Is Idealism Irrefutable?
Idealism: All that exists is mental, i.e. exists in (a/my/some/the) mind.
This seems to me to be irrefutable. Whatever I experience I experience as an idea in my mind. I assume that this idea is caused by an object in the external world. However, I can never experience this object itself since this object is by definition independent of my experience. In other words, it is impossible to perceive an unperceived object by definition.
It follows from this that belief in the external world, i.e. a world independent of my experience of it, cannot be based on reason but on faith.
I think this view is essentially that of Hume. Strictly speaking, it does not rule out the existence of mind-independent matter, but it points out that I all I can ever know are the contents of my mind, i.e. ideas. And since all that I can know are ideas, I cannot speak of that of which I do not and cannot know, i.e. I cannot speak of something that does not take the form of an idea. In other words, of mind-independent matter I can say nothing at all.
Do you think such a view can be refuted?
This seems to me to be irrefutable. Whatever I experience I experience as an idea in my mind. I assume that this idea is caused by an object in the external world. However, I can never experience this object itself since this object is by definition independent of my experience. In other words, it is impossible to perceive an unperceived object by definition.
It follows from this that belief in the external world, i.e. a world independent of my experience of it, cannot be based on reason but on faith.
I think this view is essentially that of Hume. Strictly speaking, it does not rule out the existence of mind-independent matter, but it points out that I all I can ever know are the contents of my mind, i.e. ideas. And since all that I can know are ideas, I cannot speak of that of which I do not and cannot know, i.e. I cannot speak of something that does not take the form of an idea. In other words, of mind-independent matter I can say nothing at all.
Do you think such a view can be refuted?
Comments (285)
That's a conjecture.
We could just as well say, "Whatever I perceive I perceive directly as an external object."
Quoting philosophy
Change the definition.
Arguing that x is the case because I defined it to be the case is kind of a stupid argument, isn't it?
Perhaps I was not clear in what I meant by ''external''. By external I mean external not to one's body but to one's mind, i.e. to one's perception.
Your position would commit you to the existence of a thing (i.e. an external object) which you cannot experience.
How can you prove the existence of that which you cannot experience? As far as I am aware, no philosopher has ever succeeded in this.
We'd say that we can experience external things because?
Quoting philosophy
Why would we suddenly start talking about proofs? No one is proving either realism or idealism.
They're empirical claims. We can't prove empirical claims.
Likewise, the realist's claim that "we can only experience our own minds" cannot be proved is irrefutable.
But the realist position commits one to perceiving an unperceived object (i.e. ''seeing'' an object outside of one's mind), a contradiction in terms, hence refuted.
It can be argued against somewhat convincingly. How does idealism of this sort handle birth? Death? Other minds? Why does science discover a vast universe? Did the dinosaurs not exist? What about evolution?
How do you explain the experience of sickness without talk of germs and cells that you can only experience under a microscope? Why is it that radiation is something to worry about, or poison that you can't taste or smell? How is it that technology makes use of radio waves, which we can't experience? What about atoms?
How come dogs can hear what we can't, and birds and insects can see what we can't? If you crossed the street without paying attention, could you die?
Those sorts of questions, and there are a vast number of them, can be used to construct a convincing argument that there is a whole world that's independent of our perceiving it. This doesn't mean we can't perceive or detect it using tools we make, or infer it indirectly, just that it exists on it's own terms.
You're saying it's unperceived, under an assumption of the framework of idealism. The realist isn't saying this. The realist might likewise say that you're committing one to "perceiving only one's mind" with no evidential basis for that whatsoever, and in an apparent lack of understanding what perception even normally refers to.
The idealist doesn't deny that one is perceiving an object. What he denies is that one can know that that object exists independently of his perception of it.
The realist maintains that the object can exist independently of one's perception of it.
The idealist simply asks: How could you possibly know that?
The idealist does not deny that things exist independently of one's mind, i.e. independently of one's perception.
The idealist does claim that one cannot know that things exist independently of one's mind since this would entail perception of unperceived objects, a contradiction in terms.
If the idealist accepts the existence of a mind-independent world, he does so on the basis not of reason but of faith.
It makes the most sense of our experience of being part of a much larger world to which we are born, live and die, as all those questions I posted seek to establish.
But direct realism wouldn't accept the starting premise for idealism, which Terrapin pointed out. Direct perception means perceiving things out there, and not in the mind.
You had just written "unperceived object," so that's what I addressed .
Are you changing your argument now to "We do indeed perceive external objects; we're not simply perceiving our own minds. We just don't know that they continue to exist when we're not actually looking at them. They might be sneaky bastards and decide to only exist when we look at them"?
This pen in front of me that I am perceiving now is external to my body but it is not external to my mind. I now look away. ''The pen'' (if it exists) is now external to both my body and my mind. I cannot know whether it exists until I perceive it again, at which point it ceases to be external to my mind.
What? Your mind extends beyond your body in your view?
I have no idea what the relation between mind and body is. My body is as much an external object to my mind as is the pen.
My point is that the moment I cease to perceive anything at all I cannot know that it has an existence independent of my perception since this would entail perceiving an unperceived object.
This might imply that I cannot even know whether the experiences I have happen in ''my'' mind or in ''a'', ''some'', ''the'' mind, etc. Again, I believe this is the position Hume reaches in his Treatise.
Whether it's Plotinus or Leibniz, that question seems to go down a rabbit hole. Plotinus' famous answer is that it's complete privation of the Good, where "Good" basically means the Intellect.
But what would be an example of a refutable ontology? I assert that the world is made of elephants. Teeny tiny elephants. If you sit in a completely silent room, you can almost hear their little trumpeting as they spray themselves with quarks. Is this refutable?
Then why are you making statements about relative extension?
''We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions which they occasion...Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions...it follows that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.''
- ''Of the Idea of Existence and of External Existence'', A Treatise of Human Nature
I am not aware that I have made a claim about relative extension? You seem to be suggesting that I believe that the mind extends beyond the body. I have said that I do not know the relation between mind and body.
What I have said is that the body is as much an external object as any other that I encounter in perception.
You said that the "pen in front of me that I am perceiving now is external to my body but it is not external to my mind." That's relative extension .
The pen is external to the body in that it is outside my body. The pen is not external to my mind since it is being perceived, i.e. it is inside my mind. Is there a pen beyond my perception of it? I do not know.
I'll concede that I've made a claim about relative extension, but I'm not sure that this commits me to a theory of how mind and body relate? It definitely doesn't entail my saying that the mind ''extends'' beyond my body.
Again, my body is as much an external object as any other. What I say about the pen I can also say about the body.
Is either one of those uses of "external" and "outside" locational?
External to my mind seems to be non-locational. My position is that the pen is in my mind and that I cannot know whether it has an existence independent of my mind.
Locational--where something is located with respect to something else in terms of extension and/or space.
So then you're equivocating the term "external" (you're using the same term to mean different things from one sentence to the next)
Was Hume channeling a future Berkeley here? Radical empiricism does logically end up at idealism, so it's not terribly surprising. I just wasn't aware that Hume actually made an argument for idealism.
Although I think it is fair to call both Hume and Berkeley ''idealists'', they are idealists in different senses.
Berkeley is an ontological idealist in that he believes that only ideas exist.
Hume is an epistemological idealist in that he believes that all that he can know to exist are ideas.
I agree regarding radical empiricism logically leading to idealism. Kant attempted to solve this problem by conceding to the empiricists that all knowledge begins with experience, but adding that it does not follow from this that all knowledge arises out of experience.
Realism is refutable in that it commits one to a contradictory term, ''unperceived object''. To quote Hume on unperceived objects:
''We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions which they occasion...Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions...it follows that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.''
And just because Hume says something, that doesn't mean it's correct.
I haven't said that just because Hume says something it must be correct; I quoted him to better clarify my position.
How do you know that an object can exist independently of perception? You can never know this since it is, by definition, that which is independent of perception, i.e. experience. The realist, in positing a mind-independent world, is making a claim beyond experience.
I don't agree with it, but the argument is that unperceived objects can't be known, not that they can't exist. Well, Berkeley tried to argue that unperceived objects were incoherent, but Hume is just saying that only what's perceived can be known.
EDIT: Actually, I take that back. The Hume quote is arguing that they are inconceivable. That's kind of shocking.
That would follow if you're using "know" to refer to "things that I'm perceiving." Why would you use the term "know" that way?
Again, I believe that the realist position leads to a contradiction in terms that the idealist position does not lead to. Hence, one is refuted whilst the other is not.
Yes they are, but that's because it makes sense. Otherwise, how could you be born or die? How do we account for all these experiences of an external world with things we can't see that effect us?
The idealism that you're arguing for makes all experience brute and mysterious, and it turns the known universe into perception. That means anything external to my experience is only known as an idea. That's a very small world.
Did you honestly just say that you're using the term "know" to refer to "things that I'm perceiving" because you know that you're perceiving what you're perceiving?
The point, however, is that said existence cannot be justified on the basis of reason but on faith. I believe that a world independent of my mind exists but I cannot possibly know this.
So I agree with your point, but it does not constitute a refutation of (epistemological) idealism.
But why is this faith and not inductive logic? We're not positing elephants trumpeting quarks as the basis for everything, or God (unlike Berkeley and Descartes).
I guess it depends how you define ''faith''. Regarding induction, Hume showed that there is no non-circular justification of induction and, as such, induction cannot be justified on rational grounds.
I don't define it as induction. I can make inferences that the tree continues to exist in the quad after nobody is perceiving it, but I can't infer that it's God keeping it there.
Sure, you can infer that the tree continues to exist independently of your perception of it but it does not follow that you can know this.
The inductive argument would be: ''The tree will persist independently of my perception since it has always done this before.''
And then Hume will ask: ''Why are you using induction?''
''Because induction has worked before...''
Hence circularity.
You're taking a step back instead of answering questions I'm asking and addressing points I'm making.
This: "How do you know that an object can exist independently of perception? You can never know this since it is, by definition, that which is independent of perception, i.e. experience"
Only works as an argument if you're using "know" to refer only to "things that I'm perceiving." In other words, you'd have to be defining "know" as "things that I am perceiving."
Again, why would you use the word "know" to only refer to "things that I am perceiving" ?
Sorry, I thought I would have made this clear.
Answer: because ''knowledge'' that is independent of that which you perceive entails knowledge of that which you are not perceiving. To repeat my question: how could you possibly know that which is beyond your perception? You're not perceiving it, hence you cannot know it.
Jesus. It's like you can't learn this part.
Is knowledge defined as "what I am perceiving" ?
There's no need for a condescending tone.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I have repeatedly said that perception of an unperceived object is impossible, hence we can have no knowledge of it. Hence, all that I can know are my perceptions (see the Hume quote).
Beautiful, but I didn't ask you that.
I asked you this simple yes or no question: Is knowledge defined as "What I am perceiving"?
Answer yes or no or tell me why you can't answer yes or no, where the answer begins with "I cannot answer yes or no because . . ." And then you give the reason.
If that does not answer your question there's not much more I can say. Again, I refer you to the Hume quote:
''We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions which they occasion...Now since nothing is ever present to the mind but perceptions...it follows that 'tis impossible for us so much as to conceive or form an idea of any thing specifically different from ideas and impressions.'' [my emphasis]
Quoting Terrapin Station
If perception of an unperceived object is impossible, and hence I cannot know unperceived objects, then all that I can know are my perceptions.
MF'er.
Yes. No. Or "I cannot answer yes or no because . . ."
Or at least I can't buy that that could be beyond your cognitive abilities, especially when I'm spending time talking to you about something as complex as idealism vs realism.
''All that I can know are my perceptions''.
Translation: All of my knowledge consists of perceptions.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes. I would have thought that that would follow from ''All of my knowledge consists of perceptions.''
