I am, therefore I think
This a perspective Heiddeger shared with Kierkegaard. It means that the conscious me is understood to ____ from a mindless state of established practices. I left the verb blank because I'm not sure how to describe it.
It means we should see all theories of mind and in fact any theoretical approach to understanding humanity as limited.
There's an aspect of us that's unknown. Agree?
It means we should see all theories of mind and in fact any theoretical approach to understanding humanity as limited.
There's an aspect of us that's unknown. Agree?
Comments (71)
There are lots of things we don't know.
Do we then expect to fall back into that darkness or sleep?
A rather poetical way of describing life and death, but yes that is basically what it is all about.
"Every decision... bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing, else it would not be a decision."
So this would be a way to address the relationship between logic and the world: we actually don't use logic for most of the actions we take. The most important things we do may qualify as rational from an objective view, but there is likely no subjectivity at all in them. Logic only shows up when acting by second nature isn't working: a decision is called for.
Driving a car or riding a bike are obvious examples of mindless action. I find that when I look back, I catch glimpses of what I experienced. It is logical to speed into a curve to keep the car level, but I'm not thinking about the logic of it when I'm doing it.
Am I already operating from within the circle when I say that I can't articulate or model the way that I interact with the world as I drive the car? H says that laying out a scenario where I have innate logical understanding and that I use that to make decisions moment by moment is wrong. What is his vantage point when he makes that observation?
It works the other way: positing that which can't be articulated presupposes that critical reflection is valuable. And H doesn't deny that.
It's perpetual incompleteness. How is that not theoretical? Maybe incompleteness is like a negative theory.
The unknown I was talking about was this mindless state prior to waking up to critical reflection. But there's also another kind of unknown with Heidegger that has to do with pervasive and perpetual incompleteness when it comes to models and theories.
I would say it is not a mindless state at all, but a state of pre-reflective, pre-critical self awareness or consciousness. It is only on the basis of this implicit consciousness that explicit awareness or consciousness are possible.
What is your answer to where we stand when we talk about the hermeneutic circle? Are we in it? Just a sort of philosophical anti-realist vantage point?
That's fair enough; it might be merely a terminological disagreement. My take on it though is that it is better (more in accordance with common usage and understanding, that is) not to confine the terms 'mind' or 'consciousness' to states of explicit or thematized awareness. I can make up my mind for example without being explicitly aware of doing so at all.
Are we in the hermeneutic circle? If experience is always already interpreted, then I would say we are. Everything that is understood is understood against a background of enculturated understanding, a context which consists in a web of conceptual relations, of pre-established meanings and interpretations. You could say that the hermeneutic circle is the oceanic sphere, or fishbowl perhaps, within which we swim through our lives. As Robert Brandom would have it, the task is to make the implicit understandings explicit, at which point they can be modified and built upon, or corrected.
That makes sense. The reason "mindless" is resonating with me is that I've long thought of analysis as the primary activity of mind. It's the part of us that separates good from evil, me from not-me, subject from object. The body doesn't do that. The body doesn't understand negativity (like not-red or not-soft). It deals in positives. Maybe rationality is what we could call it instead of mind?
Quoting Janus
So how are we positioned psychologically when we talk about that fishbowl? Talking about it implies some vantage point, doesn't it? Outside it?
I see analysis as the (perhaps) primary activity of the discursive intellect. On the other hand all analysis presupposes prior syntheses, and should also, ideally, lead to new syntheses. It is never either/ or, though, or black and white, when it comes to synthesis and analysis, as I see it. I think the pre-reflective body/ mind implicitly distinguishes good and evil, self and not-self, and thus subject and object. These distinctions as explicit rely on their implicit pre-objectified counterparts. I also think rationality has its implicit and explicit dimensions; rationality, 'ratio' involves comparison, measuring, and I have no doubt we measure and deliberate without being explicitly aware of it.. In terms of pre-reflective pattern recognition I would say that difference and sameness are primordially cognized. I would also say the (enminded) body understands absence (negativity, difference) as well as presence (positivity, identity).
Quoting frank
I don't know. Maybe at some point we just reflect and recognize "Oh, I am in this medium", in media res, in the middle of things. Never "outside it", except perhaps in some rarefied, abstract, imaginary sense. Each of us has a unique "vantage point" which is "mine", but this presupposes being-with the other, as Heidegger would say.
