assiduously employed by the Church over the centuries, to demonstrate the logical necessity of God?
Now, I happen to believe that, for the most part, behind all this, the atheist’s and the theist’s reasons for believing are much the same. Their accounts make sense to them for reasons informed by emotion and aesthetics. The reasoning is often post hoc.
Excellent question. I agree that minimal, functional aboutness—I’ll use intentionality—poses no special problem for naturalism. For a signal to be useful, it must in some sense inform the organism about the world, and evolutionary biology explains this very well. A bird of prey does not ask whether its perceptions are true, yet it obviously matters that they are accurate in ways relevant to its form of life. An early bird must indeed catch a worm.
The philosophical problem arises with the emergence of language and symbolic reason, where representation becomes normative rather than merely functional. Once we can make claims, give reasons, and distinguish truth from mere success, intentionality is no longer just a matter of reliable correlation with stimuli. It involves answerability to how things are in a much broader sense, including domains—logic, mathematics, counterfactual reasoning—where there may be no immediate adaptive payoff. That is the sense of intentionality that invites explanation.
Stephen Talbott, in a great series of essays, argues that biological explanation already operates with two distinct kinds of “because”: because of physical law, and because of reason or meaning. Physical causes are law-like and invariant; reasons are context-sensitive and intelligible only in relation to the organised whole of the organism. Biology cannot dispense with the latter without distorting its subject matter. On Talbott’s view, this marks the core limitation of naturalism as it is usually conceived: it attempts to reduce context-driven, interpretive behaviour to physical causation alone. That is the conflict in a nutshell.
If this distinction between physical causation and meaning already applies at the level of basic biological organisation, then it becomes unavoidable in the case of what Terrence Deacon famously describes as the symbolic species (in the book of that name): beings whose cognition is organised around language, norms, and counterfactual structures that outrun immediate adaptive utility.
In a review of one of Daniel Dennett's books, the reviewer asks 'if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else.' So I would suggest that the attempt to explain reason in biological terms of tends to be reductionist, for the above reasons. Not that more extended forms of naturalism, such as those Deacon and Talbott are attempting, can be described as reductionist.
This is the nub of it, from what I can tell.
And I suppose one orthodox physicalist response is that intentionality emerges from a certain kind of organised complexity in the brain. When neural systems are arranged so that they can model the environment, correct their errors, and coordinate behaviour over time and across individuals, their internal states can function as representations. Intentionality, on this view, is not a basic feature of the world but a higher-level property that arises from the structure and dynamics of complex physical systems.
Would you say this summarises it?
A lot of people will say that, but you never see intentionality in the data. It is always only imputed - and by whom? For what reason?
Do you believe in God, or is that a software glitch?
Excellently put! I would also add another implicit conclusion: if intelligibility is real, then necessarily it follows that there must be at least the potential of an intellect that can understand it.
So, if one tries to derive reason from an intelligible world one is already assuming reason in two ways: the way you're describe here and the potential existence of a reason that can understand the intelligibility.
In a naturalist framework, however, reason should be explained in terms of natural processes. In order to avoid circularity, naturalist view have to deny intelligibility. If however we deny intelligibility we deny the possibility to make explanations.
That, for me, is the critical issue. If one does not accept the Cartesian view of creation constantly being refreshed by God, thinking must find itself in the stuff made without being called just stuff.
Me, I'm still partial to 'God breathing life into clay'.
I think everything is just stuff. I think everything has a non-physical property. An experiential property. Which doesn't mean everything is thinking. But everything is experiencing.
Quoting Tom StormActually, I disagree with this one, also. :grin: But, iirc, you disagree with my reason. I think DNA means something it is not. I think the codons mean amino acids, and the strings of codons mean proteins. And teams of molecules use that information to assemble the amino acids and proteins. Meaning without thinking or intelligence.
Which means I disagree with Premise 4.
But I like 3!
Quoting Tom StormI can't imagine. I think three of his four premises are wrong, so they cannot lead to his conclusion. I think he needs another argument entirely to come to that conclusion.
Not sure what that means. I have no useful science expertise.
Quoting Patterner
Ok. Philosophers also disagree. Remember it’s my probably inadequate arrangement of the argument which I am trying to fully understand. Whether it’s right or not, I couldn’t say.
How do you generally react to @Wayfarer contributions on this subject, which seems to lean towards Neoplatonism. He may have been the better candidate to run this OP. But I do find it fascinating stuff.
Would you, for instance, accept that physicalism is unable to account for consciousness?
The sticking point then becomes: how do we get from physical causation to logic? The standard naturalist move is something like:
Quoting jkop
That sounds plausible, but it glosses over an important distinction. You can examine brain processes all day long and you’ll find electrochemical activity but not implication, validity, or contradiction. Those aren’t things you can point to in neural tissue.
And there’s a deeper issue lurking: even describing brain processes as "giving rise to logic" already requires using logic — rules of inference, standards of explanation, judgments about what follows from what. In that sense, the explanation quietly presupposes what it’s trying to account for. So there's an unstated recursion operating here. That’s not a refutation of neuroscience, but it does point to the philosophical issues involved in presuming that 'brain activity' can be made to account for rational inference: it's a category mistake.
Why would you expect that a relation between two brain events would have to be a third brain event?
Trees make a forest, but we don't expect the forest to be a tree, do we?
Nicely put. I agree there’s an additional pressure point here: intelligibility isn’t a free-floating property—it’s conceptually bound up with the possibility of intellect. If reality is intelligible in itself (not merely interpretable by us), then it must at least be the kind of reality that is proportionate to understanding.
That said, I’d want to phrase the naturalist option a bit more carefully: naturalists don’t usually deny intelligibility outright, but they tend to treat it as instrumental or model-relative rather than intrinsic to being. The real question is whether intelligibility is ontological (a feature of reality) or merely epistemic/pragmatic (a feature of our coping strategies). If it’s only the latter, it becomes hard to see how explanation retains genuine truth-normativity rather than collapsing into sophisticated prediction.
Although notice that behind this framing there’s still an implicit self–world division at work. Intelligibility is taken to be either in the mind — a product of the intellect and ultimately subjective — or in the world, an ontic feature of reality itself. The opposition between intelligibility as ontological and intelligibility as epistemic already presupposes that division a priori
But reality-as-a-whole is not something we stand outside of. It’s a totality in which subject and object are poles rather than separable domains. Once that is seen, intelligibility need not be grounded on either side. It can instead be understood as something that comes to light in the act of knowing itself — neither a mental construction nor an intrinsic property of things taken in isolation.
Merleau-Ponty gestures toward this alternative when he speaks of subject and world as co-arising, with meaning disclosed in their relation rather than deposited in one or the other. I’m not especially well read in him, but this passage captures the idea:
[quote=From Phenomenology of Perception, Quoted in The Blind Spot Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser. Evan Thompson] The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.[/quote]
Entirely subjective I know, but this frame is wonderfully seductive to me.
Why Buddhism and phenomenology? Because they're both laser-focussed on reality as lived, not as seen through the net of abstractions and theories that philosophy usually generates.
(Anyway, again, I really have to drag myself away for a while. I'm at the climactic stages of the book I'm working on, and speaking of laser focus, that's what it is going to take to get it across the line. Of course I'd much rather be signing on to Forum in the morning and chatting but I have a manuscript assessement booked for 26th Feb and I'm on the home stretch. So once again bye for now, but I will be back.)
I think this is a fair pushback, and I agree that my quick framing risks sounding like a Cartesian “mind vs world” split. I’m sympathetic to the Merleau-Ponty point that we don’t stand outside reality as spectators, and that meaning is disclosed in lived engagement rather than deposited on one side or the other.
That said, I am hesitant to adopt that framing in its entirety. Even if intelligibility “comes to light” only in the act of knowing, we still need an account of why that disclosure is normatively answerable to truth—i.e. why it can be correct or incorrect rather than merely an internally coherent projection. If the possibility of error is to be taken seriously, then disclosure must be constrained by what is the case. This seems to require that reality itself be intelligible in more than a merely relational sense.
So I’m happy to grant the subject–world entanglement, but I don’t think it removes the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility is intrinsic to being or merely an artifact of our mode of access.
[Url=https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/1015878]This post[/url] has several of the usual quotes about it.
Consciousness is not physical. Although it is inextricably bound to the physical, and doesn't exist without a physical component (at least we are not aware of any consciousness without a physical component), it is not, itself, physical. It does not have any physical properties, like charge, mass, density, hardness. It does not have physical characteristics, like size, hardness, and weight. We cannot measure it's speed, direction, or any other characteristics of physical processes. It cannot be sensed with any of our senses, or our technology. It is not describable with mathematics.
Physical things - objects and/or processes - build physical things. There is no logic or evidence for the idea that physical things can build non-physical things. And there is no theory, not even a guess from those who assume physicalism must be the answer to consciousness, as to how it can happen.
It doesn't make sense for purely physical structures and processes to evolve for purely physical reasons, without consciousness being selected for, without anything directing the evolution in order to bring about consciousness, yet one day find themselves in a configuration from which consciousness emerges. That scenario is absolutely bizarre.
Would you say you were a dualist? You believe that there’s a physical world and are not an idealist?
Hart’s argument is clearly informed by idealism.
I’m not anlways attracted to arguments from evolutionary biology, they sometimes seem to function as a catch all for anything we can’t quite explain.
I'm a property dualist. I don't think consciousness is something separate from the body. I think it is a property of everything, every particle, like mass and charge. You can't remove mass from matter, and you can't remove consciousness from matter.
Interesting. There's a theory for everything and everyone, isn't there? Perhaps this is a kind of soft-Aristotelian, telos affair.
This doesn't seem right. A naturalist isn't restricted to casual explanations only. So long as any contextual, interpretive explanation can ultimately resolve to a casual explanation.
Looking at the behavior of playing chess. A naturalist might explain the how in terms of the neural architecture that supports this ability, and the dopaminergic reinforcement that drives the behavior. And the why, in an analysis of game playing, that it fosters social connection, reinforces hierarchy, and most importantly it is a platform for learning. Each of these in turn might be subject to a how and a why analysis. Eventually, the whys will resolve to hows: to a discussion of adaptive advantage, and how such advantage propagates across generations.
A naturalism that was restricted to purely casual explanations would be hopeless! This seems like a cartoon straw man.
I'd say statements are normatively answerable to truth because our communities are set up in a manner such that we can demonstrate "true" or "false". Norms come from social groups acting together rather than from being.
Though here "the act of knowing" isn't as much a psychic as a social act -- a statement made to a body of fellow thinkers, and not a proposition believed by a given subject of the external world.
I agree that norms of assertion and justification are socially articulated, and that standards of evidence and demonstration are embedded in communal practices. But while social practices can explain how we enforce norms (what counts as warranted, what gets sanctioned, what gets treated as knowledge), they don’t yet explain why those norms are (in principle) answerable to something beyond communal consensus. I’m happy to grant that epistemic norms are socially mediated — but that mediation itself seems to presuppose an independent constraint: the difference between what is justified-for-us and what is actually the case. Otherwise it becomes hard to make sense of inquiry as genuinely corrigible rather than merely internally self-stabilizing.
Yes—exactly. If intelligibility is reduced to pragmatic usefulness, then “understanding” collapses into successful prediction and control. But then the naturalist has given up the stronger claim that our beliefs are answerable to how reality is in itself, rather than merely to what works for organisms like us.
In that case, it’s not that science becomes false, but that its truth-claims are quietly reinterpreted as instruments. And once that slide happens, it becomes unclear what grounds the normativity of truth and correctness rather than just adaptive success.
I'm not sure that they are. Though...
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't think that follows, either.
Couldn't it be the case that norms are always historically bound -- situated, not trans-communal, etc. -- and yet successfully refers, describes, and so forth? I.e. one could make true statements?
Yes, I agree that norms can be historically situated and yet we can still make true statements.
My point is about what makes that success intelligible. If norms are wholly internal to a community, then “true” collapses into “licensed by current communal standards,” and any notion of correction becomes hard to distinguish from mere change in consensus. We could still shift norms, but we wouldn’t have a basis for saying we were previously mistaken rather than merely operating under different standards.
Put differently: the very idea of “successful reference” seems to presuppose a distinction between what is warranted-for-us and what is actually-the-case, because success and failure aren’t defined by communal uptake alone. That’s the sense in which inquiry appears answerable to something beyond consensus, even if it is always socially mediated in practice.
I'm curious: how would you cash out the distinction between "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" if the norms of correction are understood as entirely internal to practice?
My thought here is that I jumped in when you were on board with the general phenomenological thrust of things: to use an idea from @fdrake "warranted-for-us" and "actually-the-case" are mutually determinative of one another -- you don't get one without the other, they mutually constitute one another as a contrast, that sort of thing.
So the norms of correction are either neither internal/external or both/and external/internal. Which in turn would mean that we can't sneak in an "well, ultimately it's being" or "well, ultimately it's us"
I see what you mean, but to my mind the function of “actually-the-case” is intrinsically asymmetric in the sense that it can overturn what is warranted-for-us, whereas the opposite does not hold. This asymmetry is precisely what underwrites the possibility of error. We revise what is warranted in light of what is the case, not vice versa.
Thoughts?
My thought is we do both, and more.
There is sometimes an asymmetry -- but I'd put it that this is when we're approaching a collective practice. The asymmetry comes from how many people of importance would say what, and that asymmetry can be on either side of this (from the perspective of Being) merely conceptual divide.
I grant the sociological point that we often revise both directions — what gets treated as “warranted” shifts, and what gets treated as “the case” shifts as inquiry unfolds. And of course authority and consensus play a major role in how communities stabilize belief.
That said, the asymmetry I have in mind isn’t about which side has more rhetorical or institutional weight in a given historical moment. It’s about the normative status of truth itself: even if “important people” determine what counts as warranted, they don’t thereby determine what is actually the case — which is precisely what it means to say that communities (and authorities) can be mistaken.
If we collapse the normative distinction between warrant and truth, mustn't we relinquish the possibility of an entire community being wrong, even while fully satisfying its own norms of justification?
I don't think so.
This is the co-constitution going on, I think. Yes, we're talking about something. That's what talking often is. And we can satisfy our own norms while being oblivious to something outside of those norms.
I didn't collapse the distinction between warrant and truth -- I don't think there's even a distinction to be had there except that they are different things**. With both we're definitely talking about how we talk about, though, rather than referring to thing itself.
But what it is we are talking about in the first place is decided by our interest -- so it's not so much Being that we're talking about but a facet, an affordance, a temporal part that may never be again.
**"warrant" I associate with justification. "truth" I associate with statements -- i.e. a statement of the proper form is either true or false.
So a statement is about what is, and a justification is about why I believe something is.
I think your last paragraph is exactly right: warrant concerns justification, whereas truth concerns what is the case. I’m completely on board with that distinction.
I'm less sure about the suggestion that we’re only ever “talking about how we talk about” rather than referring to the thing itself. I agree that our interests determine which aspect of reality we’re talking about (we always carve out a facet, an affordance, a temporal slice, etc.). But that selectivity doesn’t seem to imply (on its own) that truth is merely an intra-discursive status rather than a genuine answerability to what is.
In fact, the possibility you mention — that a community can satisfy its own norms while being oblivious to something outside those norms — seems to presuppose precisely the asymmetry I’m pointing to: that what is warranted-for-us can fail to coincide with what is actually the case. If “truth” isn’t ultimately a constraint beyond our practices, in what sense is the community oblivious rather than simply operating within a different discourse?
:up: Cheers.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I want to note that I only meant that we're talking about how we talk about when we're talking about metaphysics, epistemology, science, and so forth -- we can certainly talk about more than our words.
Does that untangle some thoughts, or make things more confusing?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
"both/and" is my guess here, at least in the abstract.
They're both oblivious and operating within a different discourse -- suppose the many years of Ptolemaic astronomy.
They said true things, of course. Their predictions were better than Galileo's.
Yet to describe the universe as if the earth is the center of it is oblivious.
That helps, yes — and I agree that in metaphysics/epistemology we’re often clarifying the conceptual norms governing our discourse rather than straightforwardly “describing objects”.
For me, the Ptolemaic case nicely illustrates the asymmetry I’m trying to get at. They were warranted given their evidence and conceptual resources, and they certainly made many true claims and successful predictions. But the reason we call the geocentric framing “oblivious” rather than merely “a different discourse” is precisely that it failed to track what was actually the case. The discourse ultimately shifted because reality didn’t cooperate with it.
So I’m happy to grant the “both/and” descriptively — different discourse and genuine error — but the notion of genuine error seems to require that “what-is-the-case” is not itself fixed by our discursive norms, even if our access to it is always mediated by them.
In other words, we are forced to revise discourse to accommodate what-is-the-case, whereas what-is-the-case refuses to be forced into inadequate conceptual schemes.
This is where things are a bit tricky I think. It's not so much that it failed to track what was actually the case but that a different way of looking at the world was developed such that we could describe what was previously certain as oblivious. Here "affordance" helps, I think -- it's not so much that Ptolemy did not describe what-is-the-case. Like I said his predictions were actually better than Galileo's, in that time. Rather Being is such that it affords both a Ptolemaic and Copernican description.
We can say it as oblivious, now, because we've now journeyed outside of Earth and taken pictures. But Galileo and the rest had no such benefit. It's only now, in light of our techonlogical ability, that the picture seems quaint and so it's easy to think Copernicus, et al., were superior because they laid out what-is-the-case better and reality broke the Ptolemaic model.
But in fact science only changes with new generations -- the new model was interesting, lead to new avenues of research, conflicted with orthodox opinion and so was attractive.
It happens to be the case, now, that the Earth is not the center of the universe. But it's not like I have a time machine to go back to then where I can send a rocket into the sky to make sure the Earth was, then, not the center of the universe. We'd predict that it was not, but that's not because we're tracking what-is-the-case better -- at least, there is no measure of such a thing, even if we believe that we have more truth now than they had then regarding astronomy.