The key word is ''All'' since it means that knowledge cannot take the form of anything other than my perceptions.
Is this a fact or possibly just a relationship between what we usually mean by 'mind' and 'experience'? If you define experience in terms of mediation, then of course you will never directly experience whatever it is that is being mediated.
On the other hand, we also use 'experience' in terms of experiencing something. And perception means roughly that we are perceiving something. Our rough common sense notion (which is used in-explicitly all the time) is that we live in a shared reality which we experience with some individual variation as a function of our individual spatial position, mood, sense organs, education, etc. If we didn't start from a sense of shared reality, then why are you here trying to tell us something about that shared reality? What can truth mean in the absence of others? In the absence of some vague stuff that makes statements true?
[As an aside, I think all attempts to formalize or make explicit this sense of shared world tend to run into difficulties, but that's an issue for another thread.]
Quoting philosophy
If one identifies absolute deductive certainty with reason, then science itself is based not on reason but on faith. An a priori deductive certainty is usually just a matter of definitions (learned in time and imperfectly and not really a priori anyway) (with mathematical intuitions being a little more controversial.) Just about everything is suddenly based on faith rather than reason so that the worth of the distinction is obliterated. And you must then take a leap of faith that you are actually talking to other people and not just figments of your imagination. (I don't think it's controversial that our experience of other people is mediated or indirect.)
Quoting philosophy
In a way yes, but mostly by understanding 'mind-independent matter' in terms of that about which you can say nothing at all (in the first place.) What is discovered is a relationship between meanings as you semi-arbitrarily yank them from the usual blurriness into a specificity that serves your conclusion.
In short, IMV you are just exploring the way we tend to talk rather than some reality beyond that talk. I'm not saying I don't understand you or see why you say what you say.
No, that doesn't follow. You could define knowledge as something broader, yet you could claim that all knowledge happens to have property p."
Okay, so this argument amounts to simply saying that x is not K just in case x has property b, because we've defined K as that which doesn't have property b.
Now, we could simply define K another way--K is any x with property p or property b, no?
Why is there something rather than nothing? I don’t see why it makes more sense to say that first there was matter and then there was consciousness than to just say that first there was consciousness.
Unless you want to argue for an eternal past (a problematic notion) something just had to have come into existence apropos of nothing. Why not mind rather than matter?
There seems to be this implicit assumption that consciousness cannot be “free-floating” but that matter can. What’s the reasoning behind this that doesn’t just assume that external world realism is the case (i.e asserting that every case of consciousness we know of is “carried” by matter)?
Because that's what our observations/science have determined. Could that be wrong? Sure. It wouldn't be science if it couldn't be wrong, but to believe that it's wrong, we'd better have a good reason for it.
Quoting Michael
Again, based on observations/science. It's not as if there is no neuroscience.
Because all of our scientific and everyday knowledge tells us otherwise. People are born and they die. Humans evolved. The geological and astronomical records indicate great age. And so on for almost everything we care to investigate.
That may be the external world realist’s interpretation of their observations but if idealism is the case then the interpretation is wrong. Is there something to suggest that this interpretation is more reasonable than an alternative?
Unless you have a good reason to believe that an idealist world would look different then your answer doesn’t work.
So what kind of reality are we talking about when we say that realism is refutable [in that reality]. Is our solipsist just deciding that realism is refutable in his lonely mind? In most cases, philosophers are trying to bring important truths to others, which assumes a shared reality that grounds those truths as true-for-us and not just true-for-me. This [s]notion[/s] of the ground of true-for-us seems fundamental. I write it under erasure because it seems pre-conceptual. We can argue about whatever this ground is, but we argue from the very beginning in terms of this elusive ground. Merely bothering to argue with a particular notion in mind already grants the fundamental point, that there is such a [s]notion[/s].
So arguments about whether there is an external world or whether there is a 'real' argument for or against this external world already presume this ground, which we might call the 'real' or 'primordial' external world, except that 'social' might be better than 'external' here.
Idealism seeming like a pretty retarded belief that people seem to buy to try to justify stupid religious beliefs seems like a good reason to me.
It's basically the philosophical equivalent of a toddler thinking that mom disappears when the toddler puts a blanket over their head. Some people mentally don't move past that stage. Things like autism and extreme self-centeredness are probably factors in the belief persisting in adults, too.
Obviously it's subjective.
Right, but if idealism is the case, then the world as it appears to us is massively misleading. One has to wonder why the world is experienced as if it's material/physical, and as if it's much more than what we perceive. Why the appearance of billions of years of matter prior to consciousness, if that's not the case? Why the experience of needing a physical body that requires nourishment, air, water, etc in order to stay conscious?
Your flippant attempt to ridicule idealism is a terribly weak strawman.
Who said there was such a thing as "objective reasoning"?
Quoting Michael
I was just being honest. Would you prefer I be dishonest?
Ah. Well, I wouldn't say that there is any "objective reasoning." That's an oxymoron rather.
I think it's more about scientism. Doubt is perceived as 'scientific.' It's an asceticism in terms of belief. The less you believe, the better you are. Faith is the basic sin. But of course it ignores our practical situation, which makes it a kind of theological scientism, 'reason' gone wild, getting tangled up in language out for a smoke break.
The only thing is that contingently, I almost always see it wrapped up with religious beliefs.
What you're saying would make sense otherwise, though. It's kind of one of those, ". . . Hence we don't exist" moments where you should do a big "Oops! We must have royally f-ed up somewhere!"
Unfortunately there are a lot of currently in-vogue scientific ideas in that vein, although I excuse that just as much to the widespread love of kind of fantastical SciFi among current generations of scientists.
I guess what you mention is common enough. Perhaps we both noticed one of two or more common games being played.
It seems to me that the real issue is the [s]thing[/s] that can make opinions not just opinions. When people argue whether there is matter, they clearly are concerned with something that makes their opinion not just an opinion. Those who deny matter or the certainty of matter are still relying on something that makes their idea true for others. Logic is part of that, and some sense of a shared world seems to be part of that. It's as if our 'sense' of there being others is 'deeper' than any explicit conceptualization of this sense (about which we could argue endlessly with others, who are there prior to this elaboration and for this elaboration. )
It's a straw man to say that I mean "personal opinion" by "subjective."
Ontological idealists believe that only mind(s) exists. What I mean by the term "subjective" is mental phenomena. If only mind(s) exists, there is only mental phenomena.
Does the materialist argue that matter is what makes mathematical or logical statements true? Does the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 and that ¬(A & ¬A) depend on the existence of some configuration of atoms?
I suppose you can be strict about it, like Terrapin, and argue that they must to be consistent, but then I'm more relaxed in my interpretation of these positions and think that the issue of mathematical realism is independent of the idealist vs dualist vs materialist argument.
Maybe not. I probably had the wrong kind of materialist in mind and am derailing your point.
Quoting Michael
I think I see what you mean, and I agree. I guess my focus is on what we mean by 'real.' What is the thing that makes something real? Or not-just-for-me or not-just-opinion? When people debate about this 'thing' earnestly (with a sense that their own position is not-just-opinion), are they even appealing to the ground they are arguing for ? If someone says that mathematical entities are real and another disagrees, how are the numbers supposed to be present or absent? There is already some grasp of the entities in the first place, else there could be no semi-intelligible debate about whether these entities had a 'further' or 'official' kind of existence. [Forgive me if this is too much of a digression.]
Logic and mathematics are ways that we think and talk about the world--namely, a way that we think and talk about relations. At a very basic level, we're reasoning about relations we observe (though it still inherently depends on how we think about those relations, abstractions we make, etc.). A lot of the content of logic and mathematics is an extrapolation that doesn't correlate to observations, however.
The relations in question are material things, yes. And the thinking about it is also a material thing--it's brain function.
Where is this mind you speak of? Is it located only inside your skull? How can you tell if you know so little of what is outside of you?
If you are able to provide a proof that the mind is only inside you, what difference does it make from not being able to? I understand that a map differs from the territory. But why bother with making maps if they are never engaged with the territory?
I suggest reading this essay by Gregory Bateson: Form, Substance, and Difference. It puts the uses of reason in a context.
Agree that the world is in some basic sense mind-created. But the way I now put it, is that there is an irreducibly subjective pole, or to put it another way, that there are no ultimately-existing objects. After all, physics was supposed to arrive at a supposedly ultimately real object, but despite the construction of the largest apparatus in history, it has been unable to do so. This has lead at least some physicists to posit that the observing consciousness is indeed fundamental.
Color me disappointed in this paltry showing.
Probably helps if those of us who arent idealists think it's worth "taking seriously."
I have to be dishonest to treat it as if I don't think it's basically sophomoric trolling.
Yes. Sad, isn't it?
Worlds without minds don't exist.
Worlds without minds may exist but... I've left the oven on, I have to go.
Why wouldn't it be?
It really isn't that important either way.
...but guess which one unparsimoniously assumes something not experienced.
...and Materialists pride themselves on being "empirical" :D
Michael Ossipoff
Will 'something physical' still exist if somehow all conscious life were to vanish? Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by 'exist.' Does anyone really doubt that the mountain on a lifeless planet is there in some sense, even if no one ever sees it? One can make a case that consciousness is being itself. One can make a case that consciousness emerges from being and can vanish leaving being behind. Correct me, anyone, if I am wrong, but I think it's easy for most of us to understand why either position might be embraced. Both views take something important into account.
While there is often a 'scientistic' investment in the second view, there is also a less theoretical 'argument' for it. We were [s]thrown[/s] born into this world, picked up and fed by those born before us. We were shown pictures and told stories. Clearly the world was busy with love and war and work long before we arrived. And most of us have lost grandparents if not friends or parents. Or maybe just celebrities who were important to us. We and the rest of the world are still here. Do we call this sense of a world that precedes and outlasts us 'realism'? I don't know. The terms mostly express nothing fundamental but rather more specialized grasps of existence. We perhaps even exaggerate our differences in a sort of play (with maybe some vanity and maybe some virtuous concern for getting things as exactly right as we can.) I'd guess we mostly pick our terms according to how they fit into the larger context of who we have been and want to be.
That is solipsism, not idealism. It is one of the consequences of Cartesianism, that I can only be certain of *my* own existence.
Quoting macrosoft
Here's a passage in Magee's book on Schopenhauer which talks about this exact point:
Bryan Magee Schopenhauer's Philosophy, Pp 106-107
Solipsism is a subset of idealism.
Why isn't that obviously stupid?
If the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding, then how can that be "true of the Earth before there was life"?
Yes, I understand that. Perhaps I should have been clearer. Idealists are realists in the sense that they believe in some world outside themselves, and realists are idealists in the sense that they understand reality to be mediated by the self (from sense organs to personality as a whole). I get the impression that some idealists think realists deny mediation, and that some realists think idealists deny a world outside themselves. Beyond that it seems like a question of emphasis and preferred terminology.
That's a great quote. While some may really not 'get' why mind might be said to come before matter (a friend of mind just could not understand my defense of this view once), others (like myself) view the issue stereoscopically. The world-for-us cannot arrive before we do, since it's the world for us (meaningfully present, nameable, calculable.). This point can be made individually (along the lines of solipsism) or in terms of human communities (along the lines of idealism.)
IMV, this is an important realization, largely because it can loosen up a taken-for-granted scientism that identifies the real with the input, output, and conceptual supplements of our algorithms. This kind of scientism thinks of 'value' or 'meaning' as a kind of inessential icing on a cake of dead but real 'stuff.' This same scientism often ignores that it itself is this 'illusory' icing. In short, it denies its own reality and cannot give an account of what it itself is. The driving image seems to be a transcendence of sentimentality and bias, but the scientism I have in mind still has a passion for truth that it does not account for. Pragmatism and instrumentalism make more sense and seem less 'sentimental.' If we are just randomly evolved animals (an idea I find plausible if not the last word), then we need an account of why randomly evolved animals are sentimental about transcending sentimentality. (Some have postulated a transformation of the passion for God or gods into a passion for 'useless' Truth. )
*I'm not accusing TS or anyone in particular of scientism.