But Dreyfus says: "Heidegger does not deny that we sometimes experience ourselves as conscious subjects relating to objects by way of intentional states such as desires, beliefs, perceptions, intentions, etc., but he thinks of this as a derivative and intermittent condition that presupposes a more fundamental way of being in the world that cannot be understood in subject/object terms." Are you agreeing or disagreeing with Dreyfus? Heidegger?
BTW, I'm not trying to become a Heidegger disciple, it's more that the anti-realism and the idea of emergence from an state where there is no analysis (and therefore strictly speaking, no synthesis) is where my pondering has sort of naturally ended up. I think your outlook is different. You don't really recognize a mindless state that acts as a background. And maybe that's where the crux is. That background is an element of language use. If you had to think about every action you're taking when you talk, it would take forever to say anything. And yet we think of speech as the epitome of critical reflection. ?
I'm not sure I agree with Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger. As I said I agree the "fundamental way of being in the world" is prior to the explicit positing of subject and object. But the explicit positing of subject and object is derived from that fundamental way of being, a way of being wherein I would say that subject and object are "always already" implicit. So, does that mean that the fundamental way of being can be understood in terms of subject and object?
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean. Once you have explicitated subject and object you have attained a state that is different from that fundamental state, and yet the new state relies on and presupposes the primordial state. In other words if there were no pre-reflective understanding of self and other could we ever arrive at the explicit position of self and other? Is the new explicit understanding not then,in that sense, precisely an understanding of the "fundamental" pre-reflective state?
Alright, you are, but wherefore you think you are?
I think what's key here, from Dreyfus' vantage point, is how you mean to interpret the transition from "pre-reflective" to "explicit". If you mean to say that a conceptual understanding of self-other merely makes explicit our pre-objective/pre-reflective experience, then I think you're disagreeing significantly with Dreyfus. If you mean to say that this transition is transformative of our experience, then I don't think Dreyfus would disagree with you at all. This is why Dreyfus is sometimes accused of a sort of dualism.
BTW, I suspect a thread on the Dreyfus-McDowell debate would probably be a huge help in sussing out the issues you two are running up against. They're fascinating issues, and I have no fixed views, though I wish I did.
It may be that Heidegger meant this. I'll take the question with me as I continue my book. If that is Heidegger's view, then I'll be a little disappointed.
Quoting Ilyosha
That would be great!
Hi. Great examples. The following may not at all be new to you, but in that case we can at least enjoy sharing awareness/agreement.
What do we know when we know how to ride a bike with no hands, for example? It is not propositional or linguistic knowledge. It is 'knowhow.'
And how does the bike exist for this knowhow? I don't think we can capture that propositionally either. Sometimes the bike is 'transparent.' I forget about it and look at the fox I saw tonight on my ride. Sometimes there's an obstacle to look out for, and I am conscious of the bike as I carefully turn it without using my hands. But the no-longer-transparent bike is not tranformed into a theoretical object but rather into a tool consciously employed.
Is the same true for personality? Is the 'true' philosophy a knowhow as opposed to a knowthat? Of course we need plenty of knowthats in life, but perhaps you see what I'm getting at. The philosophers for whom practice was primary and the supporting theory of that practice secondary come to mind.
This is a great theme too. I think of the 'I' emerging from the 'We' both ecstatically and anxiously (like a little boy wandering away from his mother to explore or demonstrate independence?)
I don't agree they're mindless. We talk about know-how and 'knowing how' because we move about the world with embodied knowledge, inculcated in us by ourselves or our carers/teachers, through logical rule-making, rule-explanation, reflection and repetition. A lot of mind is embedded in bikes, and embodied in bike-riding. To me the match to Heidegger then is in his idea that we are 'thrown into the world' - Dasein finds itself flung into in a sea of established practices before it has even learnt to think, to grasp or have revealed to it what thinking might be.
This relates then, if we want, to ethics, or so I see it: to the Aristotelian model of virtues that we learn by habit, in pursuit of a notion of eudaimonia or well-being that already is present in our polis/society, and which we then contribute to in our virtuous action and our thoughtful reflection. Of course it's not clear in the modern world what binds us together, so angst becomes a typical and certainly Heidegerrian description of our fundamental (individualised) state, whereas Aristotle founds his ethics on the inevitability of the wonderful Athenian state, and on the deep philia that we feel for a few others.