This what-is-the-case then becomes something like a thing-in-itself.
I find this argument lacking because it depends entirely on one's beliefs. If one is a theist then the plausibility of naturalism is simply false, and if one is a naturalist then intelligibility couldn't have come from anything but a blind watchmaker.
It's really only appealing to someone who already believes the conclusion.
But some things aren't in need of an explanation. "Why is the world intelligible?" may not have an answer at all. It's something like asking "Why is there something rather than nothing?" -- if there be an answer it won't be of the sort which we abduce. Intelligibility is the mystery which philosophy reflects upon, and all the metaphysical stories we tell about it aren't strictly explanations or descriptions but rather frames for us to be able to say "this is intelligible" in the first place -- frames which I think comes from cooperating with others.
So when in Rome the world is intelligible due to Apollo. And when we're now the world is intelligible because it arose out of a chaotic process of natural selection. But in either case the world is intelligible and intelligibility somehow is "beyond" these stories, or grounds these stories in the first place.
Yes—this is the key pressure point. A naturalist can of course say “we trust our models because they keep working,” but that’s a pragmatic entitlement, not yet a rational vindication. The deeper question is why predictive success should be taken as evidence of truth or real structure rather than merely a contingent fit between our cognitive habits and the environment.
If intelligibility is not intrinsic to reality, then “success” can be explained causally, but it becomes unclear what licenses the further inference to correctness or truth. And that’s exactly where normativity enters.
I agree that technological “affordances” matter, and I don’t mean to deny the Kuhnian point that theory change involves sociology, pedagogy, and generational uptake as much as brute confrontation with data. And certainly Ptolemy’s system was impressively successful at saving the appearances within the observational constraints of the time.
But I’m not sure that supports the stronger claim that there’s “no measure” of tracking what is the case better. Even if our access is historically conditioned, we still distinguish theories by explanatory scope, unification, counterfactual robustness, and coherence with independent lines of evidence. Ptolemy and Copernicus aren’t merely alternative descriptions on a par; they make incompatible claims about the Earth’s motion, and later developments (Kepler/Newton, and eventually spaceflight) strongly vindicate one over the other.
So I’m happy to grant that what counts as warranted is interest- and instrument-relative, but the very intelligibility of calling geocentrism “oblivious” seems to presuppose that reality itself was not as the Ptolemaic picture described it—even if no one at the time had the epistemic means to establish that. That doesn’t posit a Kantian "thing-in-itself"; it’s just the minimal realist point that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate.
I'd say there's no measure to reality itself. When we're distinguishing theories with these criteria -- scope, unification, etc. -- we're comparing and contrasting theories to one another on the basis of our aesthetic criteria for knowledge rather than on the basis of Being. Neither has a "more direct" accessibility relationship to reality itself -- in terms of their accessibility relation two theories are on par with one another.
I mean how would you measure your "correctness" to reality? Isn't that just to say "My theory is true, and here are the reasons why"?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I agree that what-is-the-case is not exhausted by what we can currently demonstrate. I don't know if I'd call that "realist", though -- it's not like Voltage was waiting to be discovered. We have to invent new ways of thinking which in turn lead to productive research paths. Reality unfolds and even changes shape with knowledge-production.
I'd prefer to put it that the realist position is something like "There are true statements": rather than an explanation of Being as an independent category wherein we have potential structures to discover I'd pass over that in silence and prefer to say "Some statements are true", which is much more manageable a claim than claims on Being.
I think we’re actually quite close on several points. I agree there’s no “view from nowhere” where we can measure our theories against reality as such, and I also agree that many scientific concepts (voltage is a good example) are genuine inventions that open up new lines of inquiry rather than simply “reading off” ready-made categories from nature.
But I’m not convinced that this makes explanatory scope, unification, etc. merely “aesthetic.” They look more like epistemic virtues that have proven themselves precisely because reality pushes back: ad hoc theories tend to break under novel testing, while unifying theories tend to be more counterfactually robust. So while we can’t directly compare a theory to “Being,” we can still distinguish better and worse ways of being answerable to constraint.
On voltage: I agree we invented the concept and the measurement practices, but it seems hard to deny that electrical potential differences existed long before we conceptualized them. That is, the conceptual scheme is constructed, but what it latches onto is not.
And on your last point: I’m sympathetic to the modesty of “some statements are true,” but I’m not sure we can cash out even that minimal claim without implicitly presupposing that what makes a statement true is not constituted by our norms of justification. Otherwise “true” collapses into “warranted by our best lights,” which reintroduces the very distinction we’ve been debating.
The problem with this formulation is that even for Hart the argument is independent of theism. Hart is quite comfortable to say that his argument does not lead to theism specifically; it merely identifies an inadequacy in physicalism's explanatory power, for reasons that @wafarer has often pointed out (and he is not a theist either). Thomas Nagel holds a similar view and he is an atheist.
I think it's better to identify the specific reasoning and work out what is actually going on. But the first step is to understand the argument properly, and I’m not convinced that I do. Hence my OP.
Quoting Moliere
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. They are only similar in that both issues seem to be unresolved, but they are not addressing the same type of question. Even your formulation of the issue isn’t quite right: the question is not 'why the world is intelligible', but how naturalism explains intelligibility. Given that naturalism presents itself as the predominant explanatory framework for all things, the question seems apropos.
In my own life (I agree with you) I am content with not having explanations for things, like life or consciousness. My favourite three words are 'I don't know' and I wish more people would employ them. But that's a separate matter to trying to understand this argument.
Let me try a different formulation then.
The argument is going to sound plausible to those who reject naturalism as an adequate metaphysics and not plausible to naturalists.
The naturalist is content with it being a capacity of our species that was selected for through a chaotic process. When Thomas Nagel talks about consciousness as a metaphysical problem for naturalism the naturalist simply shrugs. I'm criticizing the persuasive power of the argument. Hart can make a conceptual division, and of course the argument can be rendered independent of theism, but the appeal of the argument will be heavily determined by the beliefs of a listener.
Quoting Tom Storm
Fair. I'm not convinced I do either, especially as I haven't read Hart -- only the thread.
Quoting Tom Storm
I just mean to say that the way we'd answer either question won't be by abduction -- there's not an inference to the best explanatory route by which we can decide whether naturalism is adequate to explaining intentionality or not.
Fair.
What do you say to my updated reply I started with?
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure.
For my part I'm not sure naturalism "explains" anything anymore than non-naturalism does with respect to intentionality. I feel like that's the wrong sort of way to think about metaphysical questions.
I agree.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Not "merely" aesthetic -- but aesthetic.
Epistemic virtues work well enough for me. I wouldn't draw a hard distinction between ethics and aesthetics here -- especially with respect to intelligibility and naturalism.
What I don't know about is the "that have proven themselves because...."
But then your conclusion I agree with -- we can still distinguish better and worse ways of answering.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It does seem that way.
Yet we have the example of Ptolemy who surely felt the same. And it's possible that we're in a similar scenario. Perhaps electrical potential, in the future, will turn out to be another phlogiston.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
To get back to how we agree in many ways: I agree that collapsing "true" into "warranted" isn't right.
And actually I find your rendition here much more agreeable: the minimal claim "some statements are true" implicitly presupposes that what makes statements true is not the norms of justification. In some ways this is almost analytic to what we mean by truth (except when we don't, of course ;) )
But I wonder if it justifies the criticisms against naturalism on the basis of intelligibility.
If the non-naturalist explanation is that intelligibility is somehow an essential feature of things, even a matter of essences that allow an "agent intellect" to grasp their meaning and significance, would that apply only to symbolic language enabled beings or would it apply to animals also?
I think that’s unfair. There are people who were naturalists and have changed their minds precisely because of this reasoning. I’ve met people who are persuaded by good arguments. Forget the ones who have already decided, they exist in every area and can be left in brackets for this discussion.
Quoting Moliere
I’m not accusing you of sidestepping the problem, but you can see how people might call this avoidance. In other words, if I say the model is wrong, I don’t have to engage with it, I can just change the subject.
Quoting Moliere
Yes, and this is really the area I’m interested in: understanding the argument, not refuting it or trying to sidestep it. I want the best possible formulation of this argument. We often move so fast on this site that, for the most part, people are playing a kind of tennis with their own preconceptions: you hold this, I return your serve with mine.
Hart’s argument concerns an explanatory gap. Even if every mental state is correlated with a brain state, that only gives a correlation, it doesn’t explain why the brain state represents the world rather than merely being a physical pattern. The point, it seems is that naturalistic accounts struggle to bridge the gap from physical patterns to meaningful content.
Yes, I think it might apply to animals. But we can't talk to them.
The argument pivots on whether physicalism can explain intelligibility. The reasoning for why it can’t is what I’m trying to drill into. See above.
Fair point.
I'll try to stay more focused. These were just my first thoughts.
Quoting Tom Storm
Cool. Sorry for starting out critically, then. It was my first instinct and reactive.
I wouldn't put naturalism in terms of mental states and brain states, though I can understand that rendition. I suppose part of me is thinking that it's easy enough to adapt naturalism in different ways such that there is no explanatory gap.
Which, yes, charitably that means I don't understand the argument.
Quoting Moliere
What I potentially like about the argument is its apparent simplicity (although, obviously, I don’t fully understand it). It isn’t talking about consciousness, mind, or any number of tedious philosophical problems; it is simply saying that a mere point of view can’t be explained by naturalistic processes.
Coming back to this. I wasn’t being critical of you or your thinking; I apologize if it came across that way. We’re all just fumbling through this stuff. :up: :up:
Heh thanks. I didn't know and mostly was just worried that I went out into left field too much.
The critique of naturalism emanating from phenomenology is, as has been mentioned, quite different from Hart’s objections to it. For instance, Merleau-Ponty argues that empirical accounts of perception succumb to the myth of the given. At the core of the myth of the given is not just the idea of “raw sense data,” but the deeper assumption that perception begins with something already fully determinate, such as neural signals, stimulus features and information, that is then processed or interpreted. Many neurological models describe perception as the transformation of incoming signals into representations: edges, contrasts, motion vectors, object files, predictive hypotheses, and so on.
The “input” to the system is treated as if it were already a perceptual unit, already individuated as visual information, when in lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. What the neuroscientist calls “input” is itself a reconstruction abstracted from an already meaningful encounter with the world. The retina does not receive “edges” or “features”; it is we who later describe neural activity as if it were encoding them. The world is perceived in terms of what it affords, not as a neutral array of data awaiting interpretation. No amount of neural description can recover this level, because it presupposes it.
I think this is exactly the right question. And I agree: the point we’ve converged on (truth not collapsing into warrant) doesn’t automatically refute “naturalism” if by naturalism we mean something like methodological commitment to the sciences.
Where it arguably becomes a problem is for a stronger naturalism—one that treats reality as exhaustively describable in the idiom of efficient causation, and treats normativity/intentionality as reducible to that idiom. If what-is-the-case is not constituted by our justificatory norms, then truth is a genuine constraint that isn’t identical with any social practice. But it’s also not obviously the sort of thing that can be captured in purely causal vocabulary.
The reason that normativity purportedly can't be grounded in efficient causality is that causal explanation and normative status come apart. An efficient-causal story can tell us why a belief arose (neural mechanisms, evolutionary pressures, reinforcement histories, etc.), but none of that by itself tells us whether the belief is true, false, valid, invalid, justified, or unjustified. Two people could arrive at beliefs through the same kinds of causal pathways and yet one be right and the other wrong depending on how things actually are. So the causal story underdetermines the normative story. That’s why the worry isn’t that naturalism can’t describe cognition, but that it struggles to account for the binding “ought” of truth and correctness using only the “is” of causal sequence.
So the worry isn’t “science can’t work,” but that the intelligibility presupposed by science (truth, validity, correctness) can’t be ontologically grounded in a picture of the world as fundamentally non-normative. That’s where Hart thinks naturalism quietly leans on what it can’t fully account for.
In other words: the critique isn’t of naturalism as method, but of naturalism as a total metaphysics. The issue isn’t whether naturalism can describe how we reason, but whether it can make sense of why reason is answerable to truth at all.
Quoting Tom Storm
There are promising signs that mainstream neuropsychological approaches are starting to nibble at the edges of phenomenology. The popular free-energy predictive processing branch of neuroscience used to ignore phenomenology-influenced embodied enactive approaches , but lately there has been a rapprochement between the two camps.
I more or less agree with you. But I'm not sure that you can 'explain' anything without positing intelligibility. Rather, intelligibility seems to be the ground for any explanation.
I don't think that is a fair assessment of either physicalism or naturalism. It may apply to certain stripes, but beyond that, no. For example there are physicalssts such as Galen Strawson who propose a kind of panpsychism. Naturalism in the broadest sense, I would say, just rules out an intelligent designer, it doesn't rule out that matter might be, in some sense, intelligent at all levels.
Quoting Tom Storm
Again I think this is not right. That there may be mysteries which might never be explained is not ruled out by either physicalism or naturalism. Supernaturalism posits an intelligent designer and an overarching plan, and the problem with those ideas is that they can never be demonstrated to be true, and they are, given the nature of the world we know, greatly implausible to boot.
Quoting Tom Storm
It seems to me the argument is one from incredulity coupled with accusing naturalism of not being able to deliver on what it does not necessarily claim to be able to deliver on. In other words, as you say the "explanatory gap" is counted as being fatal to physicalism/naturalism.
But really, what is the alternative? Positing a designer or even merely some kind of pan-psychism does not solve the "explanatory problem" because there seems to be no way of explaining how either of those alternatives could work. So it doesn't come down to a contest of explanatory power so much as a case of people simply having different intuitions in the matter.
The physicalist/naturalist can fairly say "why should we posit entities for which we have no evidence, and maybe even no possibility of evidence?".
Quoting Janus
I’m not saying that other more circumspect views, like the ones you mentioned, aren’t also present. I’m just describing what I often hear and regarding physicalism and naturalism: the usual claims about eventually achieving a full understanding of consciousness in the future. In the meantime, trust in complexity and brain states. And yes, some naturalists agree that we may never have a complete account, leaving the door forever open to versions of God and esoterica.
A big issue for naturalism is whether we are talking about methodological or metaphysical naturalism, as people often shift the meaning of their claims.
Why should we not trust in complexity and neuroscience up to the point of what is known in those fleids? Like all science the trust should be provisional, and completely open to revision.
Also saying that we may never have a complete account does not necessarily leave the door open to God and esoterica, because those posits can never be scientific or satisfactorily explanatory. They can only be faith based notions. Science should not have problems with faith-based notions since they can never be part of science and hence pose no challenge to it. The obverse also holds, I think, since science can never be the "be-all and end-all" of human life, it can only ever play a mere part.
Quoting Joshs
The problem applies equally to postulating that the input is historically determined cultural and social conditioning. In lived experience there is no such pre-perceptual layer. The degree to which what we perceive is "naturally given" as opposed to culturally constructed is impossible to determine and so the question seems always to be open to black and white thinking on both sides of the argument.
I think you misunderstood me. I should have said that we would leave the door open to superstitions, folk traditions, and supernatural ideas, God and esoterica. There is little doubt that wherever there is a gap, God will be inserted, as a kind of explanatory wall filler.
Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism:
Yes, I suppose that is true for some?for those who need certainty. My point is that God and other spiritual and/ or esoteric notions might provide a sense of certainty, but cannot provide any cogent explanation for anything. There is nothing more mysterious, more inconsistent, more ambiguous than God, for example. Just read the Old Testament?particularly the Book of Job.
Ah, that's a nice quote of Witty's.
But your OP is about that -- how is consciousness related to the physical world, only that you stated it as if intelligibility could be extracted out of consciousness.
So, you've written a very good OP in terms of the naturalistic view, but you haven't really isolated anything from the hard problem of philosophy which is this: consciousness and the physical make up of the brain. If we could explain this, then we could explain intelligibility as it relates to the world.
Do you think there are theistic, supernaturalistic or esoteric explanations that offer better, more coherent and consistent accoiunts than naturalistic ones?
You say this:
Quoting Tom Storm
But that is a mere assertion. What reason do you think the argument is offering for why point of view cannot be explained by natural processes?
Quoting Tom Storm
Okay, I get you.
The frustration with naturalism is that that their principles are not about intentionality, but causality. As you have already laid down on page 1 of this thread.
If you actually search among the mind philosophers where intentionality came from, you'd find yourself back again to the causal connection of our cognition with the structure of our brain. But intentionality, as you might have already pointed out, is not (or if you want to be argumentative, should not be) a necessity resulting from the causal relation. (We could have perception, but in the form of irrational or intractable occurences that don't give us meaning). It is its own principle and processes.
But I disagree with this view.
The autonomic bodily functions drive our intentionality also. We do not have much control over the arrival of hunger or thirst or fatigue. So, what to think about these bodily functions that make us want to eat -- and not just eat, but to choose what we want to eat?
Here's a shot at reconstructing Hart's arguments from normativity and intelligibility respectively. It's worth noting that Hart doesn't explicitly spell out his argument in a concise manner, so this definitely involves some interpretation. The first argument is a reductio style deductive argument, while the second is more of an inference to the best explanation type of argument. I've tried to be as charitable as I can:
Argument 1: The Argument from Rational Normativity
P1. Reasoning involves being guided by normative logical relations — recognizing that conclusions ought to follow from premises, that inferences are valid or invalid, that beliefs are warranted or unwarranted.
P2. Logical relations are intrinsically normative (they involve "ought"), and no purely descriptive-causal account of physical events entails or generates normativity. (The is/ought gap applies at the level of logic itself.)
P3. If physicalism is true, then every feature of human thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations.
P4. Genuine reasoning requires that our beliefs are (at least partly) explained by the normative logical relations themselves — that we believe the conclusion because it follows, not merely because neurons fired in a certain sequence.