The world as it 'was' before consciousness is like the thing-in-itself. I put 'was' in quotes because this is already a human concept and already an addition of content. No one really doubts that it was there in some sense, but it's very hard to specify that sense. Our scientific vision of this world-before-us is our vision. It is linguistic and mathematical, human through and through, even as it reaches for the pre-human and the trans-human. No one doubts it exists, but the way it exists is problematic, if/when we are in the mood to problematize it.
"Prior to life, the whole of the empirical world in space and time is the creation of our understanding."
Is that the case?
No, I wouldn't put it that way at all. But I see what is being driven at. In my view it's more like a figure 8. The world-for-us depends on the 'material' brain which exists in the world-for-us. We dream of something that is outside of the dream, but it is only a 'dream' because we 'dream' of this outside-the-dream.
Distinctions tend to break down when we make one side or the other absolute. They are born in and for practical life. This isn't to say that we shouldn't try to do exciting things with them. It's only to warn against getting tangled up in our words when we'd really like to talk about what motivates us to stretch these words until they snap in the first place.
But that's what the passage says.
"This is as true of the earth before there was life."
No metaphysics is provable. Lots of contrived metaphysics can be irrefutable, in the sense that they're unfalsifiable. Various metaphysicses have been suggested to explain our physical world and describe something that allegedly underlies it. Any sort of metaphysics can be contrived to unfalsifiably be consistent with the physical world that we observe. An unfalsifiable proposition, by definition, is irrefutable, and would remain irrefutable whether true or not.
What can be shown is that a particular metaphysics (...like Materialism) requires an unsupported assumption or posits a brute-fact.
There are reliably-true things that can be said about metaphysics, but no particular metaphysics can be proven, for the above-stated reason.
Michael Ossipoff
Let's look at the context and see if I can at least illuminate why a smart person would say something so apparently ridiculous.
Note that we are talking about the objects of empirical knowledge. ---for humans, already digested by human language as objects of knowledge. If we imagine the earth before humans appeared, then what are we imagining? It probably looks quite a bit for us in our imagination as it does for our senses. Maybe we see a green and blue sphere from outer space. Does the world have a color independent of an eye and brain that translates photons? Maybe we see trees, mountains, rivers, insects, birds. And we know what these things are and how they interact. Does the world 'really' break into little interactive pieces? Or do humans choose these pieces according to the utility of various analyses?
So maybe we abandon that approach and start thinking in terms of equations and the theoretical entities of physics. While this language of quantitative relationships modelling uncontroversial public experience is perhaps the most-tribe independent perspective we can take, it is still a human perspective, especially if one considers math phenomenologically. Math exists in some sense for consciousness. Do we think that the math is really outthere somehow where we are not? I understand that we think that some kind of substrate is out there and presumably 'obeys' the same laws. But what is it that really obeys laws in the world for humans? Our measurements. Are these equations, concepts and measurements still there in the pre-human world?
In short, once we remove everything human from the world-for-us, there's pretty much nothing left. We forget when that when we are imagining the pre-human world that we do this imagining as humans.
:up:
You're making up stuff so that it's not simply something stupid to say. That's overly charitable--to a point where it's rather detrimental. It's better to simply acknowledge that people--no matter who they are, sometimes say stupid things, sometimes write poorly, etc.
The passage doesn't say "If we imagine the world prior to life," and if it were to say that, it would be such a trivial point in context that it would be just as stupid to say.
If someone wants to say "If we imagine such and such," then especially in a philosophy context, they need to write that and not write essentially "x is true at time Ty"
Right - this is the point that I have realised also. When we imagine the world from the viewpoint of scientific realism, then we just picture an empty universe, with nobody in it. Of course in empirical terms, there was a time when the universe was just like that - but we're overlooking the fact that this is something that is still being understood or imagined from the human perspective. To put it another way, every coherent notion of what it means to say something exists requires a perspective - a sense of how things are arrayed, the scales of both extension and duration along which they persist and extend. Is our scale atomic or galactic? How is the unit of time measured? We measure time in multiples of years, for example, which are clearly derived from terrestrial existence. And there are Kant's 'primary intuitions' of space and time. They're not purely subjective, they don't only exist in the mind, but a mind is an extricable pole or aspect of them.
The mistake that is often made is to imagine the Universe (or apple/tree/chair) literally going out of existence in the absence of observers. But that takes too simplistic a view of what 'existence' really means. Reality is a manifold of subject, object and perception/cognition, of which 'the subject' is an inextricable part. Modern scientific method 'brackets out' the subjective - or tries to - so as to arrive at a perspective which is the same for any putative observer (Nagel's 'view from nowhere'). And it does that quite successfully - but only up to a point. Because 'the observer' is still part of the picture, albeit covertly.
In fact this very argument was at the centre of the debate between Einstein and Bohr about philosophy of physics. Bohr understood it from this perspective, but Einstein didn't. Which indicates to me, that it's not just a matter of sheer rational analytical ability (which Einstein had in spades) but a gestalt shift, a qualitative insight into the nature of knowledge.
I'm paraphrasing the context of such statements as I am familiar with [some of] them.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Sure, people can just be stupid sometimes. But with philosophers it's maybe better to be careful. And then there's this passage, which tries to head off misunderstanding:
One might say that the gist of the transcendental approach is to be become more conscious of the intensity of our mediation. Again the question is how certain things that are said to exist are supposed to exist. If we talk about a pre-human world, then what can this mean for us? I agree that there was one, but what was it that was there? On one level I am curious about clarifying these concepts for their own sake, and on another level I'm trying to make explicit the linguistic tangles that keep two perspectives from understanding one another.
That shouldn't be the case if you imagine the world from the viewpoint of "scientific realism" (what's the difference between "scientific realism" and "realism" there, by the way?) a la the past 6-7 milion years at least.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think anyone is overlooking that fact. It's just kinda pointless to keep talking about it, especially when we're not talking about epistemology qua epistemology.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is talking about semantics qua semantics. But why keep changing the topic to epistemology, to semantics, etc.?
That's fine and it's certainly a factor that everyone is aware of to some extent, but if that guy seems to ONLY be able to talk about that, he'd drive you crazy--you'd think something is wrong with him, in some sort of weird OCD or autistic/Aspie/"idiot savant" way, and it would be frustrating in that you'd not be able to work on anything with him, because he just constantly obsesses on soundwaves and how electrical signals in cables amount to sound transmission.
That's what it's like when people keep obsessing on epistemology, semantics/semiotics, etc. regardless of what topic you're talking about.
Exactly, and well said.
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd even extend this to saying that the 'how' is again and again lost in the 'whether.' Whether something exists or not is only important in the first place as a function of how it exists. What does it mean for something to exist? Not just one thing, that much is clear. Ideals don't exist as shoes exist. Persons don't exist as clouds exist --except in certain models (acts of imagination) that break ordinary objects down into virtual entities --for certain purposes among many others. Are these entities real? Sure. We use them all the time. But how are they real? And what kinds of questions are these? What kinds of answers can we hope for? Final answers? Or just answers that might improve or degrade the way we exist as a whole and not just as proposition-machines?
Quoting Wayfarer
I agree. 'Qualitative' is nice. For me semantic holism is a key insight at the moment. Or in folksier terms, we don't see the forest by staring at individual trees. And as we look out on the forest(s), we ourselves are 'forests' with both a history and a future that exists as possibility. We aren't passive truth-detectors, though this is a role that we can include in a wider itself-non-passive project.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think this is a great post. It puts everything in the proper human context.
That said, you just described my objection to what I'd call scientism. I refer to semantic holism again and again because I think metaphysicians have an OCD that makes them interpret everything in terms of epistemology. In their obsession, as I perceive it, they insist on interpreting the words of others the 'right' way. Instead of grasping the person as a whole and cutting through the noise, they get hung up on terminology. 'I'm a realist.' 'I'm an idealist.' When Berty Russell told his folks he wanted to be a philosopher, they teased him with 'no matter, nevermind.' From my perspective, lots of philosophers just have weak communication skills, and they sell this to themselves as a virtue. Admittedly a certain kind of academic/technical conception of philosophy is possible, but this seems like the zombie version of philosophy. Propositions about propositions can be fascinating, but surely this fails a different vision of philosophy as humanity's attempt to grasp the heights and depths of its existence conceptually.
Lemme end on a lighter note.
*******************************************
A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
Nothing is better than God.
A ham sandwich is better than God.
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Isn't the OP directly tangled in those themes? 'Irrefutable.' And don't we have to explore what is even meant before we can get out the old logic machine? One might say that the logic machine is the trivial part. The real work is (or often seems to be) figuring out what the hell the other person is even talking about ('has in mind') and why they or anyone should care.
Sometimes one looks back on old issues that seemed real and wants to share why they are somehow unreal or tangential or the result of a bad way of asking the question in the first place. Of course this 'just' preference.
Some realists do deny this, at least when it comes to perception. Direct realism denies that there is an idea or sense impression in the mind mediating the thing itself. As such, you're aware of seeing the tree, not a mental image of the tree.
Not that I've payed much attention to the discussion, but this seemed nice to reply to. Underlying this (and @Wayfarer's post to which it responds) is a belief that scientific inquiry is necessarily reductive. To be sure, we can point at some reductive points in science; eg intelligence = IQ, mental health = absence of DSM category, but on the whole it need not be. Linguistics can and often does take a holistic approach, behavioural economics does too, even something as 'component driven' as climatology (in terms of focusing on spatiotemporal gradients of weather indicators) still runs aggregate simulations with full knowledge that results of any specific model are unlikely to represent the manifest behaviour of the climate.
The thing to look for is inappropriate reduction, as it is usually an oversimplification. Oversimplification isn't a necessary constituent of science, it produces bad science. To a good approximation the Earth is flat, to a better one it's a sphere, to a better one it's an oblate spheroid, to a better one it's very close to an oblate spheroid with randomised and fractal topographic development on and near its surface. Similarly, ecologists need not look at an ecosystem as an interacting system of components alone, they can look at the effect integration of one component into the aggregate of the others produces.
Even the study of evolutionary development, regularly accused of being reductive on the forum, is a myriad of interacting forces. Genes, contexts of gene expression, developmental landscapes. Evolutionary development raises questions like 'will the wolves of Yellowstone Park reduce the selection pressure for increased root-soil interaction surface area on riverside plants?', in which you have a larger ecosystem (Yellowstone) manifesting in several smaller ones - the ecology of wolves, the ecology of riverside plants, the erosion brought about by increased herbivorous population - then asking a question of their interaction (wolves decreasing herbivore numbers, decreasing plant consumption at riversides, perhaps influencing root behaviour) and then as a result of that interaction trying to figure out how it would influence the phenotypes and genotypes of riverside plant species found there.
The important thing to look at here is a non-reductive account of causal structure. We have 'fundamental units' at all levels interacting with 'fundamental units' - which is to say speaking of those fundamental units at all is somewhat of a category error. So, ecosystems shouldn't be analysed with such a reductive notion of causality, evolutionary development shouldn't be analysed with it either. And goodness knows, they usually are not.
The myth that science is necessarily reductionist needs to be put to rest, it's well past its bed time.
Sign on the door says 'philosophy forum'. :smile:
Quoting fdrake
Except that science still does frequently don the (lab) coat of moral authority.
Sign up for an ontology course.
I'm one of them.
I don't really know what you're talking about. How does moral authority come into asking questions about nature, social systems etc?
Ecology question: 'Has the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park reduced the number of their prey species?' Where does moral authority come in in answering that question rigorously?