The way I tend to understand this is that language itself is another 'bike' most of the time. It is 'transparent' while we use it. When we double back on our own language to question it, the questioning language is 'transparent' while the questioned language has become translucent or opaque.
Can any of us remember 'fading in' to this basic knowhow. I sure can't. For me the fact of always already possessing this We-dependent-knowhow is our thrown-ness into the hermeneutic circle.
"Theoretical Holism. Plato's view that everything human beings do that makes any sense at all is based on an implicit theory, combined with the Descartes/Husserl view that this theory is represented in our minds as intentional states and rules for relating them, leads to the view that even if a background of shared practices is necessary for intelligibility, one can rest assured that one will be able to analyze that background in terms of further mental states. Insofar as background practices contain knowledge, they must be based on implicit beliefs; insofar as they are skills, they must be generated by tacit rules. This leads to the notion of a holistic network of intentional states, a tacit belief system, that is supposed to underlie every aspect of orderly human activity, even everyday background practices. Tacit knowledge-what Husserl calls "horizontal intentionality" in his answer to Being and Times-has always been the fallback position of consistent cognitivists.
"Heidegger opposes this philosophical move. He denies the traditional assumption that there must be a theory of every orderly domain-specifically that there can be a theory of the commonsense world. He insists we return to the phenomenon of everyday human activity and stop ringing changes on the traditional oppositions of immanent/transcendent, representation/represented, subject/ object, as well as such oppositions within the subject as conscious/ unconscious, explicit/tacit, reflective/unreflective. Heidegger is definitely not saying what Peter Strawson rather condescendingly finds "plausible" in Heidegger's works, namely, that we each have an "unreflective and largely unconscious grasp of the basic general structure of interconnected concepts or categories in terms of which we think about the world and ourselves."6 This would make our understanding of the world into a belief system entertained by a subject, exactly the view that Husserl and all cognitivists hold and that Heidegger rejects." --Being-in-the-World, Dreyfus
Do you disagree with Dreyfus' view?
Would it not be possible to hold both views? If a conceptual understanding makes explicit our pre-reflective experience it seems natural enough to think that this making-explicit would also transform our experience. Still, I don't see any kind of gulf between the two 'modes' of experience, so no kind of troublesome "dualism" would seem to be involved.
Quoting Ilyosha
That sounds interesting. I hadn't been aware of any debate between McDowell and Dreyfus. Will you start such a thread?
Why would you find that disappointing?
As to whether Heidegger thought as Dreyfus suggests, or as to whether if her did think that, he was right?
On the first I am not sure, on the second I would disagree. I don't believe there is as much difference between Husserl and Heidegger as Heidegger perhaps and Dreyfus certainly imagines. Perhaps Heidegger mis-characterized Husserl as a 'Cartesian' thinker in order to claim original credit for ideas which are already present in Husserl.
I certainly don't agree with the idea that implicit understanding is the same as "tacit knowledge"; characterizing it as knowledge rather than understanding seems to introduce a cognitivist slant that may well be based on a misinterpretation of Husserl.
It's like theories have some sort of inertia. They want to be completed. Or maybe it's built in to the idea of a theory that since it models the world and the world is completed, the theory is completable in principle. Imagine that theories are not completable. There's a difference between pondering that and actually accepting it. Do you find that?
I'm not clear on what commitments that would involve. Husserl was the one who introduced the "Epoché" which is basically a suspension of concern over the question of realism. Is anti-realism, for you, something more than that; a definite rejection of realism, perhaps? It does seem to be that for some, but I have never been able to understand what that would look like.
Quoting frank
I think the idea of implicit distinction making is self-contradictory. My idea is more that our pre-reflective lives and their activities work in ways that make thematic awareness of, and distinction between, self and other, possible. So the distinctions are implicit, but there is no implicit "distinction-making" because distinction making can only be explicit. We don't "discern distinctions without reflection" but rather we act in ways which the possibility of making such distinctions is inherent.
Think of riding a bike. You need have no reflective understanding of what you are doing at all in order to ride the bike, but your act of riding it inherently involves the possibility of a self-reflective understanding of what you are doing (given that you are a language-user, of course).