P5. If a worldview renders genuine rational warrant impossible, it undermines its own claim to be rationally believed.
C1. If physicalism is true, no belief — including the belief in physicalism — is held because it is rationally warranted; it is held because it is causally produced.
C2. Therefore, physicalism is self-undermining.
Argument 2: The Argument from Intelligibility
P1. Reality is not merely ordered but intrinsically intelligible: it is the kind of thing that admits of rational explanation and can be known as such by minds.
P2. If reality is fundamentally mindless and non-rational (as physicalism holds), then intelligibility is not intrinsic to being but at best a contingent appearance generated within certain organisms — a useful fiction rather than a feature of the real.
P3. But all explanation — including physicalist explanation — presupposes that reality is inherently ordered toward intelligibility. The physicist's equations work because nature is rationally structured, not because we impose structure on chaos.
P4. A worldview that must presuppose the intrinsic intelligibility of being while denying it any ontological ground is parasitic on what it refuses to explain.
P5. Classical theism accounts for intelligibility: the rational order of nature and the mind's capacity to grasp it are both grounded in a transcendent rational source (Nous, Logos) — what the classical tradition calls God.
C. Therefore, classical theism provides a more coherent and less parasitic metaphysical framework than physicalism.
This is also an unacceptable admission. Consciousness is not some funky revelation that no one could produce a convincing argument.
First, let me say for the record that I sympathize with physicalism. No, in fact, I side with them and agree with their argument.
There is, after all, energy that drives all entities. If you actually listen to neuroplastic outside-in explanation of how, even old people's brain could create new neural connections and reinforce existing ones by doing increasingly complex tax, in which, learning gets difficult progressively.
So outside-in means there is an outside input of a challenge to perform certain tasks, and this input has been proven scientifically to have a profound effect on the wiring of our brain. And what's the common denominator between input and the physical brain? Energy. Energy is the driving force in perception.
Funny thing is, we unquestionably accept gravity as a fact -- we ourselves didn't even witness it. We were taught by people who observed that apple falls down, not up, from its tree.
I don’t think that’s right. That would be something like mistaking an absence of an account with an account. But I think some like @Wayfarer have come part of the way and I am exploring @Esse Quam Videri comprehensive attempt. But again if I or others can’t make sense of it that’s not the same thing as there being no argument.
Nice. Yes I think that’s a detailed account, which goes further - to Mr God - than we need to.
The other arguments may have been made by CS Lewis too I seem to recall.
I found this from a rather well written and somewhat intractable essay by Hart on the matter.
Thoughts? It's a little too difficult for me.
The problem is that any physicalism which claims that there can be no real intentionality is always already refuted, since the claim that there is no real intentionality is itself a claim about something and hence is itself and example of intentionality.
It doesn't follow that, for example, electro-chemical signalling, which amounts to semiosis ...that is amounts to information about some conditions or other being apprehended, would be impossible if it were nothing more than a physical process, just because we cannot explain how it works in the terms of physics.
It is already obvious that those kinds of biological processes cannot be explained in terms of physics. It is simply the wrong toolkit.
That there might be (current at least but even no possible future) physical explanation does not prove that something more than physical processes are involved, even if it might reasonably serve as a motivator for the faith-based intuition that something mysterious and perhaps inexplicable is going on. Claiming that the something mysterious is logical or empirical proof of a spiritual realm or god or whatever is a step too far and does not provide any missing explanation in any case.
I think this is a genuinely distinct argument from the other two, though it shares deep roots with both of them.
The first two arguments were essentially negative — they aimed to show that physicalism cannot account for normativity and intelligibility. This passage is doing something more constructive: it’s trying to show that the very structure of intentionality, properly analyzed, naturally points toward something like a participatory metaphysics — a hierarchy of being in roughly the Neoplatonic sense.
The key move, as I read it, runs like this:
Every intentional act — even something as mundane as using a hammer — is directed toward an end that is not yet realized but is already operative as the organizing principle of the act. When I swing a hammer, the completed action (the nail driven in) is not yet actual, but it is already functioning as the rational cause of my present movements. The future end is operative in the present as a final cause.
Hart then argues that this temporal structure — where the end is “always already” governing the act even as it is being worked out in time — requires more than a merely mechanical succession of efficient causes. Time (chronos) is the unfolding, in sequence, of what is graspable only as a unified whole (aeon). This is the Platonic dictum from the Timaeus: chronos is the moving image of aeon.
And then the crucial further step: this order of intelligible purposive wholes cannot itself be understood as a mere aggregate of interacting parts. It must involve genuine intrinsic unity. But any determinate unity, Hart suggests, is intelligible only as a participation in unity as such — which points beyond itself to a higher principle of unity. This yields the Plotinian hierarchy: temporal becoming, noetic wholeness, and ultimately the One beyond all distinction.
So the argument’s skeleton might be formalized roughly as follows:
The Argument from Intentionality to Participation
P1. Intentional action is real — our acts are genuinely directed toward ends, and this directedness is not epiphenomenal.
P2. Every intentional act is structured by a meaning — an end or purpose — that is not reducible to any present physical configuration. The act of hammering is organized by the completed goal (nail driven in), which does not yet exist physically but is already operative as the rational principle governing the agent’s present movements.
P3. This directedness toward what is not-yet (and even toward what may never be) cannot be captured in purely immanent mechanical terms. No arrangement of present matter, however complex, constitutes aboutness — orientation toward an absent end — without presupposing an irreducible intentional structure that already exceeds efficient causality.
P4. Therefore, in every intentional act, the temporal sequence of physical events is governed by an intelligible wholeness that is prior to and not derivable from the sequence itself. The parts of the act only make sense in light of the whole, but the whole is not yet physically actual. Temporal sequence presupposes intelligible wholeness.
P5. This intelligible wholeness — the order in which intentional acts exist as complete purposive unities rather than as mere successions of physical states — constitutes what the tradition calls a "noetic order". This is not a “separate place” or a Platonic warehouse, but a claim about ontological priority: intelligible form is more fundamental than material sequence.
P6. The noetic order, as a realm of determinate intelligible unities, cannot be self-grounding. Any determinate unity — any "this" rather than "that" — is a limited participation in unity as such, and so points beyond itself to a principle of unity that is not itself one determinate thing among others.
P7. If intentionality is not unique to human minds but can be discerned at systemic levels of nature — if biological organization, persistence, and function exhibit genuine directedness toward ends — then this structure (temporal unfolding governed by intelligible wholeness, grounded in a principle of unity) characterizes reality as such, not merely human psychology.
C. Therefore, if intentionality is real, reality cannot be fundamentally mechanical. The present is always already governed by a meaning that transcends the present, and this pushes metaphysics toward a participatory ontology — a hierarchy from temporal becoming, through noetic wholeness, to an absolute principle of unity ("the One").
Basically Hart is arguing that if you take intentionality seriously and follow out its internal structure, you are led — almost by phenomenological necessity — toward a participatory ontology. It’s not primarily attacking physicalism (though it does that in passing, with the point about the “mechanical narrative of emergence”). It’s constructing a positive metaphysical picture “from the inside,” showing that it arises naturally from reflection on what intentional action actually involves.
Hart is also doing something methodologically distinctive here. He’s suggesting that ancient Neoplatonic metaphysics — which modern philosophy often treats as naïve pre-critical speculation — was in fact operating with something like a proto-phenomenological method: deriving ontological structure from the analysis of agency and experience. So the argument is simultaneously philosophical and historiographical: Plotinus is not separated from Husserl/Heidegger by a Kantian abyss, but is engaged in a continuous project of making explicit what is implicit in experience.
Where is it most vulnerable? Probably around P3 and P6. A naturalist will say: the “end” that organizes present action is just a neural representation — a predictive model of a future state that causally shapes present behavior. No need for a "noetic order".
Hart’s reply will be that this simply relocates the problem: a “representation” is itself already an intentional phenomenon. The question is not whether the brain can generate models, but how matter can be about something absent, future, or merely possible at all. Invoking neural representations is not an explanation of intentionality; it is intentionality redescribed in mechanistic vocabulary.
So the real issue, for Hart, is whether intentionality is eliminable or irreducible — and if it's irreducible, whether it forces us beyond the mechanical narrative toward a metaphysics in which finality, form, and unity are basic features of reality rather than emergent accidents.
For me I found myself saying "But..." at his depictions of naturalism. I find phenomenology -- even participatory metaphysics -- as compatible with a kind of naturalism. A naturalist doesn't need to believe in the singular present moment as the only existing physical reality, and the mechanistic picture is more of a reductive move than a naturalists move.
My thought where he says "this is impossible" is to ask "Why's that?" -- in some sense, if we're good naturalists, we'd say we may not know how something arises and so need not "sit on both sides" to point to a limitation. Rather that seems to me that Hart believes reality is intrinsically structured with intelligibility and it's a rather handy explanation for a problem he sees in naturalism.
I agree with your rendition that he's using Heidegger as a sort of continuum between Neoplatonic metaphysics and modern philosophy to attempt to deny the critical turn. But then I'm critical of Heidegger too so I wouldn't say modern philosophy stops at Heidegger. :D
You're raising something I think is genuinely important — the question of what "naturalism" actually commits you to. Hart is at his strongest when he's targeting the Rosenberg/Churchland end of things, where intentionality really is denied or explained away. But you're right that there are much more capacious naturalisms that would happily accept real intentionality and even something like teleology.
The interesting question is whether those generous naturalisms are still naturalism in any meaningful sense, or whether they've quietly conceded the ground Hart is fighting over. If one's naturalism includes irreducible intentionality, real directedness toward ends, and the genuine ontological priority of meaning over mechanism — at what point has one just become a fellow traveler with Hart who prefers different vocabulary? That's not intended as a "gotcha" — just an interesting question about where the boundaries of the dispute actually lie.
And your point about Hart sometimes asserting impossibility where he should be arguing for it is well taken. He has a tendency to treat certain metaphysical intuitions as self-evident that aren't self-evident to everyone. The "impossibly fantastic" line about emergence is a case in point — it expresses a conviction rather than demonstrating a conclusion.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes. What do you make of the argument? Given the potential problems in premises 3 and 6?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I'm not sure how one would demonstrate this is necessarily the case.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
What does this mean? It seems to be saying that a specific idea is one thing rather than another, but it can’t explain why it is one at all; that unity must come from something more basic than the idea itself.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, I would have thought that this is low hanging fruit.
Quoting Moliere
I think this seems to be a good summary of the matter along with the tension for naturalists.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think he would agree with this, but he would say he can’t help it if others are too dull or intellectually captive to understand the point properly.
That’s a totally fair reaction — Hart tends to get very “high altitude” very quickly, which can make his prose rather opaque (being charitable) for the "uninitiated".
If we strip away the technical metaphysics, Hart's basically saying that when we act intentionally, we aren’t just pushed around by physical causes like billiard balls. We are guided by meanings — by “what we are trying to do” (e.g. desires, goals, plans, etc.). When I hammer a nail, what explains my movements isn’t only the physics of muscles and neurons, but the goal I am aiming toward: driving the nail in. That goal isn’t physically present yet, but it’s already shaping what I do right now.
So Hart thinks the world contains something that physics has banished: purpose (or “end-directedness”). That’s the intuitive starting point.
Regarding your comments on P3 — you're right to press this. The claim is basically: when you reach for your coffee cup, your action is organized by something that doesn't physically exist yet (the coffee being drunk). The whole movement only makes sense in light of where it's going. Hart says no purely mechanical account — billiard balls hitting billiard balls, so to speak — can capture that forward-directedness, because mechanism only allows the past to push the present, never the future to pull it.
Can this be demonstrated beyond all doubt? I doubt it. But Hart would say: every attempt to explain intentionality mechanically ends up either smuggling intentionality back in through the back door (your "neural representation of a future state" is itself about something — so you haven't eliminated aboutness, you've just relocated it), or else giving up on intentionality altogether and saying it's an illusion — which is the Rosenberg move, and which most people find absurd.
So as with all philosophical arguments, it's less a proof and more a challenge. Hart is saying: show me how mechanism gets you aboutness without presupposing it. He thinks no one has ever met that challenge. Whether that constitutes a demonstration or just a very confident bet is a fair question.
Regarding P6 — your reading is essentially right. A specific intelligible unity — say, "the act of hammering this nail" as a purposive whole — it is one thing rather than another. But it doesn't contain within itself the reason why it's a unity at all. Its being-one is something it has, not something it is. So it participates in unity without being the source of unity. And that means there must be something more fundamental that grounds the possibility of things being unified wholes in the first place.
This is the most Neoplatonic step in the argument and frankly the one that asks the most of the reader. If you find it natural to ask "but why is anything a unity rather than merely an aggregate?" then the argument has some purchase. If that question strikes you as confused or unanswerable, you'll get off the train here. Hart thinks it's the most important question in philosophy. Many people think it's not really a question at all.
On the "low-hanging fruit" point — yes and no. Hart is targeting eliminativists, and that's the "easy" win. But his deeper claim is that any naturalism that accepts real intentionality has already conceded something that sits very uncomfortably within a naturalist framework, even a generous one. Real aboutness, real directedness toward ends — these look a lot like the formal and final causality that the scientific revolution was supposed to have banished. So the generous naturalist may have a harder position to maintain than it first appears: you've let the camel's nose into the tent, so-to-speak.
On Hart's confidence — your last line made me laugh, and you're probably right that he'd say exactly that. It's both his greatest strength and his most exasperating quality. He writes as though the Neoplatonic hierarchy is just obvious once you've cleared away modern confusions, and for some readers that's electrifying and for others it's maddening.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, good. What's your reaction to this point?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
And I think this may be the best distillation of what it all means.
I would be interested to learn more about what a post-modern response would would be or what someone like Richard Rorty might say. One possible approach might be to argue that Hart assumes that purely physical processes should be able to fully account for aboutness, but this expectation may misrepresent what explanation can do. The fact that any account of intentionality already presupposes meaning shows that some aspects of our engagement with the world are not reducible to lower-level processes, highlighting the limits of explanation rather than pointing to something beyond the physical. Does that make sense?
Quoting Wayfarer
Come to think of it, science is generally one massive attempt to disprove religion. Billions are poured into space exploration, evolutionary topics, etc. -- and for what? To show that life and everything in the universe can come about and function without God.
- - -
Quoting Janus
Sure. But IRL, scientism seems to be one of the main streams of thought. And many religious arguments are geared against scientism.
Quoting Janus
In order to win the argument, of course.
But like Moliere has been saying:
Quoting Moliere
Quoting Tom Storm
But arguments don't somehow "speak for themselves", don't somehow stand in a vacuum, don't "stand on their own". They depend on unstated premises that are simply taken for granted -- just not necessarily always and by everyone.
No ...
"Reason has been so assiduously employed by the Church" ... no. They sure like to talk a lot, yes, but that's not the same as "reason assiduously employed".
There's a reason why philosophy and religion are two different areas of expertise.
Of course. And this is something to bear in mind when approaching your OP.
Quoting Tom Storm
What should we do when we disagree?
When can we afford to "agree to disagree"?
So much of politics and religion is about addressing these questions; obviously, with an eye on winning.
This explains a lot about the often absolutely vicious authoritarian attitude of theists in interpersonal relationships.
It explains why one's experience (as a non-theist) with theists can be as demoralizing and exhausting as with narcissists and sociopaths, even though theists are not necessarily either.
You might get in trouble for that claim, but I can’t say I disagree.
I think that’s a superficial description, which I’ve already addressed. The point is: can naturalism account for intentionality? Forget God: what can naturalism explain? Surely that’s the nub of it, as I’ve said before. It's possibel to answer “no, naturalism doesn’t account for this” and still not arrive at Mr. God.
Quoting baker
I don't think you're understanding the point I am pursuing.
Follow the reasoning, not what you think about theism or theists, or what you think I, or others, think about theism.
Quoting baker
I always incorporate this point. But you are not engaging with the point of this OP. I am asking: what is Hart’s argument? You seem to be focusing on the argument based on implicit assumptions of theism. I don’t care what the implicit assumptions might be - such assumptions are surely obvious. I am trying to understand his reasoning, which seems complex.
Fortunately has arrived somewhere with this.
Cheers! :up:
Quoting Tom Storm
My reaction is: I actually think Hart has a real point here.
If you grant that intentionality is real — that thoughts are genuinely about things, and that actions are genuinely directed toward ends — then you've already moved beyond the picture of nature that came out of early modern mechanism (matter in motion, efficient causation, nothing else).
A generous naturalist can certainly allow intentionality, but Hart's challenge is: what is it, ontologically? Is it just a convenient way of talking? An illusion? Or a real feature of reality? If it's real, then it starts looking a lot like what older traditions called formal and final causality — forms, purposes, directedness. And Hart's suspicion is that once you let those back in, you've already conceded that the mechanistic story is incomplete in principle.
That said, I'm less convinced that Neoplatonism is the only viable landing place. While I am sympathetic to irreducible intentionality and teleology, I'm more inclined toward a neo-Aristotelian metaphysical picture where nature is simply richer than pure mechanism allows — without taking on a Neoplatonic metaphysical hierarchy. At a certain point the labels start mattering less than the substance. The real question isn't "are you a naturalist?" but "what do you think reality actually contains?" And if your answer includes irreducible aboutness, directedness, intelligible structure — you've already left behind the worldview Hart is primarily attacking, regardless of what you call yourself.
So I'd put it like this: Hart is right about the inadequacy of mechanism, but the positive metaphysical conclusion is underdetermined by his argument.
Quoting Tom Storm
Rorty is interesting here because I don't think he would try to answer Hart on Hart's terms at all. He wouldn't say "intentionality is reducible to physics." He'd say something closer to: "Hart assumes that if aboutness can't be reduced, it must correspond to some deep metaphysical structure. But why? Maybe aboutness is just part of how we talk — a feature of our vocabulary and practices, not a window into the architecture of being. It doesn't need metaphysical grounding any more than humor needs a metaphysical theory of funniness."