As for the ‘lab coat of authority’ - that was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the role science plays in secular culture as the ‘arbiter of truth’ or ‘umpire of reality’ - i.e. as the final court of appeal for what ought to be considered real - a stance which Terrapin Station advocates.
That's actually not at all true. I'm actually skeptical or outright reject a lot of claims that are fairly well-accepted in the sciences.
I'm just not an idealist. And I certainly don't buy any religion.
It requires recognising the question at stake is not whether the table exists when we look away from it. That's just an empirical situation which cannot be subject to observation.
Idealism (of this form) is actually a metaphysical position which cites presence of experience as logically entailing other entities that might appear in experience. The claim is actually stronger than just saying things of our experiences only exist when experienced. It goes a step further to conclude without experiences, the presence of anything must be logically impossible.
This is easily refeuted by pointing out the logical independent of things. Just because I see a tree, it doesn't make me (including my experiences), the tree. The tree is its own object which may or may not exist without the presence of my experience. It is not logically reliant on my experience to be.
Eh, seems I was hasty in my skim-reading, I thought we were currently having the 'science is reductionist' debate rather than the other one we have, 'observer in science'. Second time's the charm.
'Cant's see the forest for the trees' usually connotes the need for part-whole aspect shift. The connotation in @macrosoft's post was that the observer and their theories should be seen as part of a corpuscle with the rest of reality and its behaviour; observer/'the rest' and theories/behaviour sharing a structural symmetry. If you'll permit a metaphor, the structural symmetry reflects reality along the axis of the observer producing theories, perceptions, intuitions. It also reflects the observer along the axis of reality highlighting that theories, perceptions and intuitions are themselves only insofar as they are indexed to an observer; what nature displays depends on what we ask and how we ask. It's easy to forget that theories, perceptions and intuitions aim at the real through the first reflection simply because the second one when taken alone displays theories, perceptions and intuitions as human productions.
Scientific inquiry exhibits the first, targeting the real with well posed questions, whenever it deals with its topic with sufficient finesse and relevance of content; a well posed question is a conceptual opening for nature to fill. Scientific inquiry exhibits the second when dealing with how theories produced through targeting the real operationalise; checking if the question is well posed or whether the data relevant for that question it is sufficiently strong and precise. Need both, and every competent researcher does both.
I like direct realism, actually. 'I see the tree.' That captures it well enough for me. But I know what others mean by other expressions. The pragmatic way to cut through the noise is to just look at how or how not various theories affect the way we behave. And a charitable or sincerely curious listener or maybe just a good sport tries to look beyond individually objectionable words to what their conversational partner is really getting at and why.
No disagreements on your post except its misunderstanding of the themes I'm exploring. The opposite of holism as I understand it is taking a piece of what is being examined out of its living context as an initial approach, without first getting a sense of what is going on. This is often a word from a sentence or a paragraph from a book. But it can also be an entire language game ripped out of the larger context of lots of language games.
Here's how you scanned me before approaching:
Quoting fdrake
And (no big deal) but right away you read me out of context and lumped me into a group of your 'bad guys,' the 'bad guys' who think scientists are the 'bad guys.' I think we both agree that it's boring to be and see such cartoons. I am striving to avoid one-sided perspectives (such a striving is a decent description of philosophy itself.) There are plenty of old moves that only need to be seen once or twice. And I'll even confess to rehashing old moves, just not exactly the one you accused me of (my concerns lately are those of late Witt. and early Heid., to sketch them briefly.) Your defense of science (with which I agree) is probably itself an old move. We learn them, make them our own, and then try to share them. Probably we have to master quite a few old moves to make a new move possible. I'll settle for a nice paraphrase here and there, a fresh metaphor.
This is closer to my concern, and it doesn't only concern science. One of the things that IMO philosophy works against is an unsophisticated sense of how 'real' and its synonyms are used. If someone just tells me that matter or God or ideas or whatever is the really real, they have told me almost nothing. Hegel critiqued this kind of bare result approach pretty well in the PoS.
[quote = Hegel]
Among the many consequences that follow from what has been said, it is of importance to emphasis this, that knowledge is only real and can only be set forth fully in the form of science, in the form of system; and further, that a so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, even if it is true, is yet none the less false just because and in so far as it is merely a fundamental proposition, merely a first principle. It is for that reason easily refuted. The refutation consists in bringing out its defective character, and it is defective because it is merely the universal, merely a principle, the beginning.
[/quote]
That is quoted for its eloquence and not as if Hegel is some authority. I interpret 'system' in terms of a whole. This 'whole' is not only the 'concept system' as a whole, but embodied existence as a whole, though I have the sense that for Hegel it was more strictly conceptual. For me the 'system' is less crystalline and includes the know-how we can't make explicit, such as our ability to write and understand paragraphs like the one quoted. This ability is in some sense the actual beginning of philosphy --batteries included, mysteriously able to operate with 'global' linguistic knowhow that we never quite get 'behind,' since we depend on this knowhow to try.
The atomic approach is like a cat, lovely and complex, trying to understand its own existence in terms of paper airplanes. Somehow the paper airplanes (little snapped together sentences) are supposed to 'dominate' their source and fold paper into a leaping torty.
Thanks. Yes, this is closer. But more specifically I mean that individual words have very little signifying power. Nevertheless it seems fairly common to get hung up on words, arguing about whether something exists without making sense of whatever it is that is supposed to exist or not. We can make sense of 'making sense of whatever' is in terms of clarifying 'how' it exists, which (among other things) is to clarify its relevance to those talking.
IMV, we need only look at our own reading and writing to see that words don't fit together like legos. They exist in a kind of 'existential' time. As I read a sentence, I am already ahead of myself in expectation of what will follow. And what I have already read 'hangs' over my scanning of the 'present' word. In short, meaning is not instantaneous. The time of language (human time or the human as this kind of time) does not seem to be well modeled by some segment of R, and the often-implicit idea that meaning is snapped together from bricks of instantaneous meaning becomes especially questionable.
That doesn't refute anything. Not that I'm an idealist of course, but that doesn't refute it. Neither idealism nor realism are refutable. It's just a matter of whether we have good reasons to buy one framework or the other.
What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar”. When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account. Knowledge of that sort, with all its talk, never gets from the spot, but has no idea that this is the case. Subject and object, and so on, God, nature, understanding, sensibility, etc., are uncritically presupposed as familiar and something valid, and become fixed points from which to start and to which to return. The process of knowing flits between these secure points, and in consequence goes on merely along the surface. Apprehending and proving consist similarly in seeing whether every one finds what is said corresponding to his idea too, whether it is familiar and seems to him so and so or not.
[/quote]
I am recontextualizing some nice passages from Hegel for my own purpose (not the best way to understand Hegel the person, but a nice way to read the old man in the light of 20th century linguistic concerns.) This 'flitting between secure points' and going 'merely along the surface' is roughly the kind of thing that I notice and want to point out. And it stems from ignoring the issue of the right approach for the 'object' being investigated. For instance, an atomic theory of meaning can function as a kind of default background, trapping us on the surface.
[quote=Hegel]
Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowledge or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the view that truth consists in a proposition, which is a fixed and final result, or again which is directly known.
[/quote]
For me this is a criticism of yes/no questions like 'Is Idealism Irrefutable'? We decide a proposition with our logic machines is the idea. Argument is foregrounded and disclosure of the entities in question is backgrounded, so that we don't know what we are arguing about --or not as well as we could. I don't think we can ever become completely clear on the atomic level of meaning. 'Idealism means exactly this.' 'Being refutable means exactly this.' Meanings are caught in 'living time' with other meanings. Timeless propositions are nets for sand. <---And that proposition 'knows' that it is not really timeless. It expects to be caught up in a living contemplation to be developed and recontextualized.
[quote=Hegel]
Where could the inmost truth of a philosophical work be found better expressed than in its purposes and results? and in what way could these be more definitely known than through their distinction from what is produced during the same period by others working in the same field? If, however, such procedure is to pass for more than the beginning of knowledge, if it is to pass for actually knowing, then we must, in point of fact, look on it as a device for avoiding the real business at issue, an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject altogether. For the real subject-matter is not exhausted in its purpose, but in working the matter out; nor is the mere result attained the concrete whole itself, but the result along with the process of arriving at it. The purpose of itself is a lifeless universal, just as the general drift is a mere activity in a certain direction, which is still without its concrete realization; and the naked result is the corpse of the system which has left its guiding tendency behind it.
[/quote]
For me this is a good sketch of the futility of taking categories like 'realist' or 'idealist' seriously. Their quasi-timeless content offers only a bare suggestion. I need to scan quite a few paragraphs of a poster on this forum, for instance, to even begin to learn his/her somewhat-private language as a 'system' or whole --the only way science/knowledge does (and not merely 'ought' to) exist. In the real world we do this all the time. We meet personalities as personalities, 'systems' grokking 'systems' as systems in order to make sense of this or that emission against a background understanding which is crucial. The naked result is almost nothing without its history/context. It cannot trap all the meaning that led up to a pithy summary. The summary is enjoyed (and meaning-rich) only after its engendering is repeated in the listener's mind (approximately repeated, since 'perfect' clarity is a ghost too quick for us.)
I'm still quite sure that there is an anti-'scientific metaphysics', through the opposition of scientific reductionism to some kind of ontological holism, operating in the response you had to Wayfarer. I had two choices really, one was to focus on that theme I saw, the other was to go through my usual response to this kind of thing, rehearsing the arche-fossil argument from Meillassoux; which you should look up if you are unfamiliar, it's an attack on Hegel (afaik) as much as it is an attack on Heidegger. I have no interest in going through it for the umpteenth time though. The book it's in is 'After Finitude'.
So yeah, apologies for a hasty reading of you.
A beautiful book, but hardly the last word. I think Meillassoux is subject to some of the criticisms above. Have you looked into his other work? He insists on the possibility of a resurrection of the dead. I refer to Harman's critical anthology, Philosophy in the Making. He seems like a strange theologian after all. I don't mind this. I say bring on the creative thinking. But he might not be your ideal go-to retort here in light of that.
[quote=Meillassoux]
We have seen that the experimental sciences are unable to give an account of the qualitative excess of life beyond its material understanding, and clearly this is not their goal. They do not even aim at such an explanation, which is simply meaningless with respect to their procedures. We have none the less shown that the incapacity of experimental science to touch remotely on this problem does not doom every rational approach to it, as long as we accept the disjunction between reason and real necessity.
...
What we call divine ethics rests on the real possibility of immortality, a possibility guaranteed by factial ontology. ...Since the rebirth of bodies is not illogical it must also be possible; it cannot even be deemed either probable or improbable. For if rebirth suddenly occurs, it ought to occur suddenly in the very fashion in which a new Universe of cases suddenly appears in the midst of the non-Whole. Rebirth can thus be assimilated to the improbabilizable advent of a new constancy in the same manner in which life suddenly arises from matter...
Following the three Worlds of matter, life, and thought, the rebirth of humans ought to be distinguished as a fourth World: if a World were to arise beyond the three preceding ones, this World could only be that of the rebirth of humans.
...
The core of factial ethics thus consists in the immanent binding of philosophical astonishment and messianic hope...
Divine inexistence fulfills, for the first time, a condition of hope for the resurrection of the dead.
[/quote]
excerpts from The Divine Inexistence
Quoting fdrake
I'd say it was more like holism versus anti -scientistic metaphysics, but even this 'scientistic' too specific. I'm working from a perception/understanding of language (formally indicated by others but to some degree just grasped directly by really looking and caring) that inspires me to apply it to old debates in a way that opens up mutual understanding (synthesizes them) or reveals them as trivial disagreements. The value in this is primarily personal, but it's just fun to work this out in conversation with others. That makes sense, since bridging gulfs between jargons should be what it's good at, or at least trying to be good at.
Quoting fdrake
Thanks.