Sorry, I don't think I wrote very well. I'm going to take another (short) crack at it, and if I'm still being ambiguous, I'll go back and take a thorough look at Dreyfus.
I think the idea is this. When Michael Jordan is playing basketball at his best, he is solicited by meaningful differences within the context of the game and acts accordingly (pass here, spin-move there). This presents his learned capacity to cope meaningfully within a certain sort of situation (say, an NBA championship game) through the exercise of non-conceptual capacities (e.g. perceptual capacities). I think that Dreyfus' point is that (a) Michael Jordan would not be able to do this (viz. play skillfully) if he were exercising his conceptual capacities while playing; (b) When Michael Jordan tries to conceptualize the experience of what it is like to play basketball at his best, this transforms the content of the experience. That is, there is not an isomorphic relationship between the activity and the conceptualization of the activity; any attempt to put that experience into conceptual shape necessary changes the content of the experience.
Sorry, that may be a bit of hand-wavey gobbledy gook.
I'd be really curious for you to explain what you mean by this. For what it's worth, Dreyfus, Taylor, etc. are all staunch realists.
Yes. Exactly. That's what I think. I think we might behave in a way that upon reflection seems to indicate to us that we think the world can speak to us. That doesn't comply with our worldview, so we attribute that voice to an objective nobody.
Quoting Ilyosha
Yep. Exactly.
Quoting Ilyosha
Ontological antirealist. It's the same thing we've been talking about. Our knowledge of our pre-reflective behavior generates conflicting ontologies. In the past I imagined the conflict could be resolved in some way. It can't be.
I've always been pretty bad with philosophy shorthand, so this just leads me to further questions, such as: Why does this imply conflicting ontologies and why do multiple ontologies need to be *resolved* in order for us to be realists? It seems to me an easy way to square the problem we've been discussing with realism is to suggest that our human forms of knowledge and freedom are expressions of distinct modalities.
Edit: Of course, then you would need to give some sort of philosophical account of the "genealogy of truth" within these modalities, as Merleau-Ponty put it.
I will start that thread if no one actually competent volunteers! Best would probably be to have a formal debate between people who can do a good job of defending each side.
Take a grain of salt with everything I say because I'm trying to think it through (that's why I started this thread, so thanks for engaging). In the midst of unthinking behavior, there is no division between subject and object. That division is a product of reflection. It's linked to other distinctions like mind/body, real/unreal, contingent/necessary. There is no conflict until the desire to lay out a complete ontology appears.
To be an ontological realist is to have conviction that a complete theory of existence is possible. To be an anti-realist is to deny it. It's to recognize why there is a longing to establish a completed ontology, but that methodological is all we get.
Quoting Ilyosha
I'm not sure what you mean. Could you say more?
I don't think there is anything wrong with your writing; what you are saying seems clear enough to me. I agree with you that Michael Jordan's "learned capacity" to play basketball is not the same, conceptually or experientially (and does not even rely upon) his capacity to give a discursive account of capacity to play basketball.
But I also think, as I have explained to @Frank that, to continue with this example, MJ's capacity to play basketball has within it the potential to be explicated, so that all the distinctions that become explicit in any such explication are incipient within his capacity to play basketball. This does not mean that those distinctions are actually being drawn in the course of MJ's playing basketball.
So, there is a kind of "isomorphism" there, I would want to argue, even though the playing and the explication are very different conceptually and experientially. (When iI say that the playing and the explication of it are conceptually different, what I mean is that the explication of the playing and the explication of the explication of the playing are different).
I'm not sure what you want to say here; could you expand on it? The first part is clear, and I agree with it: I think reflection does seem to show that the world primordially speaks to us, but without there being any separation between us and the world. In a way we are (part of) the world speaking to itself; we are the speaking part of the world, on other words.
I've read much more of Heidegger than I have Husserl; I'm familiar with the latter mostly only from secondary sources (Michel Henry and Dan Zahavi, mostly).
So, I wouldn't advise one over the other. It seems from my reading of Zahavi that Heidegger is not as different from Husserl as is commonly thought. But I'm no scholar of phenomenology, just an interested amateur.
I have no doubt that you are as competent as most of the people here. Personally I prefer open threads (with all their divergences and digressions) to formal debates.