Hart's counter would be sharp: even to describe vocabularies and practices, you're relying on meanings, norms, and directedness — you're relying on intentionality while refusing to account for it. The "it's just how we talk" move is parasitic on the very thing it waves away. I don't think Hart decisively refutes Rorty, but he does expose the cost of the Rortyan move. Rorty will avoid Hart's metaphysics, by treating "what is intentionality?" as a pseudo-problem — and Hart will insist it isn't.
To summarize: I think Hart's challenge is serious. I'm sympathetic to the claim that intentionality and normativity are irreducible, but I'm less convinced that irreducibility forces you all the way to Plotinus or even to classical theism, rather than to a richer-than-mechanistic view of nature. Hart's argument doesn't force you to become a theist — but it does force you to decide whether you really believe that nature is exhausted by efficient causation.
Nice - that's also a point I made earlier. We can set aside the Neoplatonism and admire the construction of his argument.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Indeed. And sometimes it seems to me that philosphy is about sidestepping problems rather than answering them: dissolving not resolving. Not sure where I sit on this. A case by case basis, I guess.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
That's a keen insight. I was thinking similarly but I'm no expert or Rorty. Meanings, norms and directness are unavoidable. I love the idea of waving away the thing you are resting on. Perhaps it can be done.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
That's a fair question.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think I've thought "no" to this question so long, while being sympathetic to naturalism and pondering it, that I find the argument hard to process.
Billiard-Ball causation, I thought, has long been left behind -- insofar that this is the only target of his criticism then, yes, I'm a fellow traveller. But I suspect that I'm not at the same time.
Sartre comes to mind to me as a counter-part to Heidegger. Rather than a misreading I think of him as a materialist reading of Heidegger: and in those terms that consciousness is nothingness seems to fit a post-critical materialism (that would at least be on par with an updated NeoPlatonism or Neo-Aristotelianism).
Quoting Tom Storm
Heh, thanks. I suppose I can't help myself but to be critical because it's a question I've often wondered about this sort of argument. I tend to skew skeptical with respect to metaphysics while claiming my prejudices are naturalistic, of a sort, so it's just where I come from.
Dewey says this somewhere, that there are philosophical problems that are just no longer "live" for a new generation, in new circumstances. He endorses that move, and offers his ideas as suited to the times.
Something besides sidestepping or dissolving is possible, then: ignoring. Which will sound a bit un-philosophical, but among working scientists, you'll find some (and some famously) openly hostile to philosophy, some intrigued because they're curious and like puzzles, and a considerable amount of indifference. I can't imagine you'll find many, of any predisposition, willing to take marching orders from David Bentley Hart—"Pack it up boys! Hart says it's not gonna work."
So who are these arguments for?
The "naturalism" he's talking about, after all, is found in philosophy departments, not in science labs. Is he holding naturalist philosophers to account? To what end? The way this actually plays out is just classic arms race stuff: pointing out a flaw in a philosopher's position only forces someone to fix it and strengthen the position. Very rarely, there is a critique generally considered strong enough to discredit a whole approach, but even that's usually no more permanent than the death of a superhero. Another generation or two and someone will get the old wine into a new bottle. It's fashion conducted by means of argument, but still fashion. (I suppose we could throw in philosophers who fight back basically for the sport of it.)
So who are these arguments for?
The only answer that makes sense to me—one where there would be genuine consequences for the success of the argument—is believers who have somehow become "natural science curious". Here, Hart's arguments could find real purchase, and keep that little sheep from straying, or, rather, bring the sheep that has already strayed back into the fold.
I can't think of anyone else who would be interested and would take seriously what he has to say.
Indeed, "Shut up and calculate". Although it seems to me that Hart isn’t saying "it's not going to work", he is identifying that a particular presupposition may be less secure than many dogmatically assume. If accurate that seems to me a reasonable piece of work, and there is certainly an enthusiastic audience for Hart's many books on these sorts of matters. Personally I find his prose close to unreadable.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, I'm someone who has ignored philosophy for most of his life, so I should be biased in your favour.
But isn’t it sometimes the case that the subjects people are least interested in turn out to be among the most important?
I’m interested in what Hart has to say, up to a point. It should also be said that Hart may appeal to agnostics/atheists who are “classical-theism curious” and wondering about alternatives to what might strike them as the scientistic dogma of the present era. Either way, since this is a philosophy site which frequently examines precisely these kinds of recondite issues, I figure it's probably legitimate try to understand his argument.
Not at all. The metaphysics of causation is a major topic in any philosophy classroom.
That's true in some ways.Take a look at the Wikipedia entry on the conflict thesis 'which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict between religion and science, and that it inevitably leads to hostility.' That is the view of the so-called 'new atheists' (not so new anymore), Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris. The article goes on to say that it's generally regarded as a discreodited idea, but it certainly lives on in the so-called 'culture wars', especially in American society.
But then, this conflict also has roots in the European Enlightenment and the attempt to escape the autocracy of religious organisations.
But the times are certainly changing. I spend a lot of time listening to talking heads on YouTube discussing the intersection of philosophy and science, and there are new perspectives on these question, well outside the narrow confines of the typical Religion V Science tropes. Take a look at this 2008 NY Times column, The Neural Buddhists, which I read just as I was getting into forums for the first time.
Just dropping by
I think that’s a fair self-diagnosis. Hart isn’t really targeting “science” so much as the idea that nature is exhaustively describable in terms of efficient causation. If one has already moved beyond billiard-ball mechanism, then Hart's argument will seem overwrought.
The remaining question (and I think it’s the one you’re gesturing at) is whether a non-mechanistic naturalism is stable as a metaphysics, or whether it either collapses into deflationary quietism or else starts to look like a cousin of the older metaphysical traditions—just with different vocabulary. That’s where the boundary question becomes genuinely interesting.
That's a fair sociological observation — no working scientist is going to pack it up because Hart thinks physicalism can't ground intentionality, and you're right that the dispute lives in philosophy departments, not labs.
But I think the "who is this for?" framing quietly assumes that ignoring a philosophical question is a neutral option. It isn't. Every working scientist presupposes that nature is intelligible, that valid inference tracks truth, and that explanation is possible when they do their work. Those are philosophical commitments, whether or not anyone stops to examine them. Hart's point isn't "stop doing science" — it's "maybe your philosophical assumptions are in conflict with what must be presupposed when you actually do science."
That helps put him in perspective for me.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Both/and here as well. I say that naturalism is my prejudice, though, because I don't believe that it's an object of knowledge. It's a frame which makes sense of making sense. And we really only come to believe these things through a shared experience with others.
Which is why I was questioning the place of metaphysics as if it were an object of knowledge or explanation in the first place: naturalism isn't a theory that explains how we come to know the world, and neither is NeoPlatonism, from my perspective, but these are the myths which help us to make collective sense at all. It's more of a choice than something which is simply true or false. It's mythopoetic Truth which metaphysics pursues, and both kinds of metaphysics are good to know. (or pass over in quietude if one doesn't feel the metaphysical need, or has come to see that it's not strictly satisfiable in terms of criteria of knowledge)
Reality is still there, though. I just believe that our stories do not capture it, lay it out, place light upon the subject, mimic the forms, or so on. They're for-us more than in-itself.
It wasn't meant to, and I don't think Dewey thought of moving on as a neutral move, but a necessary one. (I'll likely come back to this in a minute.)
One reason I was thinking about it was not just the known misalignment of science and philosophy, but because arguments have audiences, especially in philosophy where argument is overwhelmingly persuasive rather than demonstrative. You have to have a common vocabulary, some idea what the audience will accept as inference, and so on. That's true within the field, and becomes particularly pointed when philosophy speaks of or to other fields. They have their own conceptions of evidence and inference that philosophy thinks it knows all about, and can even explain to the people in those fields, but too often the philosopher comes off looking like the management consultant or efficiency expert who doesn't really know anything about how the work he is "improving" is done. [hide=Bonus reference](Herman Melville went to lecture of Emerson's once, which he recorded enjoying, "however, one cannot help but form the impression that, had Mr Emerson been present at the Creation, he would have offered several helpful suggestions.")[/hide]
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't think that's quite true, not in its entirety. It's clearly something like an aspirational goal, but it seems to me the most a scientist needs to commit to is giving it a shot. Scientists seem generally very forthcoming about what they don't understand, and also about what, at the moment anyway, they don't even have a plan for figuring out. You hope you'll be able to reach understanding, but the proof is in the pudding.
I had this very thread in mind when I was commenting elsewhere this morning, that the process of science, indeed all sorts of learning, cannot presume it has the right concepts when the investigation is begun; what's needed is a process that will allow the "right" concepts, useful concepts, to emerge in the course of research. "Emerge" is probably a little too strong, even misleading there, though I think it's phenomenologically right, because we're really talking about revision, only sometimes the revision can be pretty dramatic.
The curious thing is, I think this applies even to the practice itself. That is, what kind of intelligibility is on offer will evolve with what you're able to achieve. It's why research fields involve a lot of hand-wringing about statistical analysis, what it shows and what it doesn't. And when something like a fundamental principle comes into view, you may be surprised to find a kind of intelligibility you didn't dare hope for.
So not only is there no assumption that a given research program can be successful in the long run, what kind of success it might or might not have might only become clearer through the process of research itself. It's all in play, all at the same time.
Quoting Tom Storm
I did read this post, and I wrote a couple replies, which overlapped a bit with what I said above, but I didn't want to dump a whole 'nother thing in your thread for the second time.
But since @Esse Quam Videri did such a bang-up job reconstructing Hart's arguments, and I expect you've gotten most of what you specifically wanted from this thread, maybe there's no harm in a little after-party chitchat in the driveway...
I've already mentioned Dewey, so I'll start with something else I've mentioned here (I don't know how many times) before, Burt Dreben's comment to Quine that "great philosophers don't argue."
You see, I wasn't actually arguing for "Shut up and calculate." I was quietly contesting the view that the business of philosophy is primarily argument, or, rather, argument conceived in a particularly narrow way.
What I am claiming is that no one is under any obligation to refute Hart's arguments. I was a long time coming to this view, and felt the old impulse when I saw your thread. (Saying "Explain this argument" is like waving catnip in front of me.) It's a lot of fun analysing arguments. It's interesting work—to me, anyway—trying to figure out where there is some subtle flaw in a piece of reasoning. (I indulged the old impulse a little in the infinity thread, because Zeno's paradoxes are attractive targets for this sort of work.)
It's worth doing if you learn something, and indeed I think I learned something about informal reasoning doing that sort of thing for many years on this site. It's work I enjoy, and sometimes I'm pretty good at it, but it tips over into a kind of intellectual bloodsport more easily than I am comfortable with.
Danger to the soul is not the main issue though; it's that sometimes there is a misalignment of methods and goals. If you refute Zeno's Dichotomy, have you shown that motion is possible? Of course not. We all already know that motion is possible. The interest in studying the argument is purely in figuring out what's wrong with it. That's why it's a paradox. If you learn something about human thought, or about logic, from doing so, and that's what you wanted, great. That happens to be the sort of thing I want to know, so I've done a lot of that.
But suppose what I wanted to know about was motion. Should I care that some yahoo has an obviously flawed argument that there's no such thing? If I allow myself to get sucked into dealing with him, just as a preliminary matter of course, before I move on to the actual work, then I'll recreate his damn paradox in my own work and never get to what I actually wanted to do.
What's worse, I will take on the framework and concepts of the argument, and then work to develop a counter-framework and improved concepts that are useful for dealing with this damned argument. I think there is an expectation in philosophy that the framework I develop there will be precisely the framework I need to understand motion, but I'm not at all sure we're warranted to make that assumption.
And the reason I have my doubts is because of what I said above: the concepts and theoretical frameworks you need develop within the process of research itself. Why would I think I will find the right concepts for understanding motion if I spend no time researching motion and all my time researching an old Greek argument? I deny myself, as a researcher, exactly the experiences I need to revise my conceptual framework.
(I think it's a fundamentally mistaken approach, and it's why I have so much trouble with SEP. The best philosophy is always, like science, work that is done on the phenomena themselves—even when those phenomena are theoretical rather than practical or physical—rather than purely counter-arguments to arguments.)
All of that—and I have several thousand more words I could add—is why I think it might be not only acceptable but a good idea just to ignore Hart. It depends on what your goal is, but philosophers like to pretend you are required to deal with them, when there are good reasons to think you aren't.
— You're a somewhat special case, Tom, because your goal is often just to understand what someone else thinks and why, especially if it's quite different from what you think. That's your choice and, as I said, I think @Esse Quam Videri has done yeoman service here in reconstructing the arguments. I still don't care, even after reading the reconstructions.
Yes, that’s mostly it. The point of this thread, as I mentioned a few times in only to understand the argument being made, which I have tried to do. Whether the argument is located in some form of Christian thinking or whether the reasoning is compelling or not isn’t of much interest.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Which matches my aims too.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well, that’s beyond me. I’m not sure what philosophy is primarily for. It always struck me as being too diverse to have a central concern or approach. I’ve never been close enough to the subject to develop a view.
I’m afraid much of what you set out above is beyond me.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So if we were to take "conscious" as a subject, in two or three dot points what direction does your approach lead, in terms of method?
I somehow missed this earlier. I'll give my thoughts on each premise and conclusion.
P1: Saying that reasoning is normative suggests that it is socially or culturally constructed. I don'rt buy that because it seems obvious to me that animals, and not just social animals, reason. Of course symbolic language vastly extends the ambit of reason, but I think it is also true that the necessity for consistency, validity and justification in reasoning is intuitively obvious if a thinker is self-aware enough to be concerned with more than merely asserting a random opinion.
P2: The only ought I see in logic is that if you want your thoughts to be more than arbitrarily related to one another, orderly instead of chaotic, and pragmatically insightful, then you ought to attempt to think consistently, validly and justifiably. I think this applies to animals as much as to humans. It seems reasonable to expect that the ability to think in appropriate ways would be selected for in both animals and humans, as chaotic thoughts unrelated to what is going on would not be conducive to survival.
P3: It is simply not true that human (or animal) thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations. To think this would be to posit strict determinism and the impossibility of novel insight.
P4: What if believing the conclusion because it follows just is neurons firing in a certain appropriate sequence or pattern of relations?
P5: The physicalist worldview does not necessarily, even if certain versions of it may, render rational warrant impossible. This is a strawman.
C1: This is an either/or fallacy. A belief may both be held because it is rationally warranted and because it is causally produced.
C2: Physicalism is not (necessarily) self-undermining. This is not to say that it is certainly true, but that only tendentiously simplistic caricatures of physicalism are self-undermining.
As time allows I may come back to address the other argument as you have laid it out.
Here ya go:
That's it. I don't think there is much of a role for philosophy in consciousness studies. Historically, there was.
Quoting Tom Storm
Historically, philosophy has been an incubator and nursery for the sciences, and that accounts for some of the great diversity of material, and why philosophers continue to think there's a role for them in the lives of their children. But the kids are all grown up now. Well, mostly. Anyway, we've done pretty much all we can for them.
Quoting Tom Storm
Tempted as I am to fall back on a flippant, if knowing, "me neither," I do have an idea. It's the idea we tried to instill in the sciences as we sent them out into the world: to stand up for the claims of reason. That might sound like the opposite of what I've been saying, but in thinking that with a priori argument you can tell the sciences how to do their job, philosophy is behaving unreasonably. Philosophy should be an advocate for the sciences, not a school marm looking over their collective shoulder, ruler poised menacingly.
And I pitch philosophy as reason's advocate, not because reason should always win, but because it should almost always at least get a hearing. And that means that philosophy has to spend some time figuring out what to say should it get the chance, so that means thinking about what reason is, what role it plays in our lives, and what roles it could play.
Quoting Tom Storm
Dang. Well, I guess that supports my point about the audience for an argument.
Oh yeah.
Quoting Tom Storm
I don't see it, not in the suggestion that there are these assumptions that imprison science. The goals of scientific research are inherited from philosophy, to gain knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the rest of the natural world, but the many means by which the sciences attempt that have evolved considerably and continue to do so. The sciences are philosophy's greatest achievement.
I've enjoyed your contributions to this thread.
Does this then mean that philosophy actually has evidence that it "does" something?! :D
I never thought about science like this but I like it.
This isn't the first time I've described the sciences as philosophy's children, and every time the description seems more apt. The sciences are like a son who takes over his dad's garage, but the old man keeps stopping by, getting underfoot, trying to tell his son how to do his job. "Dad, they've got computers in them now! These new cars, they're not like what you used to work on."
And I say this as father. If you've done right by them, they've got the values they need to make their own way. Your example is what counts the most.
Some people hold a view that philosophy is merely speculative, whereas science deals with reality - no doubt there are hard and sift version of this.
I'd like to differentiate myself from positivists in some way.
Quoting Tom Storm
I wouldn't put it like that.
To use Srap's story -- it's not like the grandparents cease to visit in or have influence.
Ha! I've said this a number of times on the forum, and never knew I was plagiarizing Russell. (I'll check out the source.)
As I said before, this to me is just historical fact. I tend to think of science as the fulfillment of philosophy; some people think of science as, I don't know, second-rate philosophy.
Quoting Moliere
Hmmmm. Be nice if your parents and grandparents were proud of you, instead of second-guessing everything you do. (Mine were. Randy Newman tells a story about visiting his dad: "Hey Pops! I won an Academy Award!" "Yeah? For what?" Oof.)
I would. But perhaps you’re saying that’s not how you see yourself in relation to a claim like: ‘science is what we arrive at when philosophy has been successful and weeded out all the dead ends.'
Yes.