Thanks!
Maybe read a philosopher who isnt just a big mishmash of gobbledygook instead. :joke:
Staying away from the continentalists is a good idea in general. :yum:
Yeah, I've not read his other works, just secondary literature on them. Even in After Finitude things get exceptionally chaotic. I dislike that in untethering time from experiential temporality through the arche-fossil argument he also untethers becoming from forming stable structures. But I think the arche-fossil stands alone as an excellent argument against a strict dependence of being upon an observer situated within it.
So the claim he's attacking with that argument is what he sees as a phenomenological undermining of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Soil can be damp to the touch, dry, dense, lightly packed, and these depend somewhat on how the soil is interacted with; making them secondary qualities. But it has pH, a certain profile of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous in it, it traps a given amount of air; chemical composition and the like are primary qualities of the soil.
A more sophisticated reading of pH and chemical composition will reveal that pH and chemical composition only manifest as a property in relation to our mental models of the soil; even the primary qualities require a particular mode of apprehension of the soil in order to show up. In this sense, the exhibition of the soil's mind-independent properties are still undermined on a meta level by the mind-dependence of their model upon human conduct. In the discussion between @macrosoft and @Wayfarer, 'human conduct' is 'the observer' which needs to be seen as part of the mental models; the observer takes the role of a containing and conditioning unit upon their observations, which is contrasted to the supposedly passive role the observer plays in scientific measurement (ignore QM for now, that discussion's largely irrelevant to the arche-fossil).
These sophisticated readers, those who know the true nature of primary qualities; that while they appear as mind-independent they are still counterfactually conditioned by the interaction of thought with their object, are called correlationists by Meillassoux. They are called this because they make being reciprocally depend on the subject in all senses relevant to interaction between the two, and the subject reciprocally depend on being in all senses relevant to the interaction between the two.
At this point, imagine that one of these sophisticated readers is a hobbyist digging for dinosaur fossils and they find one! Great luck! Unfortunately, things which predate the coupling of subject and being are not good for an ontology which necessitates their coupling. In one sense, the correlationist says, the dinosaur fossil predates humanity - in another, more profound sense, it does not; all interactions with it generate interpretations which are derivative of our phenomenological condition. The fossil appears as prior to the suture between the subject and being only because it is already within that suture as one of its interactions.
Which is rather strange, is it not? Something which predates the very coupling of human subjects and our world is nevertheless denied expression of its being until we come along and save the day; allowing the universe to 'talk to itself' in the only register fit to recognise its dynamics, the thoughts, speech and words of humanity. The creature which produced the fossil still died, it still obtained sustenance during its life, it was still a process of evolutionary development coupled to ecological constraints, and it was such prior to anything we had to do with it. Which is to say, the creature did not depend in any sense upon the reciprocal relation of subject and world in humans; it predated them.
The effects of this move, locating the reciprocity of being and subject within history are quite profound. This move transforms the transcendental coupling of subject and world into an event which occurs in history; the transcendental (like the ideality of space and time) becomes a transcendental for-humans, and the novel ability to use this 'for-humans' is also an invitation to think being as ultimately indifferent to any of our comportments; even the transcendental structures underlying reasoning and apprehension. The distinction between primary and secondary qualities now makes sense again.
Quoting Terrapin Station
It's not a hard argument. Maybe if you studied who you're having trouble with more generously, and used more secondary literature, you'd have an easier time. Ask yourself, is it really likely that they are all saying nothing of worth simply because you do not understand them?
Well, and likewise, "Are they really saying something of worth/are they really worth studying just because they're well-entrenched in the field, where generation after generation studies them just because the generations before did?" And it's also important to note that you only have limited time to spend on anything. Where is your time best spent?
Hah. The only reason they're respected is that they're entrenched in the field! You can reject literally any scientific discourse with this. You can do the same thing with the analytics and the ancients. Is the only reason we still study Plato because his ideas are entrenched in the field? Is the only reason we still study Frege because his ideas are entrenched in the field? Come on, this is lazy argumentation and you know it.
What's lazy is assuming that they're worth studying just because you like them. Philosophically they're crap and they'll lead you in countless wrong directions. Just look at the balderdash that fans on this board post. They're not being well served by reading bad philosophy.
Quote me where I said that they're worth studying because I like them. Stop putting words in my mouth. This in group/out group bollocks you're doing with analytic and continental philosophy is complete bollocks, and has been bollocks since it started. Pathetic.
See how much good reading that nonsense is doing you? You think that I'm thinking that I'm quoting you.
Oh no, I was asking for textual evidence for your attribution of 'I study them because I like them and that's the only reason anyone ever studies continental philosophers' to me. We should stop this exchange now before it becomes even more of a pissing contest.
Then why would you write "quote me"? And why would you assume that I'm making a comment based on textual evidence rather than other possibilities?
If you have a good argument that all continental philosophy is worthless, incoherent nonsense perhaps you should start a thread on the topic rather than throwing spitballs at me.
Perhaps I should do that because?
What is the grounds for the suggestion?
Because a well reasoned attack on continental philosophy would be a good thread and stronger support for your position than simply antagonising me.
For one, I'm not of the opinion that it's some unified project (continental philosophy) that can be attacked as if it is. It's that contingently, the works that conventionally fall under that banner are poorly written, poorly reasoned, etc.
That's not to let analytic philosophy off the hook, necessarily. There's plenty of crap there, too. But at least it tends to be much more clearly written and reasoned crap.
It was just an off-the-cuff comment above, obviously meant in jest. You wanted to argue about it, so I don't mind arguing about it.
Well then, I'm sorry for lumping you in with every other joking dismissal of continental philosophy as 'fashionable nonsense'. I'm glad that you have some amount of appreciation for it.
I think your reading of Hegel accurately reflects his method but also hints at how difficult it is to proceed in a manner that provides "the result along with the process of arriving at it."
The Gregory Bateson essay I mentioned earlier in this thread does a particularly good job at showing how "comparisons of differences" cannot be a reduction to a single scheme.
In trying to "grok" different systems, what is being discussed looks different if being understood as bringing something to an end, a last word that does need further thought, or as directions on a map, suggesting we travel in a certain direction.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, it is difficult, isn't it? And then existence is always underway, unfinished, further clarifying itself, including the how of this clarification -- such as Hegel seeing the emptiness of slapping on minimally in-formed predicates.
Quoting Valentinus
That sounds great. I'm sorry I didn't pay more attention to that the first time around. I will def. check it out.
Quoting Valentinus
Beautiful way to put it.
If you feel like expanding on that first idea, I'm all ears. I do think the arche-fossil argument is valuable, and I agree that it doesn't make sense to make being dependent on the observer. And I enjoyed your reply generally. Thanks.
Here's a thread which you may or may not feel like picking up with me:
One of the charms/problems of AF is its dependence on Cantor's work. Now Cantor's work is beautiful, but constructing a metaphysics on it maybe takes mathematical foundations for granted. Clearly one can prove the existence of uncountable sets, but one is thrown back on the issue of how such sets exist. IMV, there is certainly a strong intuitive component operating in math, but its epistemology is more formal and machine like. Proofs can be checked by computers and recognized as proofs without anyone finding 'meaning' in them. The computable numbers have measure zero, which means that most real numbers exist only as background that can never be foregrounded. In one sense this is unnerving. In another sense it is the perfect metaphor for that dark place from which we listen --that 'global' know-how which we cannot make fully explicit (the possession of a language that moves through existential time.) Another mathematical metaphor for this global would be artificial neural networks (unsurprisingly, since they are inspired by actual neural networks.) The 'distributedness' of meaning is what I have in mind, with a special focus on its spread 'over' time, as I think you already grasp.
Ha. Well I understand your frustration. Some of Hegel doesn't seem worth the candle. On the other hand, his actual lectures (which were hugely popular) are quite approachable. His Lectures on Fine Art, while a little abstract, are especially profound. His book on history is also considered a relatively concrete introduction to his system. I have Kaufmann's translation of the famous preface. While a few lines are still obscure to me (I don't claim to grasp Hegel as Hegel grasped Hegel), much of it is comprehensible right away and some of it becomes more comprehensible on rereading.
And the difficultly of interpreting Hegel relates to my central theme of holism. One slowly gets a sense not only of Hegel's basic grasp of existence but also of the feeling he had about it that motivated him to share it. Occasionally he gave speeches to the general public. These especially reveal his motivation, which puts his entire project in the context of his sense of himself and of philosophy.
[quote=Hegel]
This science has sought refuge among the Germans and survived only among them; we have been given custody of this sacred light, and it is our vocation to tend and nurture it, and to ensure that the highest [thing] which man can possess, namely the self-consciousness of his essential being, is not extinguished and lost.[11] But even in Germany, the banality of that earlier time before the country’s rebirth had gone so far as to believe and assert that it had discovered and proved that there is no cognition of truth, and that God and the essential being of the world and the spirit are incomprehensible and unintelligible. Spirit [, it was alleged,] should stick to religion, and religion to faith, feeling, and intuition [Ahnen] without rational knowledge.[12] Cognition [, it was said,] has nothing to do with the nature of the absolute (i.e. of God, and what is true and absolute in nature and spirit), but only, on the one hand, with the negative [conclusion] that nothing true can be recognized, and that only the untrue, the temporal, and the transient enjoy the privilege, so to speak, of recognition – and on the other hand, with its proper object, the external (namely the historical, i.e. the contingent circumstances in which the alleged or supposed cognition made its appearance); and this same cognition should be taken as [merely] historical, and examined in those external aspects [referred to above] in a critical and learned manner, whereas its content cannot be taken seriously.[13] They [i.e. the philosophers in question] got no further than Pilate, the Roman proconsul; for when he heard Christ utter the word ‘truth,’ he replied with the question ‘what is truth?’ in the manner of one who had had enough of such words and knew that there is no cognition of truth. Thus, what has been considered since time immemorial as utterly contemptible and unworthy – i.e. to renounce the knowledge of truth – was glorified before[103] our time as the supreme triumph of the spirit. Before it reached this point, this despair in reason had still been accompanied by pain and melancholy; but religious and ethical frivolity, along with that dull and superficial view of knowledge which described itself as Enlightenment, soon confessed its impotence frankly and openly, and arrogantly set about forgetting higher interests completely; and finally, the so-called critical philosophy provided this ignorance of the eternal and divine with a good conscience, by declaring that it [i.e. the critical philosophy] had proved that nothing can be known of the eternal and the divine, or of truth. This supposes cognition has even usurped the name of philosophy, and nothing was more welcome to superficial knowledge and to [those of] superficial character, and nothing was so eagerly seized upon by them, than this doctrine, which described this very ignorance, this superficiality and vapidity, as excellent and as the goal and result of all intellectual endeavor.
[/quote]
Will you agree that at least Hegel is clear in the above?
I realize that you may not grasp philosophy as he does (quasi-religiously but intensely humanistic). I just provide an example of how clearly he can speak or write at times. The above only indicates a general direction. For him 'positive content' and not just a general direction (the absolute as inarticulate feeling) is a big theme. Sometimes he seems too thorough, especially in the light of 20th cent. insights about language. But on the whole he is a profound personality.
I know you're joking, but really the continentals are the good stuff, the exciting stuff. Yes, some of them are ridiculous at time. Yes, they encourage some puffed-up nonsense at times in their readers. But on the other end of the spectrum (an opposite vision of philosophy) there are 'neckbeards,' who are methodologically stupid. A perfect example of over-correcting the indulgence often perceived in cont. phil. is the objectivism of randroids. A vague conception of rationality is presupposed as an absolute. One ends up with a 'religion' of the word 'reason' that simply flees from criticism that doesn't already accept the very presuppositions and initial understanding of this 'reason' it seeks to clarify or criticize. So objectivists have their own forums, since they don't know how to play well with others.