I guess it depends on what we mean by 'derivative'. If derivative merely means implicit then subject/object might be argued to be fundamental like you have done. However since we know that subject/object is definitely not fundamental for Heidegger, for this reason he surely must mean something other than 'implicit' by 'derivative'. I think what he means is something like: the derivative phenomenon's being (e.g. present at hand) is only possible on the basis of the more primordial phenomenon (e.g. being in the world). Explicit/implicit doesn't really do justice to this transcendental requirement since the explicit phenomenon is always going to be, as you say, "always already" present in the implicit phenomenon, thus there is nothing to derive. The two phenomena are ultimately the same only one is implicit and the other explicit.
Sorry I wanted to try to explain myself more but I must go...
Yes. What's there in a reflective moment is the realization that we can't explain how we're able to ride the bike or speak. Maybe some portion of philosophy is exactly that: trying to explain how it works. The question is whether, after we put aside the question of how, we can still see outlines of some structure to our background practices.
You mentioned the I emerging from We. What's of interest to me is that this We is not necessarily people. There's a We made of me and the non-human world. That is as much background as social practices.
That's kind of hard to digest intellectually, though. I think the intellect needs things broken down a little more. One angle on it: when a scientist asks a question: who is he or she asking it of? Nobody?
Sorry, Frank, I'm not sure I understand this question. Scientists generally ask questions of or about phenomena, dson't they?
I wouldn't say that subject/ object is fundamental. When I asked if the fundamental way of being can be understood in terms of subject/object I was asking if the fact that subject/object is implicit in the fundamental way of being should lead us to say that. The fact (if it is a fact) that the fundamental way of being can be understood in terms of subject/object does not necessarily entail that understanding would be exhaustive; it may only represent one aspect of, one way of understanding, the fundamental way of being.
Then the question would become whether the fundamental way of being can be understood discursively in any other way than subject/object. Or we might alternatively ask whether there could be a non-discursive understanding of the fundamental way of being.
Given the fellow-traveler nature of this thread please allow me to nit-pick a little.
I think Heidegger's big idea is that the order of intelligibility is the inverse of the order of explanation. The present at hand is intelligible on the basis of the ready to hand, but the ready to hand exists (in a natural/scientific/causal sense) on the basis of the present at hand. The problem, for early Heidegger, comes when we aim to give an explanation of the nature of intelligibility in terms of the present at hand.
The problem is that I don't think Heidegger has a particularly good grasp on the insight he has stumbled across here. I think that Wittgenstein has a much more nuanced and clear set of arguments about the basis and implication of this sort of position. But I digress.
My point is, I don't think that "some porton of philosophy can...explain how it works" because explanation involves a present-at-hand mode of knowledge, which lacks the necessary relationship to our forms of intelligibility needed to 'explain' these forms.
Quoting frank
Well, yes. The world is nothing other than the world, what Merleau-Ponty calls the 'entwining' of nature, the artifice we have carved out of it, the practices which take from and give to that nature/artifice, the reflection and lives that derive therefrom, and the change those reflections ultimately bring back to bear on the world of which they are a part.
Again, Dreyfus brags in his commentary that Heidegger attempts to describe this world ontologically whereas Wittgenstein simply calls it the 'hurly-burly' of our common world. But again, I think Wittgenstein wins the day in terms of clarity of thought; Heidegger's ontological pretensions obscure the underlying phenomenon a tad.
So, on your view, how is it explicable? His knowledge can be made conceptually explicit? So, for example, do you think Michael Jordan can bring all of his sophisticated basketball-knowledge into conceptual shape in order to teach it to another person? And when MJ tries to teach others how to play basketball -- he owns a team, after all -- do they play worse than him because they are worse at engaging in the practical application of the conceptual knowledge he has imparted to them through discourse?
Of course there will always be elements of an athlete's skill that cannot be made conceptually explicit, and even if they could be explicated they could only be emulated by those who possess the necessary physical potentialities.
Then what role do concepts play in skill?
Well, again I would say the conceptual explication of how to do anything is inherent in the skill to do it. It is also true that conceptual explanations enable skills to be developed, obviously. This is where the vorhanden can contribute to the zuhanden, a fact which we might think muddies Heidegger's assertions of primacy.