I'd put it that science shares a genealogy from philosophy, but has become something a bit different than what philosophy has pursued in doing metaphysics. The interests are the same along with various commitments to reason. I don't see philosophy as a dead end at all but as a fruitful activity that will always be around, but I can see how we do science now relates to philosophical influence, and how science has gradually become independent from philosophy -- at least as a discipline (i think philosophy of science is a thing and interesting and worth investigating too).
Good post. I think your argument is a bit overstated, but I agree with the spirit of what you've said. Philosophers overstep when they try to legislate rationality, pontificate from the armchair, or tell scientists how to do their jobs.
That said, I don't think Hart is aiming to do any of those things. His arguments are designed to put pressure on a certain metaphysical picture while pointing the way to an alternative that he thinks is more compelling than contemporary intellectual culture gives it credit for. That's it.
Should he be ignored? I don't see that he's doing anything particularly egregious or underhanded. Unlike Zeno, the topics he is addressing are considered "live" within contemporary philosophy and science. Sure, his metaphysical views are idiosyncratic, and he blusters a bit too much, but that doesn't make him unworthy of engagement per se.
That said, I can totally see why certain people would ignore him, whether out of distaste or disinterest. That's fine. I don't think his arguments "demand" an answer, though I think anyone who is interested in the topics should probably grapple with the underlying conceptual issues at some point.
Is science built upon philosophical axioms? Is "Reality can be understood" an axiomatic belief?
My thought is that scientism is the belief that science can resolve philosophical questions or that it has priority in all matter of things regarding reality, ethics, and knowledge. I'd say this is a philosophical belief, though, and not a scientific axiom. I don't think that methodological naturalism is necessary for the sciences, even -- one who believes that the universe is intelligibly structured due to our inability to understand intentionality can still do science with or without that commitment.
Much of my insistence on dividing philosophy from science is that I think both are valuable and different from one another, and I think a multitude of philosophical beliefs which conflict can contribute towards scientific practice: it doesn't matter if we believe we're describing random patterns or nature's structures or the results of a deeper intelligibility which structures reality what matters is that we're able to do science together through a shared practice.
I say "not even methodological naturalism" is necessary because of the different metaphysical frames we can interpret scientific evidence in, and it seems that the practice has evolved to a point that it's somewhat independent of metaphysical beliefs. Rather than necessary preconditions or necessary philosophical presumptions there's a multiplicity of possibles.
And I'd say I'm not committed to positivism or scientism with this because I don't believe science is the end-all-be-all on reality. There's history. There's personal experience. There's art. There are all kinds of ways of knowing reality that aren't bounded by scientific practice or inference.
You’re right. Axiom may not be the right term. But it is a metaphysical presupposition. There are others, like causation and the idea that the world is ordered. And pragmatically this works for us ( for the most part).
Quoting Moliere
I’m not attempting to define who is a positivist or a scientistic thinker.
Is Dawkins? Many would say so. And yet he writes with vitality about the centrality of art, poetry and music in his life. I think, perhaps, that scientism arises from the belief that reality is transparently accessible to us, that it can be captured in a complete descriptive system, and that scientific inquiry alone provides genuine insight into what matters. ( eg, consciousness) Or something like that. How do you see scientism?
I want to say that intelligibility, causation, and the idea of an ordered world can be metaphysical presuppositions, but I don't believe they must be a part of science as a whole.
We could interpret "causation" as "patterns of events" and make events ontologically primary to the logical category of causation -- i.e. here causation wouldn't be a metaphysical presupposition but an epistemic collective necessity where one is reporting events but not committed to metaphysical causation actually existing.
This is what a basic anti-realism of science looks like: there are constraints of method, but these are not metaphysical presuppositions.
Quoting Tom Storm
Dawkins fits, by my lights. I'd differentiate myself here in saying that I'm not just saying that philosophy is important while science is the best method for discovering causal reality, or something along those lines. I genuinely believe there's more to knowledge than science. Even philosophy counts here -- it's just seeking a different kind of truth than science seeks, by my lights, and due to the practices of science being made relatively free of metaphysical commitments (at least, necessary metaphysical commitments), which is evidenced by the wide interpretations of science even by scientific practitioners (i.e. a naturalist vs. an idealist, say) while the practice continues to be successful.
Making any kind of sense?
Interesting. Do you think many scientists identify as anti?realists, and also as Kantians, understanding space and time as forms of cognition rather than external features of the world?
Quoting Moliere
What are you thinking here?
Quoting Moliere
Yes, I find this interesting. Are there many scientists who believe that time and space do not exist as external realities? Or should I have written ‘spacetime’ instead?
What would count as a different kind of truth?
I don't think so, no. But I don't know, either -- I'm not sure if we'd be able to even poll the group "All Scientists" due to lack of ability to ask everyone who is a scientist.
Realism I think is more common among scientists, but what that realism is realism about varies quite a bit. A mentor of mine in biochemistry was both a determinist and a Catholic which is pretty much the exact opposite of my view on the world and on science. :D
And I've run into many different worldviews among scientists. Philosophy is only sometimes a shared interest and usually I don't get the time to talk it because we're talking science(also, I don't broach it).
Quoting Tom Storm
History is my go-to example because it is academic, it's about the world, and people generally believe that historical events are also real: we may disagree on the causes of World War 2, but that there were causes of World War 2 is a frequent belief.
History is about the real world, and yet produces knowledge. And History does not follow the methods or presuppositions of Science. Ergo, there's more to knowledge than science even in the highly constrained world of academia.
But also I like to note that almost all of our beliefs are formed by non-scientific means. Science's stringency is such that even if we're committed to science as the best and only we can't possibly fulfill that in our day-to-day life, and this kind of knowledge is still knowledge. I know that my wife will want me to do such and such not because I've done studies but because we have a relationship in which we communicate.
In some ways this personal knowledge is "higher" than scientific knowledge: Newton's Laws were true, but my marriage is preserved because I do what I need to do to keep it that way.
Quoting Tom Storm
Philosophy! :D
At least I tend to think so. It's hard to characterize just what is learned by studying philosophy, but I can see that people who do are more able at thinking. It's not that they will not fall for traps but they'll be somewhat aware of possible traps and be open to error more than people who do not.
But art is another good example here I think. I think art explores the human condition and seeks Truth over decoration, at least at times.
Then there's the knowledge of the trades I think of: knowing the different types of switches you can install into a control panel is about reality but it's not really a scientific knowledge and it's not only know-that. It's technical knowledge. Plumbing, machining, electrical work seem to fit here as genuine kinds of truth that are even about the world but they're not doing the science thing.
A concrete example is the arguments about physics (without necessarily going into all the details). But suffice to say that Albert Einstein was a committed metaphysical realist, in the above sense, and consistently rejected any suggestion that observation or measurement could materially affect the objects of analysis in sub-atomic physics. Again, time has not been on Einstein's side in this regard, the so-called 'anti-realist' interpretations of physics seem to hold sway nowadays.
But I think many scientists are nowadays aware of the dangers of metaphysical realism, the antidote to which is simply circumspection. 'We don't say this is how the world really is, but that is surely how it appears to be.'
I think that's the attitude I'm encouraging.
Though, to be fair, the children second-guess everything the parents/grandparents do, too -- and it'd be nice if we could recognize our common humanity and stop that game.
Yes.
In spite of my pronouncements, though, I believe I'm a realist of the metaphysical sort.
But I would not follow your description of Einstein's realism. From what I can see God plays dice.
I’m not sure I agree. I take something closer to Susan Haack’s view of what counts as a scientific approach. Methods that have been established within an intersubjective community, that have replicable and predictable results, where there's a body of standards and best practices based on empirical experience, would certainly include areas like plumbing, electrical work, and even boat building. All achieved over time through testing an idea, trial and error and experiment. Many fields fit this broader account of disciplined, evidence?based inquiry.
Quoting Moliere
I hear you. Although I wouldn’t say philosophy as a whole. Some philosophy, perhaps even most. But I wouldn’t include something like logical positivism, for example. The problem is whether we can treat all philosophy as a form of truth, even while recognising that some philosophy is mistaken, and in some cases perhaps even wilfully ignorant.
Quoting Wayfarer
Exactly. Thanks for the term. Queue The View from Nowhere by Nagel. An important argument.
That's interesting.
Yes, many fields do.
Would judges, in a court of law, count?
Quoting Tom Storm
I think logical positivism is a worthy area of study.
Basically I think it's worthwhile to study false things. Sometimes I think it's more worthwhile to study false things than true things, but then I shake myself back to reality :D
Also I ought note that one need not study philosophy to be good at what I was saying. One can have their own ways of listening which the philosophers we read have not bothered to articulate and those ways of listening is what I think philosophy can help one learn.
The odd part there is that in studying philosophy one can also learn to do the opposite -- to defend one's viewpoint from all possible objections and prove oneself right.
On the other hand, the idea that reality could be other than it appears to be is absurd unless what is meant by "how the world appears" allows that what appears to us is not exhaustive, since we have reason to believe it appears differently to other animals. I don't think theories should be included in "how the world appears" either, since they are obviously defeasible.
Ironically the idea that reality could be some absolute way apart from how it appears introduces the very the notion of the "God's eye view from nowhere" that you are constantly arguing against.
You make it sound as though there could be an alternative.
"Again, time has not been on Einstein's side in this regard, the so-called 'anti-realist' interpretations of physics seem to hold sway nowadays."
I don't think this is the case. Certainly I don't think that observer dependence commits one to anti realism. That the world at the micro scale works in ways that are very unintuitive to inhabitants of the macro scale shouldn't be too surprising.
There are obviously lots of interpretations. The one I prefer is that the world is fundamentally lazy. It commits to as little definite state as it can get away with. And if it does commit, that state remains as local as it can get away with. Interaction simply merges the local determinate state of both terms of the interaction. And observation is, definitionally, the interaction we are aware of. Nothing woo about it.
Whereas I would prefer ‘indeterminate’.
I think you have answered your own question. The intelligibility of reality, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics (Wigner), are not scientific questions. So we should not expect naturalistic answers. Also, any philosophical answers postulated will be limited to metaphysical and metaphorical conjectures. Are you OK with that? :wink:
Quoting Tom Storm
Since the worldviews of Materialism (random & meaningless) and Spiritualism (purposeful & worshipful) are radically opposed, perhaps a perspective somewhere in-between can offer a different interpretation of the evidence. On another thread we have been discussing various aspects of Cosmos and Consciousness.
There, we learned that the names we use to label the subject of investigation may put limits on what we expect to learn. For example, if a scientist refers to the physical World as "Universe", it's simply what exists within our sphere of perception : no before or after, just what-is physically. But, if a philosopher calls the subject of inquiry "Cosmos"*1, its properties go beyond physical & material to include metaphysical qualia of Order, Structure, Harmony, and Meaning. Both views assume rational Intelligibility, but the latter implies, not just comprehensibility, but also personal feelings & meanings.
Although Plato refrained from picturing the metaphysical Logos*1 & Cosmos2 in humanoid terms, most religions of the world have personified the abstract Universal-powers-that-be in metaphors based on their experience with flesh & blood rulers over men. And based on their encounters with mercurial kings and punishing potentates, people assumed that the overlords above --- thundering weather gods and savage war gods --- were to be feared & worshiped & obeyed without question.
On the other hand, pragmatic scientists approached the physical Universe objectively as a resource to be exploited for the purposes of ordinary people. But a middle-ground philosophical approach to understanding the complexities & contradictions of the world-system views it more as a puzzle to be solved, or at least understood figuratively and non-literally.
Therefore, maybe Plato answered the "Intelligibility" question by choosing names that inherently imply accessibility to intelligence, but not to the physical senses. Logos & Cosmos don't inspire fear & trembling in the rational subjects of cosmic power. :smile:
*1. In Plato’s philosophy, Logos generally refers to divine reason, rational discourse, or the structural principle of the soul and cosmos. It represents the logical, cognitive part of the soul that directs behavior, and in a broader sense, it acts as the intelligible pattern or account that defines true knowledge, often contrasting with mere opinion.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=plato+logos
*1. In Greek mythology and philosophy, Kosmos (or Cosmos) refers to the universe as an orderly, harmonious system, the opposite of Chaos, representing the structured world of the gods, humans, and natural laws, rather than a specific deity,
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=greek+%22cosmos%22
It's both indeterminate and determinate, depending on context. But it prefers indeterminacy, hence 'lazy '.
Scientific realism believes that what is real can be discovered by science in principle even if not yet in detail. It posits hypotheses which are intended to be as general as possible about what is fundamentally real independently of what any individual might think. This is why Einstein would reject Wheeler’s claim that ‘no phenomena is a real phenomenon until it is observed.’ Scientific realism rejects this outright as a falsification of the mission of scientific explanation. Any number of online interviews can be found with Roger Penrose saying that.
The problem I see with scientific realism is that it has tried to arrive at a fundamental explanation in terms of fundamental, and therefore mind-independent, objects. But objects are contingent by nature - no really mind-independent object has ever been identified, save for the entities of the Standard Model of particle physics, which is mathematical through and through. So Heisenberg says ‘the smallest units of matter are, in fact, not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or — in Plato's sense — Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.’
And the point about ideas in Plato’s sense is that they can maintain their identity through change. It is the capacity of the mind (nous) to grasp that identity-through-change which underwrites all science. And that is metaphysical!
I've been challenging this notion that metaphysics underwrites all science.
I can understand what you say here. I suppose I believe that we can grasp less than identity-through-change, that we are not connected to nous, and so on.
I guess I've come out, on the other side, as a metaphysical absurdist.
Science is a combination of observations (of what appears to us, obviously) and inference to the best explanation for those observations. It says nothing, and can say nothing, about how things are in any absolute, non-contextual sense. There is no such sense?not for us anyway?how could there be?
The objective world of science is only one half of human life. The other half is the world of dreams, feelings, visions, the world of the arts, literature, music, religion. The two are not, or should not be, in conflict?they are simply two different realms of human experience. The attempt to make the arts and religion sciences, and the attempts to make of science a religion are (although there is an element of art in the sciences), in my view, equally wrong-headed.
Not odd to me, I suspect most people are drawn to philosophy to find “better” justifications for what they already believe. It’s hoarding weapons and artillery.
No.
How do we know that what we call reality and math’s aren’t simply the contingent products of cognition, culture and language. In other words the patterns and regularities are in how we see not what we see. There are significant philosophers who hold this in post modernism and phenomenology. And no doubt there are other explanations we haven’t thought of.
I agree but I would just say that science is a reliable pathway to doing/achieving things in the world. But it makes no truth proclamations and provides tentative models that often become obsolete; our scientific models constantly being revised.
That leaves room to ponder what we actually know of reality. Or even if this thing called reality is just a placeholder construct we use to pragmatically go about our business and solve problems. The human urge is for sense making and getting to the bottom of things. But what if there’s no bottom?
Second, another part of science is inference to explanation, hypotheses, which are subsequently tested by observing if what they predict obtains. The theories that becomes accepted parts of science as a result of this process of testing cannot ever be proven to be true, and as you say, some of them have become obsolete, because further observations which no longer accord with them have arisen.
There are classic historical cases of this, but the fact of the being past falsifications of theories does not guarantee that all or even any of the current accepted theories will be falsified in the future.
As to what we know of reality, I would say that we know what we are able to observe, and nothing more, when it comes to "knowing that". "Knowing how" is of course a very different matter. We don't know of our theories, for example relativity and quantum are certainly true, but we certainly know how to apply them to achieve incredibly accurate results. What conclusions can we draw from that is the question.
There’s the Cartesian division again.
Curious, if someone tells you there are ghosts, is your response:
Bullshit: science hasn’t demonstrated their existence and souls most certainly can’t be demonstrated..
Or
We can’t rule ghosts out as yet and while I am unconvinced so far by any evidence, I am open to changing my mind if fresh evidence is forthcoming.
What makes you think it is a Cartesian division rather than just the acknowledgement that there are different spheres of activity and inquiry in human life? Do you think science has anything much to say about art or love or religious feeling?
Quoting Tom Storm
I think there is ample evidence that ghosts are real psychic phenomena. Do they have an independent existence? How would we know? Is that question very much different in the strictest sense from the question as to whether the world as it appears has an independent existence?
I certainly don't claim that only that which can be observed can possibly exist. Of course it many people, even everyone, observes the same things in the same places at the same times that does seem to lend some weight to the idea that the things have some kind of independent existence?unless of course our minds are at some unconscious level conjoined, and I don't rule that out, even though it would seem to be something impossible to prove.
Because they enable discoveries about nature that would otherwise be completely imperceptible to us. They account for the discoveries which make the platform on which this conversation is being conducted possible, among many other things.
Quoting Janus
That is just the division between the quantitative, material, extended, objective, and the internal, qualitative, subjective.
I'm not confident of this. Saying that maths must be independent of us because it leads to discoveries and technology doesn’t really settle the issue. Of course it helps us uncover things we couldn’t see before. We built it precisely to find patterns, make predictions, and extend our reach. The fact that it works so well shows it’s a powerful human tool shaped by long interaction with the world, not that it floats free of our ways of thinking and describing things. We could say that success proves usefulness and reliability, but it doesn’t prove that maths or even “reality” as we describe it exist independently of the cognitive and cultural frameworks that make them intelligible in the first place.
And the point about ‘cognitive frameworks’ actually supports my view, not yours. Why are our cognitive frameworks capable of grasping mind-independent mathematical truths? If mathematics were just a human tool, there’d be no reason for it to work outside human-scale experience. The fact that it does suggests something deeper: that rationality isn’t just ours, but is somehow implicit in the fabric of the Cosmos.
But again the point about the mind-independence of mathematics is that while they’re not dependent on your mind or mine, they are only perceptible by reason. Which is the ground of intelligibility.
Hart is using the word "normative" in a different way. To say reasoning is "normative" is to acknowledge the possibility of error. The distinction between successful and unsuccessful performance comes "baked in".