I'd say that radical criticism (reason at its most active) is always going to be unintelligible at first, precisely because it strikes at what is taken for granted, which has silently and invisibility operating as 'beyond question,' or rather not even available for questioning, because not till then 'disclosed.' Such disclosure is not the result of argument but rather of 'formal indication' or phenomenological 'pointing.' If this sounds suspect at first, I understand. But it's hard to avoid if one starts asking what arguments are about.
First these categories are already cartoons. But even the routine cartoonish intelligibility of chatter has a positive content, by which I mean that, however crude that distinction it is, it has some 'initial' meaning.
I think this is best explored in terms of the wideness or narrowness of one's image of philosophy. For instance, does one find Dostoevsky adjacent to philosophy? Is philosophy adjacent to or even entangled with and inseparable from literature? Or is philosophy a far more specialized disciplined, a science of science, propositions about propositions, which is best professionalized and pursued as more adjacent to STEM than literature?
Either position is defensible, though I am strongly in the first camp. Is this because I don't love science as much as I love literature? No. Instead I think literature falls within some higher concept of science with seeks to clarify our existence as a whole, including not only the traditional sciences but also their relationship to the rest of existence and their foundations. And this higher 'science' (in grandiose terms 'Science') will (no surprise) look into own foundations, perhaps as its most radical or essential activity. Such foundations will include motive and an investigation of meaning itself, insofar as such a ting is possible --and into how such a thing 'is' possible or impossible. If this sounds dangerous 'subjective' or 'phenomenological,' I think it is indeed. Now doubt narrower conceptions of science are more exoteric and reliable. But if we stick with the exoteric, then philosophy's traditional question for a wider science in the context of a 'spiritual' passion will just continue to exist under a different name. In some sense man 'is' metaphysics, which is an indulgent way of saying that maybe the quest to clarity and question existence is 'essentially' human. Even if we reserve the word 'philosophy' for an exoteric (reliably intelligible) self-consciousness of natural science, we will in fact as individuals do that other kind of esoteric or suspicious philosophy. Whether one encourages or discourages the public version of this 'private' clarification of existence is presumably a function of that private clarification. If 'Hegel is rot,' this is not only about Hegel but perhaps especially about he who says it (and I understand the suspicion of ambiguity, which is a hard-won suspicion that has proved itself in experience.) This paragraph of mine is, I suppose, an example of 'cont. philosophy,' since it traces distinctions back to a wider context, into their perhaps dispersed and only imperfectly graspable foundations. It is motivated by suspicion's counter-passion, which is to say curiosity. But it is also an elaboration of that same suspicion what has finally got around to questioning itself (not quite right, but I'm trying.)
Much more can be said far more eloquently, I'm sure.
Personally I think it's a mess Pretty much every phrase there is problematic. Just for one example, "the "self-consciousness of his essential being"? First off, essentialism is muddle-headed in general. Secondly, what does "self" add there that "consciousness" without the "self" modifier wouldn't do just as well? And what is "consciousness of his being" saying, really, anyway? It seems like a needlessly rococo way of just talking about consciousness or awareness period.
I don't want to spend time and the thousands of words it would take to address the whole thing in that way, but it all has problems in that vein.
That is really illuminating and useful post, thank you. I had read one or two papers from Meillassoux in years past, mainly due to promptings from this or the earlier forum, but I think that is an excellent synopsis.
The rejection of scholastic metaphysics and the crumbling of the ptolmaic cosmology and the associated imaginary domains, coincided with, and were also responsible for, a profound shift in the human conception of itself. I think that in In medieval epistemology, the subject-object distinction is never made explicit, because ultimately in that milieu, humans lived in a 'I-thou' relationship with God; the sense of 'otherness' to the world which becomes so pronounced in modernity, the sense of being accidental by-products of a mindless process, couldn't even have been conceived. That was a major reason why the transition to modernity was so wrenching. Post-Enlightenment, man becomes, instead of imago dei, simply another species thrown up by 'the accidental collocation of atoms' (in Russell's memorable phrase). A 'stranger in a strange land', so to speak.
Quoting fdrake
You know the etymology of 'world' is Old English w(e)oruld, from a Germanic compound meaning ‘age of man’; related to Dutch wereld and German Welt .
The connotation is relevant!
It doesn't mean, as the quote I provided above says, that the Universe sprang into existence only when it became perceived; what I think it means is that, any coherent or meaningful statement about what is real, always must include or assume the existence of an observing mind, which synthesises all of the data and percepts into a meaningful whole within which the statement about the reality of anything is real. And this manifold of perceptions, judgements, and so on, is what constitutes 'the world'. But that is a philosophical, not a scientific, observation - science assumes the reality of a mind-independent world, which it can safely do. It's only when it then treats that as a metaphysical principle, and not a methodological assumption, that the problems begin! (And that is quite compatible with Kant's declaration that one can be both an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist, for which see this blog post.)
I am almost in agreement with Berkeley's philosophy, although I don't accept his nominalism.
Quoting macrosoft
That is a great passage, and has so much in it, you could write a term paper on it.
But this phrase here:
I think refers to what Maritain would later refer to as the 'intuition of being' - which, I think, has considerable parallels with the notion of 'divine illumination' or 'spiritual enlightenment' - something that has indeed become 'extinguished and lost' in the Western tradition, for various complex and deep-seated reason. There, Hegel is showing his mystical side, which was unfortunately to become obscured by his enormous verbosity. And that is one respect in which I think Kant was lacking; I don't think he had that breakthrough into the sense of 'mystical union' which is what I think Maritain means by the 'intuition of being'.
(You might enjoy this OP on Hegel's conception of God in Philosophy NOW, which has many resonances for me. Also, I've been meaning to read Dermot Moran on Idealism in Scotus Eriugena and its influence on German idealism here).
I'm not a direct realist but a direct realist (because some kind of faulty representationalism is clearly the case) would surely laugh at this and say you're just defining your way to victory and then thinking you've found a novel truth. Literally anyone can do this and it's a shitty argument in any context. "X is the case because I've defined the crucial terms Y & Z in such a way that they entail X". That only works if everyone agrees on how to define the terms. If they don't agree on those then it clearly doesn't follow. So this:
Give the definition and see if it's actually impossible. I'm willing to bet the definition is not so clear that a reasonable alternative can't be given to avoid the apparently irrefutable conclusion.
You cover a lot of ground there, Wayfarer.
Without making an argument about anything else, one element Robert Wallace did not touch upon in his interesting article is how the "self-consciousness" that is being discussed developed through interactions between other "self-consciousnesses." The primal events Hegel is looking for in his Phenomenology of Spirit is an argument about why things are the way they are but also the introduction of a new way to represent experience. By way of example, Kierkegaard argues against aspects of the psychology being introduced but also writes Sickness Unto Death which uses the same dynamic of a consciousness going through changes when they encounter unavoidable problems. Marx is an example of someone who took the dynamic in a different direction.
If Kierkegaard and Marx are in the same lobby in another plane of existence, I bet the only thing they agree on regarding the works of Hegel is that Berkeley has withdrawn from the field of battle.
Thanks for saying so.
Quoting Wayfarer
That makes sense, but I would add that the feel of the conception is essential here. I'd say that our grasp of ourselves is only 'only conceptual' when strive to nail it down with words.
Quoting Wayfarer
That sounds plausible to me, and I think the word 'sense' is appropriate. As I've been exploring in other posts, one way to understand the modern worldview is the sense of nature of a dead machine, and that's how I sense it, 'pre-theoretically,' having grown up in this culture. I think that young adults have to repeat this process of being wrenched. Capitalism echoes nature as dead machine, too. The young adult feels himself within a machine within a machine, with the inner machine wanting only his work and the outer machine not wanting him at all. I don't at all think that this modern worldview is simply bad or good. It's a change. It closes some possibilities and open others. It can be viewed in terms of 'true' adulthood in that the alienated orphan becomes his own parent. But this orphaned adult has paid for grand interiority with the loss of a dominant public sense of what it all means, assuming that the orphan doesn't fall apart while constructing a personal meaning from the chaos of meanings available in the first place.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed. But I'd say that his sensing himself a stranger in a strange land is possible through other means too. 'Philosophy begins in wonder.' Is there terror in wonder? In some shades I think so. But other senses of wonder perhaps come with a sense of familiarity and trust. I mention this because 'strange land' reminds me of both terror and wander.
This is an outright contradiction. If we have good reason to hold one is sure over another, then we are dealing with refutable positions. By the measure of truth, having a reason to select one potion over another involves some sort of refutation of an opposing position. We reject it because we have good reason to think it is false. Having good reasons to take a position literally means some type of refutation is in play. Else our reasons are not reasons at all. They are just a preference.
You are putting no effort into thinking about the subject. In the face of the positions in question, you've just thrown your hands up and just said we cannot know anything. You're just repeating popular aphorisms about mystery. Why would the independence of objects by something we could never know?
The reason logical independence refutes idealism is because it shows other things are not logically given by experience. An object doesn't to require experience of it to exist. What we might call the empirical veil, our inability to confirm empirical states outside moments of observation, does not affect independence.
Can we confirm a tree is still there when we turn our head away? We cannot. But this does not create dependency relation between the tree and the presence of our experience. In terms of the state present, there might still be a tree (since we cannot observe it, we cannot say it must be absent) or there might be an absence of a tree. Either way, the state exists even if we a not observing. It's existence is not dependent on the presence of our experience.
The form of idealism referred to in this thread (which is not even Berkeley's) confuses our confirmation of an empirical event for the existence of an empirical event. It commits the category error of my experience observing a tree for the existence of a tree.
I don't think that's the case. We may well have good reasons for accepting realism (or idealism) without that position being proven. Having a good reason to believe X is not equivalent with establishing that X is the case. Justification and truth are not the same concept. So it's not a contradiction.
I think atheism is a view I have good reasons for holding. That doesn't mean I've proven no gods exist.
I respect that, and appreciate your sincere answer. Quoting Terrapin Station
IMV, if I can be equally honest, this is you reading your concerns into what for me is pretty clear. His essential being is the most important aspect of his being. It's more about value in this context. You do touch on some of my own reservations about Hegel. He opposed himself to religion based on feeling alone and needed concepts to be clearer than I think they really are. And then there is this way of looking at it:
[quote=Engels]
It is self-evident that owing to the needs of the “system” he very often had to resort to those forced constructions about which his pigmy opponents make such a terrible fuss even today. But these constructions are only the frame and scaffolding of his work. If one does not loiter here needlessly, but presses on farther into the immense building, one finds innumerable treasures which today still possess undiminished value. With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions.
[/quote]
Quoting Terrapin Station
As Hegel himself stresses in his preface, the 'naked result' is worthless. IMV, his portrait of the historical evolution of self-consciousness is central. And this is already in his critique of prefaces (bare results compared to bare results.) Consciousness is like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill, becoming bigger and more complex, more aware, for instance, of its own role in what it perceives. Error, for Hegel, is necessary. The truth is not ignorance of error but made of error. It is an unfinished syntheses of errors that each try to fix the preceding error. He interpreted the history of philosophy philosophically not as some random scattering of idiosyncratic worldviews but as an essentially connected thinking spanning generations that finally (in Hegel, for instance) became conscious of itself as this sort of thing. One might say that he 'unflattened' time, or saw through a simple vision of time as being space-like. I have the sense that lots of Hegel is 'common sense' for us now. A more qualified individual might be able to make a case that he even popularized a certain conception of Progress.