To whom are the questions directed, that's what I meant. If we project our own way of being onto the world, do we implicitly expect it to be able to speak. That issue is sliding down on my list of interests right now. I think I'm going to read What is Metaphysics and finish my Dreyfus book. I'll be back! :)
Absolutely. I'm going to read more and get back to you later.
The notion that we project our way of being onto the world implies that we are separate from the world. A different idea would be that the world just is a projection of our way of being. Which of these two do you have in mind?
If the former, is our way of being itself a function of the world? If it were then the world would be speaking through our projections back onto it.
If the latter, then we are actually speaking the world through our projections; in which case why would we not expect it to speak back to us, just as a character in our dreams might do?
We are. Since we're both in a reflecting state as we talk about this, we see a distinction between ourselves and our world. That distinction exists. Are you wanting to say that the distinction is just a matter of the structure of language?
You can distinguish your hand from your eye, but are they really separate from one another? Or again, we can distinguish ourselves from our bodies, our minds from our brains, but should they therefore be thought to be separate?
Minds are thought to have something to do with brains, but there is a clear distinction. If you want to change my mind, don't come at me with a drill.
Thinking depends on distinctions. I don't think we can escape that.
I'm sorry I'm very busy at the moment so am posting erratically, especially as I am interested in this subject.
I am with Dreyfus's Heidegger that there isn't always an implicit belief or theory involved in action, as Dreyfus's Plato would purportedly maintain. What McDowell wants to say in the Dr/McD debate is that the most intuitive-seeming human action can as it were be retrospectively unwound into reasons; Dreyfus wants to say that there is a residual 'mindless' area. That's my summary of my own memory of the debate anyway, I hope anyone will feel free to correct me!
For me I then go a certain distance with Dreyfus and his embrace of J J Gibson's ecological psychology. There are affordances to action in the world that are available to sentient creatures, who perceive such affordances as they move and act. But I think built into this, 'the mind' - some thinking process - is always ready to kick in. A highly-trained athlete runs largely on habit, but part of their training is what to do when habit fails you. This is the exceptional case: act on it.
Dreyfus makes a great deal of chess-masters and pushes the notion that at the highest level, grandmasters are not 'thinking'. There's some good empirical work to suggest that he's mistaken in this by a woman called Barbara Montero, which is then a philosophical challenge to Dreyfus's whole position.
My feeling is these categories like 'thinking/not thinking' still have some residual problem in them because they relate to cognitivism, and neither Dreyfus nor McDowell is a cognitivist. But they and we cannot help having breathed in the cognitivist air which makes words like 'mind' and 'thinking' hard to render anew.
Sorry if this has waffled off into incoherence.
To be sure thinking relies on distinctions; but I don't see how that obvious fact relates to the discussion. So, as far as I can tell you haven't answered the question as to whether the fact that we can draw these kinds of distinctions should lead us to think that the things we are distinguishing from one another are therefore 'really' separate from one another; the question would then be, if you think there is a separation, do you think it consists in something more substantive than the mere conceptually explicit distinction?
I'm not denying that substantive separation of things is possible, that things might actually be more or less separate. For example, you and I are separate organisms and we are both way more separate from Alpha Centauri than we are from each other. But to say that we are separate form the world is to say something different altogether.
"Really" is an honorific (according to Chomsky). You can try to go past phenomenology, but you never get too far beyond your own biases. We're just stuck with divisions of various kinds until we come up with some other kind of thinking.
Quoting Janus
You mean because we're part of the world? You're probably right about that.
Sure, thinking involves distinctions; and we can think about the possibility that there is a distinction between a distinction that is merely conceptual and a distinction which reflects something more substantial. This is the traditional distinction between epistemic and ontic differences.
Quoting frank
And yet there is this:
Quoting frank
Is it a matter of being tied up in knots?
You seem to be saying that concepts aren't substantial. What do you mean by that? What are your ontological commitments?
Quoting Janus
When I wrote that we are separate from the world, I meant world as the not-me. That me/not-me distinction is missing from pre-reflective consciousness. It's there upon reflection.
What did you mean by world? Something like a possible world?
Concepts are abstractions, generalizations and are thus not, by definition, substantial. That which is substantial is that which can be perceived. The concept of a tree is not itself a tree, for example.