Quoting Janus
Yes, but also there is an "oughtness" to logical implication itself (e.g. one ought to accept the conclusion of a deductive argument that is both valid and sound).
Quoting Janus
Hart's argument is targeted toward eliminative materialists such as Rosenberg, Chruchland, etc. who do argue that human (or animal) thought is fully and exhaustively explicable in terms of physical causal relations.
Quoting Janus
It's hard to see how the former is reducible to the latter. The "oughtness" or "normativity" described above seems to drop out of any purely causal analysis.
Quoting Janus
Again, Hart's argument is targeted toward eliminative and strongly reductionistic versions of physicalism.
Quoting Janus
This was a response to Srap Tasmaner who was less convinced.
I think that’s a very clear statement of your stance, and I get the appeal: naturalism (or Neoplatonism) functions more like an orienting picture than a theory we could straightforwardly verify or falsify. And I agree that metaphysics doesn’t behave like empirical inquiry with crisp criteria of confirmation.
But I wonder whether this quietist framing can really be maintained without smuggling in metaphysical claims. For example, “reality is still there” and “our stories do not capture it” already look like substantive theses about the relation between mind/language and world. If those aren’t truth-apt claims, what are they? And if they are truth-apt, then it seems metaphysics hasn’t been bypassed so much as relocated.
Also, I’m not sure Hart’s challenge is that metaphysics can “mimic the forms” or capture reality in itself. The claim is much weaker: that inquiry is norm-governed and truth-aimed, and that this only makes sense if reality is intelligible enough to constrain us. That’s compatible with fallibilism and with the idea that our frameworks are always historically mediated.
So I’m happy to grant the mythopoetic dimension, but I’m not sure it dissolves the underlying question: are we genuinely answerable to what is the case, or are we only ever elaborating internally coherent pictures?
I agree with the call for circumspection — but I don’t see circumspection as being at odds with metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism, at least in its minimal form, is simply the claim that there is a mind-independent reality that constrains our judgments. Circumspection is the epistemic recognition that our access to that reality is fallible, mediated, and historically conditioned. I think the strongest versions of metaphysical realism are the ones that acknowledge the conditioned nature of inquiry while maintaining the real intelligibility of being.
So you are not OK with metaphorical philosophical answers to the Intelligibility question on a philosophy forum? Do you think Math (logic), and other nonphysical aspects of the Cosmos, is not Real, simply because we can't see or touch it? If so, then it's Ideal, and physical science will not answer your question.
"the patterns and regularities are in how we see not what we see".
I doubt you would be asking the OP question if you were satisfied with empirical science's physical mechanical description of how we see*1 (rods & cones, etc). Are you aware of a scientific analysis of the "contingencies"*2 in how the human mind cognitively interprets "patterns & regularities in the environment? Ironically, I think you are asking a philosophical question, but denying the validity of philosophical methods. :smile:
*1. Philosophy explores how we see through theories of perception, debating whether we directly experience reality or construct it mentally. It distinguishes between raw sensory input (2D colors/shapes) and interpreted perception, shaped by experience, context, and "seeing as" (cognitive interpretation). Key views include direct realism (seeing reality itself), indirect realism (seeing mental representations), and the role of action/movement in building a 3D world
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=philosophy+how+we+see
*2. Contingent products of cognition, culture, and language refer to mental habits, behaviors, and knowledge systems that are not universal, but rather arise from specific, interconnected developmental, social, and environmental contexts. Culture and language act as "cognitive tools" that restructure the mind (cognitive retooling), creating unique cognitive phenotypes in different populations.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=contingent+products+of+cognition%2C+culture+and+language&zx=1771088983923&no_sw_cr=1
Division or distinction? Unlike Descartes i am not claiming a division. Are you saying there is no such distinction?
I find that hard to disagree with. I think what you’re describing maps against Kant: empirical realism combined with transcendental idealism. Empirically, we’re realists — there’s a mind-independent reality constraining judgment. But the conditions that make that reality intelligible (the framework of space, time, causality, mathematical structure) aren’t among those empirical facts. They’re conditions of consciousness.
That's an interesting comparison. I'm not sure if I would have put those two ideas together, but I see what you mean. Both appear to be unverifiable. I'm not convinced people see ghosts even though I have heard some stories (from folks I know and trust) which are ball-tearers. I've always believed in haunted minds not haunted houses.
Quoting Wayfarer
To be clear, it's not actually my view as such, I'm trying to put forward what post modern perspectives seem to be saying. Although I am sympathetic and am open to this view.
So in pushing back on you, could we simply say that “? existed before minds” assumes exactly what it is trying to prove? Circles in nature existed, yes. But ? is not a physical object in the world. It is a concept that arises when a rational agent defines “circle,” “diameter,” and “ratio” within a particular symbolic framework. Without those conceptual operations, there is no "? "only physical shapes. The claim that ? “was there anyway” quietly smuggles in human abstraction and treats it as mind-independent reality.
Secondly, the move from “math works” to “rationality is built into the cosmos” is a leap. Mathematics works because it evolved as a tool for modeling stable regularities in experience. It has been refined precisely to fit the kinds of patterns we can detect and formalize. Its effectiveness doesn’t prove cosmic rational structure any more than language proving that the universe is inherently grammatical.
Thirdly, the idea that mathematical truths are “perceptible only by reason” does not establish their mind-independence. It shows the opposite: they are accessible only within rational systems. Reason is the condition under which mathematical objects appear at all. That doesn’t make mathematics arbitrary, but it does make it framework-dependent.
So the likely post-modern reply would be not that “math is phoney.” It is that mathematics is a powerful human structuring of reality, not a window into some pre-existing Platonic realm.
All I did was ask the question, "How do we know...? why would you jump straight to me being not OK with something?
A post-modern view of mathematics would seem to say that it is a human practice that develops within shared languages, rules, and historical traditions, rather than a set of timeless objects existing independently of us. Its objectivity comes from the internal consistency of its systems and our agreement on their rules, not from access to a separate mathematical realm.
I'm asking how do we know this is not the case? I don't know the answer and I am not a post-modernist or active reader of the oeuvre.
Quoting Gnomon
I’m asking the question because it struck me as a curiosity and I didn’t understand the argument. Unlike some others, while I have my sympathies, I’m not here to promote a particular philosophical view, I’m simply curious about different positions and their critiques.
The symbol is a human invention. But the value isn’t created by the naming of it, any more than Mt Everest came into existence by being christened.
As for the ‘physical shape’ - a circle is not just a shape. A circle is defined by a bounded space with each point equidistant from the centre. Does this purported ‘physical shape’ have a determinate ratio between their circumference and diameter?
If they do, then that ratio is ?, whether anyone has conceptualized it or not. The mathematical relationship exists in the physical structure itself.
If no — then it needs to be explained why circular objects behave as if that ratio constrains them. Why do soap bubbles, planetary orbits, ripples in water all exhibit this same ratio? Is that just coincidence?
Abstraction is not imposed on an otherwise formless reality. It abstracts from. (The fact that mathematical abstractions are reified and treated as real in their own right is another matter.)
I take the normativity of reason to be relative to its form, not its content. Valid reasoning may lead to unsound or even meaningless conclusions if the premises are unsound or meaningless. Error in reasoning I understand to be error of method, not a matter of the truth or falsity of its content. What do you take the possibility of error to be dependent upon?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The problem is that the premises are taken for granted not supported within the argument itself. The requirement is only that the conclusions follows from the premises. So, there is no requirement that one should accept the conclusion of a valid deductive argument unless one accepts the premises, and there is no way, from within such an argument itself that one is constrained to accept the premises.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I haven't studied Rosenberg or the Churchlands, but I find it hard to believe that they would be stupid enough not to allow that there is a semantic overlay to neural processes. I suspect their position gets routinely strawmanned by its opponents.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It is not necessarily a matter of the former being reducible to the latter. The "oughtness" is obviously not a part of any causal analysis?however i don't see any reason to think a causal model rules out, as opposed to simply does not include, the semantic?why, that is, they could not exist "in parallel", despite the fact that we cannot unite them conceptually in a single account.
Quoting Tom Storm
As I go on to say, the fact that we all see the same objects in the same places at the same times does strongly suggest even if it doesn't strictly prove that objects are independently existent of human and animal minds assuming no connection between human and animal minds.
I believe people think they have seen ghosts, but I don't believe that what they have seen, or thought they have seen, are really ghosts as in disembodied spirits of dead people. The fact that people have seen something commonly referred to as ghosts is the reason I say that ghosts are real psychic phenomena.
Quoting Wayfarer
Any shape at all if perfectly repeated at different scales would always have the same relative proportions. How could it be otherwise? Soap bubbles, planetary orbits and ripples are not perfect circles or spheres so the ratio would differ in each individual case.
Their materialism is monistic: there is only one real substance, and that is matter (nowadays matter-energy.) Everything arises from matter and returns to it, and has no reality independently of it. Whenever I point this out of, say, Daniel Dennett, you say, he couldn’t believe that, he couldn’t be so stupid. But he really did say it. A characteristic snippet from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, speaking of the metabolic processes of organic molecules:
It’s not a straw man depiction. Materialism is materialism, and it’s not hard to discern its genealogy in the recent history of Western culture.
[quote=Gagdad Bob] I believe in a single substance, the mother of all forces, which engenders the life and consciousness of everything, visible and invisible. I believe in a single Lord, biology, the unique son of the substance of the world, born from the mother substance after centuries of random shuffling of material: the encapsulated reflection of the great material sea, the epiphenomenal light of primordial darkness, the false reflection of the real world, consubstantial with the mother-substance. It is he who has descended from the shadows of the mother-substance, he who has taken on flesh from matter, he who plays at the illusion of thought from flesh, he who has become the Human Brain. I acknowledge a single method for the elimination of error, thus ultimately eliminating myself and returning to the mother substance. Amen.[/quote]
It's clear in that quotation that he's not denying the reality of agency. consciousness and meaning? but by all means continue with your self-righteous crusade astride your mighty strawhorse.
I agree that validity is formal and conditional: logic doesn’t force assent unless one is already committed to the premises. But once one takes the premises to be true, acceptance of the conclusion is not optional—one is rationally "bound" to accept it. That “boundness” isn’t social; it’s just what it means see that the conclusion follows from the premises.
And I also agree that a causal description doesn’t mention normativity. The question is whether normativity is merely a parallel “semantic overlay,” or whether it has real explanatory authority in why we believe what we believe. If it’s only parallel—i.e. if the complete story of belief-formation is entirely causal—then it becomes hard to see how rational warrant is anything more than an after-the-fact gloss. But if warrant is real, then physical causality can’t be the whole story.
Right, the conclusion follows from the premises in that it must be, at least implicitly, saying the same thing. So, I would say it is a matter of semantics. The "should" in the "should accept the conclusion if we accept the premises" of a valid deductive argument, for me just seems to be a matter of understanding of what is being said. I think it could be expressed as "would" in other words, as in "would accept the conclusion if the premises are accepted and understood" (and given good faith, of course).
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Why can in not be both ? Perhaps the word "overlay" led you think I was counting it as secondary?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Right, not the whole story, but then neither would the semantic side be the whole story, either. Sellars attempts to address these questions. Spinoza too, in a kind of tangential way.
The difference is that Kant’s transcendental idealism isn’t just the claim that inquiry has conditions; it’s the stronger claim that the fundamental intelligible framework (space, time, categories) is contributed by the subject and is therefore constitutive of objects only as they can appear to us.
The view I’m gesturing at is closer to a post-Kantian critical realism: yes, intelligibility is disclosed only in and through acts of knowing, and yes our access is conditioned — but the norms and structures that govern knowing are not merely subjective “forms of consciousness.” They function as constraints that inquiry discovers and revises in response to being.
Put differently: Kant makes the conditions of intelligibility primarily conditions of appearance; the realist alternative treats them as conditions of judgment and truth, and therefore as answerable to reality rather than merely imposed upon it. That’s why the possibility of error and correction becomes central: we can’t simply legislate the framework, because reality can force its revision.
Quoting Wayfarer
Merleau-Ponty would say we constitute the ideal circle in stages. First, within shared, intersubjective embodied experience, we constitute stable forms out of the changing patterns we encounter, some of which are more or less round. These round forms are neither strictly in the world nor just in our heads, They are ways of interacting with experience. Next, we stabilize an ideal geometrical structure, which we call “the” circle , and discover within our construction invariant relations within that ideal structure, such as the constant ratio between circumference and diameter. Finally, we produce a symbolic condensation of that invariant into a sign (?).
The fact that there are no perfect circles in nature doesnt mean that real world shapes are approximations of ideal geometrical truths which are themselves properties of the real world external to minds. It means that the concept of a circle is the product of a genesis of constitution starting from the noticing of relatively stable patterns in our interaction with aspects of the world and leading to the deliberate flattening of variations for to serve our purposes. Pi is one result of this.
Husserl describes the advent of pure geometric idealities this way:
I feel like here, and throughout the site really, you are wont to derive marquee headlines from fairly prosaic conclusions. Of course, we have identified mind independent objects: objects which we have very good reasons to believe behave in a way much like we understand them to, whether or not we are watching them.
It's just that we cannot apprehend them as such. An object without quality, without perspective, is impossible to conceive. But, to ask anything other from a mind isn't fair. A mind can't help but apprehend mindfully.
I feel you have made the systematic mistake of transposing a limitation of minds onto a feature of the world. That a mind must apprehend the world by mind does not imply the world is mind dependent.
If you remove all of the idealizations that minds impose on the world of appearances, there is not much to say about the nature of what is mind-independent. What is left of an object without mathematical properties, or at bare minimum, self -identify over time?
I agree that deductive implication is a matter of semantics: to grasp validity is to grasp what is being said. But I don’t think that dissolves the normativity — it just relocates it. “Good faith” understanding already presupposes that one is answerable to logical implication, and that this answerability is precisely the “oughtness” at issue.
And yes, I agree it can be both causal and semantic. But that’s exactly where the pressure point lies: if the semantic/normative side is genuinely real, then physical causality can’t be an exhaustive account of thought. The remaining question is what kind of ontology can accommodate both without collapsing the semantic into the causal or turning it into a merely epiphenomenal gloss.
I think that’s why this debate ends up being metaphysical rather than scientific.
This sounds more pre-Kantian than post-Kantian to me.
Claiming that reality can force its revision” is classic critical realism. It presupposes a relatively clean distinction between a conceptual framework or set of norms governing inquiry and a mind-independent reality that can push back against that framework and falsify it. That’s Popper’s structure: conjectures are proposed; reality tests them; error and correction drive progress.
Post-Kantian idealists would find that picture too dualistic.
They would not say that we “legislate” the framework in a purely subjective way. But neither would they describe reality as something standing outside the framework and exerting pressure on it.
For Hegel, the very distinction between “framework” and “reality” is unstable. What counts as “reality” is always already articulated within a conceptual structure. When that structure breaks down, the breakdown is internal , it manifests as contradiction within experience itself. The revision is not imposed from an external tribunal called “the real.” It is a dialectical transformation of how reality is understood.
Phenomenology, especially in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, would say something similar but in a different register. The norms of inquiry are neither merely subjective forms nor external constraints discovered “out there.” They are sedimented structures of the lifeworld. When they shift, it is because our embodied, historical being-in-the-world shifts. Error is possible, but it arises within a shared field of meaning, not from a neutral reality battering a theory.
That’s a very fair critique, and I agree my “reality pushes back” phrasing can sound Popperian — as if there were a clean dualism between framework on one side and an external tribunal called “the real” on the other.
But I don’t think that picture is essential to what I meant. I’m happy to grant the Hegelian and phenomenological point that “reality” is never encountered except as already articulated within experience and within a horizon of meaning. In that sense, breakdown is indeed internal: it shows up as contradiction, tension, or the collapse of a previously stable way of making sense.
Still, I’m not sure the post-Kantian dissolution of dualism can go so far as to make constraint purely intra-conceptual. Even if the “pushback” is experienced as breakdown within a lifeworld, the very intelligibility of error seems to require that our articulation is not sovereign — that the world can disclose our inadequacy in ways that are not reducible to mere shifts in communal norms or dialectical self-repair.
So I don’t mean “neutral reality battering theory.” I mean something closer to what phenomenology itself often emphasizes: the recalcitrance of experience, the failure of anticipations, the non-fulfillment of our intentions — a constraint that shows up immanently, but is not constituted by us. That’s the sense in which I still want to say intelligibility is discovered in response to being, even if “being” is never given outside the conditions of disclosure.
In short: yes, post-Kantian thought rejects the crude framework/reality split — but I don’t think it can dispense with the asymmetry between truth and warrant without losing the sense of genuine error and correction.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, phenomenologists as well as postmodernists would agree that there is a world impinging on us in ways that cannot be swallowed up by our concepts and expectations. But our only access to this world is through our interactions with it. Our mathematical schemes depend on idealizations we construct that stabilize the world into convenient, standardized identities.
I wonder what you might make of Lee Braver’s ‘middle way’ which he calls transgressive realism.
I’m struggling to see a real distinction here, though. I don’t see Kant’s categories as being ‘subjective’ in the sense implied here, in that they don’t pertain to a particular subject, but are the necessary constituents of judgement for any subject. Likewise, I don't see the categories of understanding as 'imposed', as if 'the world' is one domain, and they another. They are, rather, the inevitable grounds of comprehension.
Thank you for those references, they’re very helpful. I particularly resonate with the closing sentence:
:clap:
Quoting hypericin
I'll refer back to Joshs' response immediately after your comment.
I don't think that "unintelligible structure" makes sense. So it would be better to say "co-create the structures we study". Then doesn't "study" suggests the structures exist independently of us? That's not inapt, so long as we don't forget that we co-create them.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Wouldn't it be better to say "intelligibility is our response to being"?