This is one take on that:
[quote=Engels]
But precisely therein lay the true significance and the revolutionary character of the Hegelian philosophy (to which, as the close of the whole movement since Kant, we must here confine ourselves), that it once and for all dealt the death blow to the finality of all product of human thought and action. Truth, the cognition of which is the business of philosophy, was in the hands of Hegel no longer an aggregate of finished dogmatic statements, which, once discovered, had merely to be learned by heart. Truth lay now in the process of cognition itself, in the long historical development of science, which mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further, where it would have nothing more to do than to fold its hands and gaze with wonder at the absolute truth to which it had attained. And what holds good for the realm of philosophical knowledge holds good also for that of every other kind of knowledge and also for practical action. Just as knowledge is unable to reach a complete conclusion in a perfect, ideal condition of humanity, so is history unable to do so; a perfect society, a perfect “state”, are things which can only exist in imagination. On the contrary, all successive historical systems are only transitory stages in the endless course of development of human society from the lower to the higher. Each stage is necessary, and therefore justified for the time and conditions to which it owes its origin. But in the face of new, higher conditions which gradually develop in its own womb, it loses vitality and justification. It must give way to a higher stage which will also in its turn decay and perish. Just as the bourgeoisie by large-scale industry, competition, and the world market dissolves in practice all stable time-honored institutions, so this dialectical philosophy dissolves all conceptions of final, absolute truth and of absolute states of humanity corresponding to it. For it [dialectical philosophy], nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything; nothing can endure before it except the uninterrupted process of becoming and of passing away, of endless ascendancy from the lower to the higher. And dialectical philosophy itself is nothing more than the mere reflection of this process in the thinking brain. It has, of course, also a conservative side; it recognizes that definite stages of knowledge and society are justified for their time and circumstances; but only so far. The conservatism of this mode of outlook is relative; its revolutionary character is absolute — the only absolute dialectical philosophy admits.
[/quote]
Note that Engels is already changing Hegel here. For Hegel, the process does attain some kind of stable self-consciousness (or that's a common understanding of his view.) The Left-Hegelians took this or that aspect of Hegel and ran with it. Feuerbach kept some of it and fused it with the sensual and the emotional, becoming something like a Nietzsche-before-Nietzsche critic of philosophy as still-too-metaphysical. 'The true religion is no religion. The true philosophy is no philosophy.' And for Feuerbach concepts had to address what was non-conceptual, philosophy what was resistant in man to philosophy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I still maintain that you are losing the forest in the trees here. IMV, you are zooming in on individual phrases you find objectionable in terms of AP concerns that didn't exist then (linguistic self-consciousness exploded in 20th cent. philosophy it seems, for AP and cont. philosophy). You do not at all respond to the big picture of Hegel's motives or thrust or direction (either to approve or disapprove.) You have every right to respond as you see fit, but I do think it's an uncharitable reading.
That's true, but then you are shifting from "good reasons" in terms of truth, to "good reasons" in terms of normatively or preference, as per my comment. They aren't good reason in terms of the truth being discussed.
More importantly, these normative good reasons are independently defined to truth based good reasons. The former doesn't make the latter false. Someone might, for example, have good normative reasons for believing in a god, even when there aren't good reasons in terms of truth (which is the case for most claims of god because they propose a refutable empirical claim).
Meillassoux's position is pretty understandable in the context of radical contingency. Since he holds any logically possible state can occur, including ones which violate what would seem to be established rules of reality, there is no limit to possible events except a logical contradiction.
Resurrection is not a logical contradiction. Tomorrow, the bodies in a graveyard might blink to the surface and be reconstituted as living. All it involves is a movement of bodies and a change in their status. Since there is no correlationist rule which constrains the behaviour of finite states, it's possible dead bodies could reappear living tomorrow.
which is surely about whether or not we have good reason to believe something. So we're surely talking about justification in believing something to be the case not about preference. But that's not truth then, clearly. And unless I'm much mistaken, when Terrapin says neither realism nor idealism are refutable he's talking about the truth of which is the case. They might well accept your reasons as more... reasonable in believing realism, but still hold it's not determinative in settling the debate (or even that the debate cannot be settled to the required level to call one side refuted).
Am I missing your point?
Yes, I do grant that he makes a clever argument for that. My objection would be that this is finally like 'maybe we are all brains in a vat.' After all his anti-faith talk in AF, he presents the same old object of faith--a denial of mortality and 'real' injustice. Personal death and the crude unfairness existing in life if not illusions are at least possibly all fixable, according to a creative argument that depends on Cantorian mathematics. Recall that Cantor caused a war in the foundations of math once. This is not the solidest of foundations. And his arguments are generally pretty delicate, fragile, even on the edge of sophistic.
Moreover he dodges 'Heideggarian' concerns about how mathematics exists for us. There is also the problem of meaning beneath any adoption of arguments.
He calls his God the non-existence of God (to oversimplify). Don't get me wrong. He's fascinating.
I don't think a conception of literature as a kind of overarching science is really supportable, because literature, unlike science, is a phenomenological exercise on the affective and/or descriptive, rather than the analytic, side; it is more concerned with human experience as opposed to the natural world per se, or even human culture and behavior per se. Philosophical literature may be thought to be an exceptional case; but only if you think the practice of system-building that aspires to grand syntheses is really a worthwhile endeavour apart form whatever aesthetic value it may create.
I don't have literature alone in mind as that kind of 'Science.' Instead I might say that we 'live' this 'Science' already as we make sense of our existence in terms of literature, philosophy, and science simultaneously. While careers split us up in specialties, we operate as entire personalities in all realms at once, though of course with different intensities of care and its attendant skill.
Sure, but the difference is that science is not about anyone's opinion; whereas literature and philosophy most certainly are predominately about people's opinions.
That is the divide along which the contrast between objectivity and subjectivity runs.
I am suspicious of the value of a certain kind of system-building, but then I also think we move toward coherence 'automatically.' So perhaps the issue is whether we think we can get this coherence in an ideal 'object language' constructed from within the wider context of the 'metalanguage.' This 'metalanguage' would be our full range of speaking and listening intelligibly. If we find this 'full range' untrustworthy for various reasons, we might try to restrict ourselves to an object language where ordinary words are given fixed meanings and neologisms are built from these fixed meanings as if from bricks. Of course I think this approach is not terribly promising and mostly argue against it.
Philosophical systems are generally systems of opinion which purport to plug as many holes as possible; and I don't think it is arguable that philosophy, or humans generally, outside of science, or apart from the benefit of science, move towards any coherence, i.e. settled opinion.
In Heideggarian jargon, we might say that science is exactly about Anyone's opinions. The time of science is the time of the clock. Of course I love science and work in science, and indeed it is far more objective in some important sense. But I wouldn't be so fast to charge literature with utter subjectivity. I'd say it's phenomenological in some ways. We might say that science is grounded on entities that are already publicly and explicitly revealed. For instance, it is not at all the case that most people know enough calculus to really do science, but we all understand what it is to repeat an experiment. We understand what it is to measure. We understand what it is to predict something definite so that correctness or incorrectness is sufficiently clear. This requires the use of language and a basic knowhow for getting around in the world. Science would not be intelligible without this knowhow. Science asks for the bare minimum of phenomenological revelation. Literary greatness is elitist phenomenologically --as well as being dangerously non-neutral along those lines. But there is inter-subjectivity available there, perhaps no more mysterious and unjustied than that in the perception of furniture, except for this 'elitism' or diminished accessibility. In more mundane terms, people agree that certain TV shows are great (high art.) They perceive something in common, an elusive greatness. Perhaps we could say that science is grounded in the most reliable kind of intersubjectivit, and that there is something like a continuum.
Its 'methodical shallowness' was a stroke of genius (Galileo and the chandelier, his hand on his wrist.) . Forget 'why' things move and describe how they move. This may encourage a forgetfulness of how they are more generally present for us, but it's so practically effective that I'm not about to complain. I'm only hesitating to identify objectivity with science without further consideration.
I wouldn't personally identity coherence with settled opinion. I'd think more in terms of the walk matching the talk. Or of a life on earth that makes more sense. It [this life] isn't jarring. The system purrs. If there are contradictions (as I think there must be whenever we demand a certain explicitness) then they aren't dominant or incapacitating or the cause of much distress.
The math stuff can be a little bit bizarre ( I think he's chasing after justifications in a correlationist form actually), but I wasn't really concerned with that. I just worried about how you were seemingly equating what is an out and out materialist argument (the possibility of resurrection occurring through states) with speculation and some sort of faith style argument.
He appropriately dismisses Heideggarian concerns. His point, since it is about necessary Being (to contextualise it to Heideggarian), is that Being is not "for us" at all. It's is that which is necessary, that which obtains regardless of the finite. The Heideggarian concern is flawed form the beginning in this context. I think Meillassoux's argument is confusing and misleading in this context because he references two specific qualities, contingency and math, which are of finite beings. He obscures his own point about Being. I think he would have done better just to argue Being was the infinite which was nothing else.
I think the point he is trying to make about Being is Spinozian. What we really wants to say is there is a necessary infinite being which is nothing else, especially any of those finite (contingent states). The God present in non-existence is pretty much identical to Spinoza's God of Substance.
I also think this would save Meillassoux from accusations of faith. In a world in which it is guaranteed anything is possible, then we can hold out that death or injustice might be overcome. Not in the sense it must be, as detailed within what might be ferried as "faith based thinking," but in the sense that finitude doesn't doom us to death or injustice. Just because we die and injustice occurs, we don't have to take them as necessary. Something we can always be certain about, since the non existing God of contingency (death might be overcome, justice might occur) is necessary.
Understanding what it is to repeat an experiment, to measure and to predict just are instances of understanding science I would say. So it is really not a matter of science being unintelligible without these understandings or abilities, but of there being no science without them.
As to literature being phenomenological I have already stated so myself, so no argument there. But phenomenology is not science, in fact according to Husserl it specifically brackets the concerns of science to focus on the subjective nature of experience; on the "what it is like'. So, I think phenomenology is properly descriptive, and although description is of course part of science it is the mere beginning of it.
Surely "the walk matches the talk" (on a societal scale at least) only when there is settled opinion?
Honestly I just can't see an important difference. Science is intelligible/understandable as science even for those who don't know math. The get the gist of it without being able to do it. And even getting this gist depends on getting a far more basic gist of moving around in the world and speaking even the simplest kind of language. We might ask about the intersubjectivity involved in these basic skills. Somehow we very comfortably experience our sensations in terms of public objects. I'm not sure that a problem-free explicit account of this worldliness can be given, and really I think that it can't be. Witness the endless debate, each side sniffing out what's fishy in the other's jargon.
Quoting Janus
Hmm. Well I'd say of course literature is not lower-case science. Recall the context. If we think of uppercase Science as existence clarifying itself simultaneously in the realm of science proper, literature, and philosophy (in terms of a description of what is) then phenomenology is even Science itself. On the other hand this '-logy' is problematic in its focus on words, concept. The self-clarification of existence is arguably as much a matter of feeling and sensation as it is of concept. 'Science' in this widest sense is....Christ? That's mostly a joke, but I think we start to touch on myths and religious traditions. The left Hegelians (some of them) understand the incarnation in terms of mankind's increased mastery over nature along with his increased consciousness of his own freedom and 'divinity.' -a fairly Satanic rendering of the incarnation. This reminds me of Hegel's notion that his absolute philosophy was absolute religion 'fixed' or 'improve' by a shift from pictoral thinking to 'pure' concept. Personally I think metaphor stays with us and that 'pure' concept might be dependent on impure concept.
*And for all who read this, I consider this a thought experiment. I am just creatively feeling my way along the conversation, exploring possibilities. I mention this because 'Science' is going to push some buttons these days. I'm less interested in various culture wars (in terms of being a participant) than I think some people are --and I think less interested in what things are called, as long as we have a mutual sense that we are talking about the same thing.
While I understand why you might say that, I don't think it's so simple. I will grant that the walk matching the talk might require some stable sense of what kind of walk is appropriate. I may have a settled opinion that kindness is best whenever possible. I might talk about open-mindedness loudly and proudly (or more consistently quietly and modestly) . And maybe I do indeed act kindly and open-mindedly. Does that count as a settled opinion? Perhaps it does.