Quoting frank
Right, so now we are going around in circles ("tied up in knots"). You should already know that I agree that the separation from the world exists only in reflective or abstractive thought. But the possibility of that distinction is always already implicitly inherent in pre-reflective experience (otherwise how would we ever be able to arrive at the conceived separation?).
Quoting frank
No, a possible world is an idea of a world. You can also have an idea of the actual world, and draw a distinction between your idea of the actual world and the actual world that your idea if of. Of course there is the further question of whether your ideas, as mental processes, are themselves separate from the world; and I would say they are not.
I've been enjoying this discussion. But I'm quite confused by what you mean by "always already implicitly inherent in pre-reflective experience"? What I mean is exactly how is the possibility of a distinction (which I interpret here as 'concept') implicit? To me there seem to be two ways of interpreting what you mean. Either you mean (1) that know-how contains various non-conceptual competencies, skills, distinctions, feelings, etc. that can be (sometimes very poorly and sometimes not at all) articulated through present at hand concepts. In other words that we can attempt to articulate our know-how in a know-that way (through language). Or do you mean (2) that the concept is somehow already "implicit" in the pre-conceptual/pre-reflective know-how. On this view knowing-that would seem to be more primary than knowing-how which seems weird.
Or do you NOT mean that the concept itself is implicit? If so then I agree (with 1) that know-how involves non conceptual distinctions that can in turn be (for better or worse) articulated conceptually.
It's a tricky one to talk about! I think I agree pretty much with what you write here. I would probably say 'non-conceptual differences' rather than 'distinctions'. But then I also think (pace Kant) that all perception involves conception, even in a pre-linguistic, non-reflective way for animals. Perhaps we need a term such as 'proto-conception'. :wink:
So it's part of your pre-reflective experience, but you don't experience it? My answer would be that the separation straight doesn't exist until analysis is brought to bear. The shift between whole and separated is kin to the shift we associate with duck/rabbit, except it's many/whole.
I don't explain how the separation pops into existence because I don't know how it works. Phenomenologically speaking, it just does. I was putting emphasis on the necessity to thought of certain kinds of separation because I think that's what makes us think the separation exists beyond a certain kind of focus (because it's necessary to rational thought).
I'm really not trying to attack your viewpoint. I'm sorry if I'm coming off that way. I think it's interesting that we would have differing assumptions.
Why would you say that because you are not reflectively aware of it, it follows that you don't experience it?
Quoting frank
You don't need to worry about that. I want you to attack my viewpoint, with arguments that are as strong as possible, so that I can discover if there is an incoherency or inconsistency within it.
As much fun as it is to spar with arguments, I've become suspicious that all I'm doing with that is insulating my psyche, providing justifications for my stance, and otherwise just circling my precious. I don't believe a logical argument that conflicts with the phenomenon gets me closer to seeing the truth. To believe that, I'd have to be an full-fledged idealist, and I'm not. I have no ontology, or rather I think all I have is mythology.
That's why I said earlier, I don't think we ever get past our own biases when we try to go past phenomenology. Do you agree or disagree with that?
BTW, I found some interesting discussions about Dreyfus vs Everybody Else on reddit.
I think you're right; there is always a competitive element and an element of self-justification and even self-protection that I can see in myself when I participate in these exchanges. I try my best not to let those elements cloud my judgement, and to agree with and say what I genuinely think is closest to the truth.
The way I see it logical arguments cannot, in virtue of their mere logic, "conflict with the phenomenon". We can certainly make assumptions that form our starting premises that have no grounding in phenomenology, though, which wouldn't seem to be a good idea.
So, if you are saying that a phenomenological approach makes for the best beginning to philosophical investigations, then I would agree. A phenomenological approach could help us to see our own biases, which would be the first step in "going past" them.
I'll check out the Dreyfus link, thanks. Years ago when I was intensely interested in Heidegger I listened to these lectures by Dreyfus: https://archive.org/details/Philosophy_185_Fall_2007_UC_Berkeley
I found them really helpful, and over the last few weeks have been listening again and experiencing some different insights.
Also found some lectures by Dreyfus on Merleau Ponty which i haven't listened to:
http://afterxnature.blogspot.com.au/2017/03/complete-recordings-of-dreyfuss-merleau.html