Quoting Joshs
If one says that, doesn't it immediately generate more questions about why the world and we are is set up that way? Could things be any different? I guess the answer is "no", because we are part of the world that we interact with. Which is very confusing.
Quoting Joshs
I have a lot of time for this.
I hope he realizes that "stultifying" is a whole argument on another level. Many people would settle for stultification if it brings the peace that, for example, Wittgenstein longed for. Yet I'm sure he would also recognize that transcendental anticipation itself also generates the next phase of confusion.
Perhaps he should have said that "irrational" is not the right word for what they were trying to do. Surely, it cannot be classified, because they are trying to talk about what comes before and enables rationality. "Arational" would perhaps be better.
I want to suggest that we might do better by accepting that the issue here is set up on a model of "us" and the world. We can also say, and should also say that we are part of the world and our intellectual (and practical) struggles with it are part of how it is. There is no journey, or rather, there is no destination, because the journey is the destination. The Tractatus was right, though perhaps for the wrong reasons. That doesn't mean we can abandon our attempts to speak the ineffable - or should that be "that we will abandon our attempts ...".
:100:
Good. Nice.
I can: People who try to make sense of the traumatic experiences they've had with theists.
When I'm reading this thread, I feel relief, finally, especially as I read Joshs' earlier post:
Quoting Joshs
This is the first time that I'm able to make sense of why my interactions as a non-theist with theists are so straining and frustrating (to say the least). (And I know I'm not the only one.)
To me, a crucial part about philosophy is looking into how holding a particular worldview, a particular philosophy plays out in interpersonal interactions. Because this is where it matters.
Quoting Moliere
Yes.
How is it that people typically prefer to say
"This doesn't make sense"
and
"You're not making any sense"
as opposed to
"I don't understand this"
"I don't understand you"
?
Why externalize and say that intelligibility is somehow "out there", immanent to things, as opposed to being something we do, or that it is simply possible for humans to understand things?
That's fair — "subjective" and "imposed" were poorly chosen on my part. Kant's categories aren't psychological or arbitrary; they're the universal conditions of judgment for any finite discursive knower. I agree with that entirely.
The distinction I have in mind is subtler. For Kant, the categories govern objects as they can appear to us, and he explicitly denies that we can infer from this that things in themselves are structured accordingly. That's the whole point of the phenomena/noumena distinction. The categories are epistemically universal but ontologically noncommittal.
The realist alternative doesn't deny that intelligibility is accessed through judgment — it does deny that the structures of judgment are merely conditions of appearance. On this view, judgment is truth-apt precisely because reality is intelligible in itself and can therefore satisfy or frustrate the internal demands of inquiry. The possibility of genuine error isn't just a feature of experience's internal economy — it's answerability to what is the case.
So the issue isn't whether the categories are universal. It's whether their universality reflects the structure of any possible experience for us, or the structure of being as knowable. Kant says the former. I'm reaching for the latter.
Braver is interesting, and I think "transgressive realism" captures something phenomenologically real — the way experience can disappoint anticipation and force conceptual revision. That's a vivid articulation of the kind of constraint I was pointing to, without falling back into naive "reality batters theory" dualism.
But I don't think it lands quite where I want to land, because Braver treats the paradigmatic encounter with the real as precisely what breaks intelligibility — the moments of shock, rupture, conceptual short-circuit. The real is most real when it is most resistant to rational articulation.
That's evocative, but I think it risks turning realism into a kind of romanticism of the ineffable. What I'm after is something stronger: not just that reality can unsettle our frameworks, but that inquiry can be normatively answerable to being in a way that yields truth and correction — that intelligibility belongs to reality itself, not merely to our revisable schemes.
In other words, Braver gives a compelling phenomenology of how revision gets triggered, but not an account of why revision can converge on truth. The transgressive moment is the beginning of inquiry — the prompt — but it's not yet the answer. And without some account of normativity — of what makes one revision better than another, not just different — I think he's left with a realism of disruption rather than a realism of intelligibility.
So I'd say that Braver is a step in the right direction, but I don't think he provides the middle way on his own. The deeper question remains whether the asymmetry between truth and warrant can be grounded, or whether it dissolves into an endless series of conceptual reshufflings punctuated by shocks.
I would want to say something stronger than this: that intelligibility is there to be discovered — that being is the kind of thing that can be understood, and that our knowing is a response to that prior intelligibility, not its source. The evidence for this is precisely the experience of error and correction: when inquiry goes wrong and we're forced to revise, the revision isn't arbitrary. It's better — more adequate to what we were trying to understand. And that "more adequate" only makes sense if there's something there that our understanding is iteratively converging on.
We know the world as perceived and conceived is a synthesis of objective and subjective, even though it presents phenomenologically as something unitary. To say there is nothing to say about the objective pole of this relationship is frankly ridiculous.
I apologize, if you were offended by my interpretation of your OP : that you are not comfortable (OK) with the postulated explanations --- supernaturalistic or naturalistic --- for the Intelligibility of the universe : "I’d like to better understand the argument that intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes"*1. Personally, I think the ability to infer the Laws & Logic of Nature did indeed evolve naturally by means of evolutionary progress. But if you think evolution is not progressive, then human intelligence will remain a mystery.
If you reject Pre-modern (religious) views on such questions, and Modern (scientific) views don't sufficiently address the issue, then perhaps you have become unsettled by Post-modern critical analysis of both religion and science. Postmodernism "critiques the certainty of objective truth, universal reason, and the "grand narratives" of modernity". As I understand it, the point of postmodernism is to unsettle certainty : to be "not OK". And 20th century Quantum Physics did that in spades.
Nevertheless, I have developed my own theory of how a seemingly "mindless" Big Bang beginning could naturalistically evolve intelligent beings, who ask how & why questions, from nothing but a> Energy (low entropy) and b> Natural Laws (regulations & limitations on energy) and c> Chance (quantum randomness). But it's a long & complex story, not suitable for a forum post. That's why I put it in the form of an initial Thesis and expansion in an online blog. :smile:
*1. The claim that "intelligibility cannot arise through purely naturalistic processes"[i]is
a central argument in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and theology, often used to challenge physicalism (the view that all things are physical). This perspective argues that the rational, logical, and meaningful structure of the universe implies an intelligent source rather than blind, random chance.[/i]
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=+intelligibility+cannot+arise+through+purely+naturalistic+processes.
I am rarely offended.
The point of this thread was to understand Hart’s reasoning. What does he mean? Is the reasoning any good? That’s the main thing I was looking for. Seems to me after 9 pages, the question may be unanswerable or perhaps, I just can't make sense of it.
No.
If the world were unintelligable, it is hard to understand how it could support something as complex as life. If the world is intelligable, it is hard to understand how the evolutionary refinement of intelligence would not tightly track that intelligibility.
I don't remember the context of my question. It was probably to understand what a theist might offer by way of reasoning.
Symbols are intrinsically intentional. Models are intrinsically intentional. That evolution should arrive at advanced nervous systems demonstrating both doesn't seem inconceivable.
Give it a try. What vocabulary can you come up with to talk about the objective pole that doesn’t already imply a contribution from the subjective pole? Husserl discussed this issue:
‘Structure of being’ is an interesting choice of words. We ourselves are distinguished as ‘beings’. If by it, you mean the physical universe — electrons, galaxies, quantum fields — then calling it 'being' is already anthropomorphizing. Such entities are not beings in the sense humans are; they just exist (or subsist, or occur).
And if they're knowable, it's only because beings like us can render them intelligible. A universe without rational consciousness wouldn't be 'knowable' or 'unknowable'; those categories wouldn't apply. (This is what I take the 'in itself' to actually mean: not a mysterious shadowy 'something' lurking around behind the scenes, but the world or object outside any act of comprehension. The world as it would be without any intelligence in it - which is something we can't know.)
So 'the structure of being as knowable' already presupposes rational consciousness. You haven't escaped the circle — you've just disguised it by equivocating the term 'being'.
(This is also why I make frequent reference to Charles Pinter's 2022 book 'Mind and the Cosmic Order'. He shows in great detail how the mind structures experience through the formation of gestalts, meaningful wholes, which are the basic units of cognition (and not only human cognition). We 'pick out' specific 'things' and identify them as shapes and forms against backgrounds. Without this cognitive activity there would be no conscious awareness as such - that is what 'the world' is for us. The difficulty is becoming aware of these activities, as it is largely reflexive and unconscious.)
Quoting Joshs
Fair question.
So if the essence of things is open and continually shaped by the conditions in which they appear to us, then objectivity cannot be a fixed feature of the world itself but must instead be something constituted through an ongoing unification of these shifting appearances across different perspectives.
Quoting Wayfarer
It interests me that you see maths (Platonically) as transcending contingent human experience, what do you make of Josh's observations:
Quoting Joshs
Quoting Joshs
I can't help you with Hart's reasoning*1, except to note that it is based on theology, and argues against Naturalism/Materialism. If you are committed to Materialism, his arguments won't make sense. However, my own philosophical solution to the Life & Mind mystery is completely natural, and evolutionary, given the axiom of a Big Bang beginning of unknown provenance. If you don't accept the BB theory or Evolutionary theory, it won't make sense. My thesis even has a role for Quantum randomness, that Hart argues against. :smile:
*1. David Bentley Hart argues that the universe’s intelligibility—the, “fitting” of the human mind to grasp rational, mathematical, and logical structures in nature — cannot be explained by, naturalistic materialism. He contends that because mind and matter are intrinsically linked, a purely mechanical, chance-driven universe cannot account for the conscious, truth-seeking ability of human reason. Hart proposes that the world is inherently teleological and meaningful, pointing toward a divine, intelligent source rather than, brute, unconscious material causes.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=David+Bentley+Hart%29+argue+that+the+intelligibility+of+the+universe+requires+more+than+a+naturalistic+explanation.
No. Some arguments that theists raise are self?contained. All the theist has to demonstrate in this instance is that intentionality can’t be explained by physicalism or naturalism (not materialism per say).
If he is right, this does not lead directly to theism by any means, any more than demonstrating the existence of UFOs leads to little green men.
And remember that the famous atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel presents arguments similar to Hart.
I think there's a distinction being compressed here that's worth pulling apart.
You're right that "knowable" implies a relation to a knower — nothing is actually known without someone doing the knowing. I'm not disputing that. A universe without rational consciousness wouldn't contain acts of knowing.
But the question is whether the intelligible structure that knowing discovers is constituted by the knower or merely disclosed by the knower. Those are very different claims.
Consider: the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter would have been the same whether or not anyone conceptualized it. Not because ? was floating around as a Platonic object, but because the physical relationships that we render intelligible as ? were already there constraining how circular things behaved. Our conceptualization doesn't create that constraint — it grasps it. And if it merely created it, it would be hard to explain why we get things wrong and are forced to revise.
So when I say "being as knowable," I don't mean "being as already-known" or "being as constituted by a knower." I mean: being has the character of being able to be understood — it is the kind of thing that admits of intelligible structure. That's a claim about being, not a disguised claim about us. And the evidence for it is the very thing you're describing — that we can form gestalts, that cognition works, that the world cooperates with our inquiries rather than being opaque to them. The Pinter point about gestalt formation is interesting precisely because it raises the question: why does the world lend itself to being organized this way?
You might say: "That's just how cognition works — it's what minds do." But that's the question, not the answer. Why does what minds do yield genuine understanding of what isn't mind? Either the world is intrinsically the kind of thing that can be understood — in which case intelligibility is a feature of being — or the fit between mind and world is a brute fact with no deeper account. I find the former more plausible, but I recognize that's where the real disagreement lies.
I'm inclined to say that number (as an example) is a necessary and uniform structure within rational thought. When I ask what the sum of 1 + 3 is, the answer is constrainted by necessity to '4'. We are 'compelled by reason' to give that answer. But in what sense does '4' exist? This is the question sorrounding platonic realism which has generated centuries of argument. The implication is, if abstractions exist, in what sense do they exist?
A strong empiricist or reductionist naturalism inclines us to accept only those things that exist as phenomena as real - numbers and logical rules are, then, seen as being in the mind or the product of the mind, 'human inventions', and the like, 'projected' onto the world. But that belies the whole concept of mathematical necessity!
Numbers are not objects in space, but intelligible structures apprehended by reason. But nevertheless, the rules of mathematics are uniform and universal, they're not arbitrary or made up. There are imaginary numbers and imaginary number systems, but they are dependent on the ability of the mind to grasp the concept of number in the first place.
Where I see the resistance to Platonic realism is the suggestion that numbers arereal but not material.. As soon as you say that, you're into metaphysics, like it or not, and most don't. We have a hardwired tendency to believe that what is real must be 'out there somewhere', literally existing in time and space. For example, see below:
There was an article published in Smithsonian Magazine a few years ago, What is Math? which explored this topic. Some of the sceptics' sentiments expressed in that article really give the game away:
But isn't the view that numbers are idealizations we construct that stabilize the world into convenient, standardized identities, somewhat inimical to this thesis? I don't know the answer to this myself.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm not saying anyone needs to resist the idea; I'm simply wondering whether the idea is more than speculative. I'm already familiar with the arguments, so I don’t need to see them again. What I’d like, perhaps, is a postmodern account of mathematics (something not too inscrutable) that unpacks this further. I don’t think we’ll get that from classical philosophy.
Whereas I see that as a claim about 'what exists'. I wouldn't use the term 'being' in that way. 'What exists' is external to us, and precedes us, plainly. I'm not disputing that.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
When you ask why what minds do yields genuine understanding of what isn’t mind, I think that already presupposes a separation that may not be ultimate. As Ludwig said above:
Quoting Ludwig V
My suggestion isn’t that mind creates structure, nor that matter is “just an idea.” It’s that intelligibility isn’t something added from outside. What we call “the world” is always already given as structured, as determinate, as available to articulation. That isn’t an optional overlay — it’s the condition under which anything counts as something at all. (That “always already” is what I take the a priori to mean — not a mental imposition, but the prior intelligibility without which anything could appear as anything)
So when we say the world is intelligible, we’re not describing a fortuitous correspondence between two independently constituted domains (mind here, structured being there). We’re describing a more basic fact: that being and intelligibility are internally related. The fit isn’t something that needs to be explained after the fact; it’s built into what we mean by “world” in the first place.
Anyway, once again, thank you for your perceptive questions, but I am going to take a brief spell and return to my writing project (although experience shows me, I never end up staying away for too long.)
I think we’re actually very close here.
I’m completely on board with the idea that intelligibility isn’t “added from outside,” and that the world is always already given as structured and available to articulation — in fact that’s very close to what I mean by saying intelligibility belongs to being rather than being a contingent overlay.
I suppose the remaining question is just whether that “always already” should be understood primarily as a transcendental condition of appearance (Kant/Husserl), or whether it also licenses a modest metaphysical claim: that what exists is intelligibly structured in itself, even if our access is always mediated.
Either way, I think you’ve put your finger on the deepest point: the fit isn’t between two alien realms, but reflects an internal relation between being and intelligibility.
Good luck with the writing project — and thanks for the illuminating exchange.
For me eliminative physicalism says that ultimately the constitutive reality is the physical causal with the semantic being an emergent phenomenon of a purely conceptual nature. Basically that the obvious fact that the semantic seems real to us due to our immersion in symbolic language and conceptual generalization does not point to any substantive non-physical reality over and above the physical. I don't say i agree with that, but I do argue against those who try to claim that it is self-refuting.
The problem arises because we think of meaning as something shared between human beings and define "reality" as "neutral", i.e. meaningless. So we need to think differently about this. First, the "neutral" reality is constructed in order to serve certain of our interests, categorized as "scientific". Second and paradoxically, we need to recognize that neutral reality is a construction that serves some of our interests and values. So there is a point of view sense in which it is not value-free. Let's say, it doesn't assign values to its assertions, but does develop its practices in pursuit of certain values - "truth", in a certain sense.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'm a bit uncertain whether you are saying that they are the inevitable grounds of our ability to comprehend (cf. Kant) or whether they are the fundamental facts about the world that enable us to apply our categories to the world.
Quoting baker
Good question. I wish I had a straightforward answer for you. One way of putting the question is whether the world as we understand it is really ordered and rationaI or the order and ratonality we understand it is just a matter of the way we think about it. Another way of the issue is the question whether our understanding is something imposed on the world or whether it is something we recognize in the world. (I'm hinting here that it is, I think, at least possible that some is imposed and some is recognized.)
There is another issue, which is that "intelligibility" is a complicated concept. We can recognize it informally, partly because what it means is different in different contexts. If you consider specific questions in specific contexts, you can usually make some progress with it. But this is the general question - typically philosophical and problematic for that reason.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The tricky part of this, I think, is that some understanding seems to be a matter of interpretation of given facts. This kind of understanding has elements of both alternatives.
This is where the tedious point that we are inescapably part of the world plays a part. We participate in the general conditions of existence - specifically order, structure, etc.
I agree that much of understanding is interpretive, but I think this actually sharpens the realist point rather than weakening it. Interpretation is an attempt to make sense of what is given in a way that can succeed or fail — i.e. in a way that is answerable to the facts, to counterexamples, to coherence with other lines of evidence, and to the possibility of correction. The very idea of interpretation makes sense only in light of such constraints.
I've had a few thoughts in response to this. One is to go into truth-aptness to demonstrate how truth-aptness does not justify an inference to something existing. The other is to argue they are not truth-apt, but in a particular way which is somewhat related to how I think about truth-aptness.
But I'm not sure which is the correct response or if there's something else that's better.
But my belief is such that reality is there, and it is not intelligible, regardless of the rational justification that might get me there.
In the same way that Hart looks with incredulity at the claim that intentionality is impossible without Being being intelligible intrinsically my reaction is such that this belief is impossible given what we know. Mine isn't an inference from understanding Being, better -- I don't sit on both sides, as Hegel insists -- but rather by comparison of what we know and noting how in trying to universalize knowledge we have to make metaphysical choices which are, from my perspective, entirely capricious.
More or less we come to argue a metaphysical position because of this sort of experience of making sense prior to making sense of making sense. My suspicion is that this experience comes from our collective identities: by participating with others within a frame we come to get a collective sense of the world prior to its articulation.
But this isn't really a philosophical process. It's pre-philosophical, and what I believe to be the source of our intuitive commitments.
But for the two arguments that I keep coming back to:
Truth-aptness is the result of the form of the proposition. When we write a sentence of the form "A is f" we have a truth-apt statement. But this sentence need not capture anything about the world -- it can turn out to be false, for instance. Or it could be a funny sentence about sentences.
Existential statements, in this view, are quantifiers over statements in the proper form. So "A is f" and "there exists an A such that A is f" are two different claims.
Parsing "Reality is there" I'm not saying anything about reality but simply noting that what we mean by reality exists. This doesn't say anything about reality, like it is intelligible or that it is chaotic, though I believe that it is chaotic.
So, yes, I'm engaging in metaphysics by making the claim -- but I'm not committed to the intelligibility of Being in making that statement.
The other argument I have in mind is noting what kind of thing "reality" is -- basically that it is no thing at all. It's somewhat funny to apply the logic of existential statements to reality because we very much mean by "there exists a..." to be within the domain of "Reality": the set of all those nameable entities exist within reality.
This argument is less clear but lays out some of my intuitions/prejudices here: it seems to me that when we reach a certain point of "elevation" what we mean by sentences and statements can look like they're truth-apt because they're of the form, but because of the generality which we're discussing that form of truth ceases to be applicable. They're not truth-apt, like that -- which gets to my thought on mythopoesis as being the kind of truth, but I admit I'm not clear on that enough to be able to rule out Hart.
I hope I've gone some way to showing that I'm not falling in contradiction here though.
I suppose to me it is odd in relation to what philosophy purports to aspire towards, but you're right about human nature.
But, then, human nature can be configured differently from this combative philosophical attitude. Perhaps that's the oddity.
How do you know that?
I'd rather say circles didn't exist prior to minds arising.
Now maybe mind pre-exists humans and is in some way interwoven into reality itself, but if not then it seems hard for me to believe that circles existed prior to minds. Circles co-arise with mathematical ability to conceive of circles. I'd say this is an imaginative process which starts rough and becomes better defined over time because that's what the mathematical mind wants: it's a product of imagination and desire rather than discovery.
Upon having a system of mathematics worked out it appears like it could never be otherwise. But then all you have to do is change an axiom, a starting point, or ask an interesting question and you're off exploring another hiccup in the imagination.
I rather thought we got somewhere on this.
I'm offering my objections from a different perspective, but I'd still say his reasoning is just fine. It's part of what makes the question interesting. Using @Quid Est Vertias's depiction it's a transcendental argument which is frequently employed in philosophy. Usually incredulity is the basis of such arguments: for Hart it's intelligibility and naturalism being impossible, for Kant it was the success of science and Hume's criticism of causation both being impossible. (Just to break things down)
That's when I really like philosophy, I guess -- when comparing it isn't just a matter of looking for error, but reflecting after seeing a different conclusion without having made an error. So what I mean to say is that in terms of a basic analysis his argument checks out and makes sense -- which part doesn't make sense to you?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
What it means to succeed or fail, to be true or false, correct or incorrect, depends on qualitative systems of criteria. Such criteria define the basis of facts, evidence and intelligibility. If criteria are subject to interpretation along with the facts they orient and constrain, then making sense doesn’t begin only after the world is given, it constructs the conditions and modes of givenness
which constrain fact-finding. This raises the question of why we think we need intelligibility to be the kind of thing which is anchored in a once and for all qualitative criterial ground. We can instead conclude that intelligibility isnt an achievement but what it means to be thrown into a world which is always already relevant to us in some way.
True, but I'd argue that there is still an irreducible asymmetry at the bottom of inquiry. To re-quote Braver:
So yes, the criteria are subject to interpretation, but even here reality will have its say regarding the adequacy of such interpretations, taking the form of recalcitrance in the face of denial.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Braver is taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Levinas. For them, recalcitrance is not a brute, uninterpreted Given pushing back from outside all conceptuality; revolutionary experience isn’t contact with a naked world. Is this the direction you want to go in?
I hope you don't mind if I press you on this point a bit. Consider the statements:
How would you describe your intention in making such statements if not to affirm an insight into the nature of Being? In denying my claim that Being is intelligible are you not implicitly committed to the notion that I have gotten it wrong? And does this not imply a standard that both your claim and mine are answerable to, and can fall-short of? And what is this standard? Is it merely personal whimsy, or communal sanction? Mustn't it be something that outstrips and constrains both of those? Otherwise, we would be forced to say that truth is exhausted by the caprice of the individual or the community.
So there is a sense, I think, in which the claim that "Being is not intelligible" quietly self-undermines. This isn't intended as a cheap "gotcha"; it's a reflection on what is presupposed in the act of making an assertion, asking a question or seeking an acceptable answer.
Quoting Moliere
I agree -- reality (or Being) is not a "thing", and I don't think metaphysical realism requires it to be thought of as a thing. Likewise, I don't think it makes sense to say "Being exists". To my mind, to affirm the intelligibility of Being is just to acknowledge that the world can be correctly understood, even if only partially, imperfectly and subject to the conditions of finite subjectivity.
By affirming an insight into the patterns which arise rather than affirming something of the nature of Being. I'm still talking about the world -- one which I'm enfolded within and composed of, by my lights.
I think the way metaphysical questions are decided is by personal whimsy or communal sanction, yes. And to count as knowledge it would have to be more than this caprice.
But given the history of metaphysics it does seem that the choice is capricious. I don't think it will ever be decided once and for all. Rather it seems to me that it fulfills some need for totality which cannot be satisfied. So, yes, it will be a continual rise and fall of various viewpoints without any final end (or purpose).
Here, in order for it to be decided elsewise, we'd have to find some common standard to which we're appealing. Now we're both interested in philosophy and presumably we're both adhering to some kind of standard of rationality due to that so it's not like it's totally unshared -- only that I don't think this reflects on Being.
There's a myth I like to tell of the [s]carpenter[/s][s]cooper[/s]cobbler, oi (mind fart) who sees the universe as being really in the shape of a shoe, when you look at it. So it looks to me with philosophers: philosophers are so attracted to the intelligible and their profession is such that it can come to seem as if, at bottom, the world really is, in some far away sense, structured intelligibly.
Where from my perspective all I see is chaos and whimsy, especially when it comes to metaphysical claims. Sometimes out of that whimsy shared norms arise for various reasons which seem unrelated to Being to me.
That isn't to say that it's bad, mind. If anything it seems to me that the more we invent the more possible patterns we might see arise: so intelligibility really does require us to keep making stuff up rather than converge on the world.
It only starts to converge on once we have some shared criteria, which I don't really see philosophy as having initially -- you have to look for it somewhere.
Not entirely. I think Braver is hitting on something important with his insight that reality can disrupt established conceptual frameworks. I also agree that recalcitrance does not take the form of a brute, uninterpreted Given.
Where I would part ways is with the inference from the recalcitrance of reality to the irrational excess of Being. I believe that we can acknowledge that reality always outstrips our current framework without surrendering to the unintelligibility of that excess.
Here I want to note I agree.
It's only that the outstripping is what makes it seem like it is unintelligible, and it's us who are making up the meanings to make sense of the unintelligible.
It could be, in some larger sense, intelligible for all that. I just don't believe it to be so because of the diversity of thought is presently unable to be universalized in the manner of the philosophers without smudging out differences. And then it seems to me that differences in thought about the world (which are true) are what points to a reality greater than the mind: something beyond the intelligible.
That sounds like proving a negative. I suppose a theist is more likely to point to (demonstrate) the absence of physical evidence for mental phenomena in matter --- other than animated matter, which raises the question of how Life & Mind emerged from physical/material evolution. Of course there are philosophical theories*1 on the topic, for whatever that's worth. Like Deacon's conjecture, my own thesis is based on scientific evidence, but also on philosophical interpretation.
Thomas Nagel*2 has said that he hopes there is no God. But I assume he's referring to the intervening God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob. Yet ironically, his "intelligibility" and "nonpurposive teleology" seem to point toward some ultimate intentional cause --- structured by whom? --- of physical existence and directional evolution. :smile:
*1. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter is a 2011 book by biological anthropologist Terrence Deacon that explains how life, consciousness, and meaning arise from the physical world, arguing that "absences" or constraints are key to complex systems. The book synthesizes philosophy, biosemiotics, and neuroscience to propose that purpose and subjectivity emerge from "teleodynamic" processes, where one system's dissipation drives another's, creating aim-directed, self-organizing dynamics. It's a dense, ambitious work that bridges the gap between physics and the subjective experience of being human.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=how+mind+emerged+from+matter
*2. Thomas Nagel argues that the universe is fundamentally intelligible, meaning it is structured to be comprehensible to conscious minds, rather than a random, mindless byproduct of evolution. In Mind and Cosmos, he challenges materialist, neo-Darwinian, and theistic explanations for failing to account for how subjective consciousness, reason, and objective value arise naturally within the world.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=thomas+nagel+intelligibility
Note --- "Nagel, an atheist, clarifies that his argument is philosophical and not based on religious belief, though he defends the right to consider ideas like intelligent design"
Quoting Joshs
This sounds like a game where I come up with some awkward formulation that is supposedly free of subjectivity, and you point out that this and that element of my awkward formulation are supposedly still conditioned on subjectivity, then repeat.
But this is beside the point. After all we can still talk about objectivity using language which contains subjective elements. Language would be useless otherwise.
Your claim was more radical:
Quoting Joshs
So you will have to explain how, after subtracting all subjective elements from a claim such as:
The earth orbits the sun.
there is nothing left to the claim.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Ok, so if Braver, Kierkegaard and Levinas dont work for you, maybe the left Sellarsians of the Pittsburgh school are more compatible.
For John McDowell, experience is already conceptually structured, but it is still answerable to the world. He uses the language of “receptivity” within the “space of reasons.” That sounds close to your idea that interpretations are constrained by reality’s recalcitrance. McDowell would agree that criteria are not self-legitimating; they must be responsive to how things are. However, McDowell would resist talk of “recalcitrance” if it suggested a brute, extra-conceptual impact. For him, the world’s constraint shows up within conceptual capacities, not as an external shove. If you mean recalcitrance in a quasi-empirical, brute sense, McDowell would push back. If you mean it as rational answerability, then there’s strong alignment.
Another member of that school, Robert Brandom, makes norms and correctness internal to discursive practice. What counts as “reality pushing back” is ultimately cashed out in normative scorekeeping, commitments, entitlements, incompatibilities. Brandom does preserve a notion of objectivity (through the idea that norms outrun any individual’s perspective), but he doesn’t posit a metaphysically independent “say” from reality outside the space of reasons. If you imagine recalcitrance as something extra-normative, Brandom would not endorse that. For Brandom, constraint is socially articulated normativity all the way down.
Robert Pippin emphasizes that objectivity arises within self-correcting historical practices. Error and failure are internal to the activity of giving and asking for reasons. Like McDowell, he would affirm asymmetry: not every interpretation works, but he would resist describing this as an external reality confronting us. The asymmetry is built into the logic of norm-governed practices themselves. Failure is intelligible only within those practices.
So your position can be made consistent with these thinkers, but only if “reality has its say” is understood in a Hegelian way: not as a brute outside, but as the immanent norm of correctness that practices uncover through their own failures. If instead, you really mean that something non-conceptual or extra-practical interrupts interpretation from outside, then you would be moving away from McDowell, Brandom, and Pippin, and toward a more robust metaphysical realism than they typically defend.
I really just wanted to see what others thought, to be honest, because it seems so simple and avoids all the usual banalities about the nature of consciousness which is more commonly proffered in arguments against physicalism. I have no real idea what the argument means or how it works.
Hrm, well I feel like I do, which is why I was hoping you'd say what's not clicking :D In an effort for understanding I'll try and pick up the other side here and spitball with you.
Not Hart, of course -- I still haven't read Hart, only the renditions here. But the general thrust of the argument which I've seen before is something I feel like makes sense, at least, I just don't agree with the conclusion because I don't believe in the premises.
I will say a point in favor of his speculation is that I don't think we have a real explanation for meaning, right now (or aboutness). The stories I've offered are just-so stories, too.
By my lights intentionality arose with our ability to speak, and one can see the clear short-term evolutionary advantages so there's nothing to rule out that randomly occurring due to biological selection.
But that's not really an explanation for how matter becomes intelligent, either, and if we're naturalists that does seem to be the sort of "puzzle" that's being put forward: if it started as the big bang and life came from non-life and meaning arose with the development of mind just what is it, within the materialist's framework, that is mind?
Hart seems to believe that all explanation presupposes intelligibility, and so physicalism ends in a kind of contradiction while utilizing the tools which indicate a deeper intelligent order to reality itself.
Quoting Gnomon
I’m interested in what people think more than looking for answers . I’m not sure what you were saying in your post.
Good question.
I'm sure that we don't know what meaning is. :D
Or, at least, it's always appeared to me to be something like a mystery. To a point that I wonder if "conceptual confusion" is a possible answer, but that doesn't seem so to me. In a straightforward way we talk about the world, our talk about the world is about the world, and this aboutness -- insofar that language is real and not an illusory set of squeaks and squawks we don't really understand as much as feel like we understand -- is as real as the rest around us insofar that we are non-dualistic naturalists.
Quoting Tom Storm
Naw, that's how I feel too. “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I prefer to keep meaning mysterious, at this point, rather than thinking any of our manners of making sense really make sense of it after all. (or, insofar that they do, surely there's other ways of making sense....)
Cheers!
Quoting Moliere
For me, the diversity (and fallibility) of thought is a reflection of our finite situatedness rather than a reflection of the unintelligibility of being. I find it very difficult to make sense of possibility of rational inquiry under the assumption that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, whereas I feel that it's much easier to make sense of the diversity of thought in terms of the situatedness and limitations of the knower.
Yes. I heard Hilary Lawson explain his view (derivative, I know) that meaning does not map onto the world. Instead, meaning is a human construction, something that drifts in and out of relevance but ultimately functions as a way for us to “close” the openness of reality, to impose structure where none intrinsically exists. Sometimes our closures work pragmatically, and sometimes they hold only briefly before being replaced by others. But we never arrive at Truth, at least not in the sense of truth as a “mirror of nature,” as Richard Rorty might put it. I find this view somewhat seductive.
(It may look as though this conflicts with my defense of a “mind-created world,” but it doesn’t. There I was arguing that the world as world — as articulated into objects, meanings, and determinate forms — is inseparable from cognitive disclosure ( or incomprehensible outside comprehension). But that is not the same as saying that such forms are arbitrary or invented. That circular patterns occur in nature is not realistically in dispute. The question is whether the intelligible form “circle” that they instantiate is reducible to our conceptual activity, or whether their intelligibility belongs intrinsically to what we designate as real in the first place. It is that very resonance between the ideal concept and the natural forms that underwrite philosophical Platonism. Compare Argument from Equals, The Phaedo.)
Yes, indeed. In fact, I think I mentioned the Pittsburgh School as a major influence in a previous response somewhere.
Of the three you mentioned, McDowell is closest, but I don't think he would fully endorse the claim that reality has an intelligible depth that exceeds any historically available conceptual scheme. For that you'd have to look to someone like C.S. Peirce:
[quote=C.S. Peirce]Over against any cognition, there is an unknown but knowable reality; but over against all possible cognition, there is only the self-contradictory. In short, cognizability (in its widest possible sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.[/quote]
This is perhaps an even stronger claim than I would endorse (without qualification), though I think it captures the spirit of what I've been arguing for.
If no physical instance is mathematically exact, and physicalism is true, then that does seem to imply that circularity is an invention of the mind being placed upon the natural world. It's something we made up.
I don't think you're undermining yourself. Like Hart I don't think you're committing a basic mistake.
I don't think the naturalist explanation is either, though.
Hrmm... almost a reason to suspect it already.... :D
That makes sense to me.
It's not like I know either way.
I'm just following another path in the philosophy forest, as I like to call it.
Do you mean something like "to be is to be structured"?
Quoting Wayfarer
That suggests we could have a concept of an unintelligible world. I think we need to understand that that would be an incoherent concept.
Good luck with the project.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't disagree with you. But is there anything in those things that interpretation is answerable to that promises that only one interpretation of them is true? I think there may be something here that I have missed.
Good question — and no, nothing in what I said guarantees that there will always be only one uniquely correct interpretation, at least not in any straightforward epistemic sense.
Underdetermination is real: the same body of evidence can support multiple interpretations, and sometimes it’s not clear how to decide between them. But underdetermination doesn’t imply that “anything goes,” only that reality’s constraint doesn’t always uniquely fix a single articulation at a given stage of inquiry.
Also, sometimes apparent pluralism reflects different levels of description rather than competing claims about the same thing. Two accounts can both be true insofar as they are answering different questions or carving reality at different joints (e.g., thermodynamics vs statistical mechanics).
So the claim I am defending is weaker but (I think) more defensible: interpretation is constrained in a way that makes genuine success and failure possible. In my opinion, that is enough for realism.
That resolves some cases. But not all - cf. the puzzle pictures. What is most important about them is that they high-light the role of gestalt - each element is interpreted, but in a different relationship to the other elements. The process is not atomistic.
But it matters also that there is no answer to the question what is the picture of. If there were. If there is, it would likely resolve the issue. But we cannot know what the picture is a picture of just by scrutinizing the picture itself - it needs a wider context - or an independent story about it. There's still no guarantee that there is a determinate answer to that question.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I agree with you. There are many ways to order a shelf of books (see Blue Book).