But I don't think you're objecting to the possibility of that kind of settled opinion.
But I don't find this necessary being to beyond clarification.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes, I get that, and well said. But there is a practical contradiction here. We don't live this merely theoretical possibility. It's not unlike an agnostic who might indeed admit the possibility of a God and live just like his explicitly atheist neighbor. For me our actions largely reveal what we significantly believe. In theoretical games we adopt 'partial' personalities. We put on a kind of hat that transforms us. We make a big deal out of difference that make no difference (a pragmatic critique.) And this is why many don't find philosophy interesting, because it pretends to wring its hands in many cases.
To be clear, I like After Finitude and his other works. As a matter or personal judgement/taste, I nevertheless find Heidegger far more significant, though with a particular phase of Heidegger's work in mind (the 5 years or so leading up to Being and Time.) I have not yet been able to enjoy his later work and maybe never will, but I continue to tune in to The Concept of Time and find it revolutionary (as you may know, it's the first draft of Being and Time, only 100 pages long so that one can quickly scan the vision as a whole, which I find illuminating with my holist preferences.)
I thought he was talking about the truth. That's why I commented he was arguing a contradiction. If truth is at stake and someone has good reason for holding a position on those grounds, then someone is being refuted.
If truth is our measure of having a good reason to hold a position, then some sort of falsehood or incoherence in the opposing position has been identified. My point was if we have good reasons for holding a position in term of truth, we are committed to the refutation of an opposing position is some shape or from. We have reason to reject to because it is false and known to be false.
For two position to beyond refutation would mean we could not have a good reason for picking either on grounds of its truth.
I'd say that on the individual level there is no "walk matching the talk" without settled opinion. On an individual level settled opinion may be a matter of commitment or faith and not necessarily scientific or empirical understanding. On a societal level, though, there is no universal "walk matching the talk" without settled opinion; and settled opinion that transcends traditional culturally ingrained beliefs (which can never be shared globally) seems to be possible only with the benefit of science.
M is very technical, very precise in his thinking. But so were the theologians, right? A machine-like technique (presumed for that reason trustworthy) is applied to deliver results that violate what one might call the existential aspect of the scientific worldview --nature is a blind machine that doesn't care about us and we actually just die, vanish, fizzle out.
To say that anything can happen at any time can be defended with machine-like logic. Hume's critique of induction is convincing in theory. But just about everyone deeply believes in the uniformity of nature, mostly pre-theoretically. The only issue is sorting out false alarms or getting more accuracy, with an occasional revolution that allows us to predict and manipulate new kinds of things (discovery of radioactivity, for instance.) So M uses machine-like logic to deny that nature is 'truly' machine-like. And yet he needs nature to be mostly machine-like to make the fossil argument. We only trust that the world is older than mankind because we employ models whose trustworthiness is founded on our belief in nature's regularity.
While his machine-like arguments are fascinating, he is ultimately attacking the idea of nature as the familiar kind of machine in order to deny the certainty of death. He uses a different language, but so did apophatic theologians and mystics. I like negative theology and certain mystics, so I don't point out the similarity as I see it as an accusation. Recall that M was invoked against my 'ontological holism,' which prompted me to say: 'Hey, wait a minute, Meillassoux is stranger than that.'
It at least seems possible (if a little scary) that the globe could fall under the control of a specific community which makes its way of being and seeing dominant. Unless one accepts the idea of a trule 'neutral' culture (an idea I can't make sense of), this would just be a traditional culture with a history and a direction in terms of that history.
As far as science goes, I do see your point, but I think it's complex. If the core of science is prediction and control, then these are so valuable to us as embodied beings that most would be tempted on those terms alone perhaps to weave the language that science uses to achieve these things into the rest of their culture. We can also consider war and population. A high-tech culture will at least be capable of sustaining a greater population density, leading to wars that are likely to be won technologically. My question is whether science is essentially deeper than this. It is of course connected to various ideals. We tend to favor the kind of lingo that gets us what we want. If 'electron' talk gives us cell-phones and angels only give a few people nice feelings, then electrons are real and angels are fantasies.
IMV we even see a kind of pre-science in some of the sophists. Talk is cheap --or actually expensive if you hire a pro. Talk itself is instrumentalized. Part of the scientific spirit seems to be instrumental in this sense. It is a 'god' with real power, that reliably answers prayers with pain pills and contact lenses. On the other hand, most people don't defend science in terms of its brute practical relevance. It is not a tool but a window to the universally real. What is our interest in this universally real beyond knowledge as power? I'm not saying that I am a stranger to this interest but only interested in clarifying it.
I don't think so. We have to be careful here. The certainty of death is something people the to approach form a position of actuality. Promises granted in response are never merely possible. When immortality is promised, it's some sort of certainty attached to the actual outcome. You will live some sort of (after)life.
In making his materialist argument, M is outright denying this certainty of an (after)life (and so is Hume). The clearing of the space of the possible doesn't actually give (after)life. It missing the guarantee which of those promises. There is a huge difference between saying; "Well, you might get to keep living..." and "you will keep living by the power of this..."
If I read your use of "machine like" correctly, M is actually giving the apotheosis for nature being machine like. Under radical contingency, there is no idea or rule which can guarantee a life. Life is put beyond any sort of definite promises. We have to always come back to: "Well, only if those states happen to exist..." He is using the machine like order to deny the certainty of death, but that's precisely what the machines entail: for death to occur, it needs the machines to do it. Nobody dies without being an existing dead thing. Not even an omnipotent being can get past this requirement or escape the possibility of its life/death.
M is taking a position directly and violently opposed to those would would claim something there than machine like logic. He's not using machine like logic to deny nature is machine like. Quite the opposite, he's saying it is only/necessarily machine like, so we can never substitute in a rule or idea which would give a definite promised outcome. Since it is necessary the world doesn't care, we cannot ever close possible events off to a particular expectation we have. In this respect, he is the opposite of mystics and theologians who promise (after)life. All we can ever promise is something might happen. With regards to death, we can never have a position of definite certainly with regards to actually. M is denying all those promises of a caring world. We will only ever have an uncaring one of possibility.
In this respect his argument (or a Humean one) isn't trying to secure resurrection at all. That it might happen is not a reason to think it will or does. Possibility is not actuality.
I'm not sure we really disagree on this issue, but maybe we aren't using the same terms. I underlined what were two compatible thoughts in terms of my jargon. I'd say that the vision of nature as a machine is precisely a set of rules that describe our expectations ('promised outcomes'). I agree they aren't deductively secured.
I agree that it's logically possible that I could walk across Lake Michigan. I think the tension here is between the machine-likeness of the argument for this otherwise counter-intuitive claim and what makes it counter-intuitive, our rough and ready sense of nature's regularity and our learned trust for those with the algorithms and strange lingo who apparently make the jets fly and the cell phones ring. We don't and can't really believe that anything is possible IMV except in some theoretical sense. Or I'm trying to point out the gulf for most of us between our abstraction realization that science isn't deductively grounded and the way we live and talk in every other context.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I'll grant that there's a difference logically between possible and certain resurrection, and it may that M was mostly interested in the possibility as an object of thought to elaborate his notion of justice. He may 'actually' believe in plain old death without resurrection. By 'actually' I just mean to sincerely expect annihilation, head-space possibilities having no place in the guts.
I don't object to defenses of a possible afterlife by the way. I don't find it to be sincerely expect-able, but many seem to.
From one angle, I appreciate you doing all of that work, but from my perspective, all of that work is only compounding the problems. I could pick all of the problems apart, or even just one at a time, which is what I typically do when I'm trying to encourage focus, and then you'd be an apologist for what I'm picking apart in maybe an even longer post, and then I'd have additional problems with that, and then you'd be an apologist for it in another really long post, and I'd have additional problems with that, and it would just never end.
Rather than engaging in the futility of that, the deal, or the challenge, basically, is this: could you type something about Hegel--if you want to basically try to sell his merits to me--that is is short, clear,to the point, that I'd agree with/that I'd think is not constructed in a way that suggests beliefs that are misconceived if not outright wrong? You're not going to type a big chunk of his ideas obviously, since that wouldn't be short, etc., but just start with the smallest of steps that you'd guess maybe we could agree on.
I do indeed, because I both sympathize with the skepticism/resistance and think Hegel is worth with trouble --and because I love the opportunity to paraphrase. Paraphrasing strives for a jargon-independent global comprehension IMV.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You yourself just waxed Hegelian there. This is the 'dialectical' process that Hegel is trying to point out. I start with an assertion that is not quite right. You locate what is not quite right. I try to patch the hole with more detail, more context. Repeat. What is happening as we move through time? We work together to build an account of existence that increases in complexity and becomes more adequate, to some degree by taking account-giving itself into account as an essential part of what is. This would be the dialectical process become 'self-conscious,' or the philosopher grokking that debate is productive. 'Spirit' or 'mind' is dynamic and synthetic. Instead of viewing spirit or mind as a set of truths, we can view spirit or mind (or existence) as a self-elaborating process. Substance is caught up in or as a living subject.
This is already implicit in the 'impossibility' of a summary that precedes dialectical elaboration or development in time (or development as a kind of historical or conceptual time.). The kind of truth that Hegel is concerned with (truths about mankind, history, philosophy, religion) are created in the very pursuit of those truths. The comprehensive or more comprehensive truth is a stairway of 'lies' or 'partial truths' or 'errors.' Today's so-called truth is not the refutation of yesterday's lies but rather their harmonizing synthesis. 'Spirit' assimilates otherness. From this perspective you are doing exactly this as you try to make sense of some of these suspicious ideas and work them into your living system/personality. And we can also think of a larger human who is composed of individual humans who come and go, catching up with the conversation and contributing to it, only to pass away. [What I leave out here is something that Hegel finds important, action, especially war. For Hegel thought is not independent of work and fighting in the real world. Contradictions are not only conceptual but existential. Humans also clarify what they are in terms of what they want (the recognition by others of their freedom and value.) The phenomenology is an idealize history of this evolving self-consciousness. The only way to understand it is to repeat the journey. The 'result' is this journey as it understands itself as the end of the journey (philosophy understands only what has already happened.)]
[quote=Hegel]
The more the ordinary mind takes the opposition between true and false to be fixed, the more is it accustomed to expect either agreement or contradiction with a given philosophical system, and only to see reason for the one or the other in any explanatory statement concerning such a system. It does not conceive the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive evolution of truth; rather, it sees only contradiction in that variety. The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.
[/quote]
How about "short, clear,to the point, that I'd agree with/that I'd think is not constructed in a way that suggests beliefs that are misconceived if not outright wrong"?
OK, I will try once more, and perhaps what is not there will be illuminating in its conspicuous absence.
[quote= kinda-sorta-'impossibly'-short-Hegel]
It is impossible to be short, clear, and to the point and significantly meaningful.
[/quote]
This sort of statement is incoherent. If you don't even know what someone is saying or haven't even looked at it, how can you have any idea whether an idea is wrong or misconceived? The move of decreeing a position wrong because you haven't understood it or done some work to understand it is to abandon honesty and reason. Speech and efforts of others aren't meaningless just because someone doesn't want to take time to understand it.
I am quite shocked people seriously entertain the argument otherwise so frequently.
Yeah, that's not something I at all agree with. (Which probably should be obvious given what I was asking for.)
First, I didn't say anything in the vein of "I haven't even looked at it."
Aside from that, in my view it's a matter of "the emperor's new clothes" basically.
You outright said you won't read these philosophers because they'll only say something meaningless.
You also said this in response to a Hegel quote earlier in the thread:
Quoting Terrapin Station
None of that addresses the content of the argument. You misread the use of "essential being" as talking about some sort of essentialism. You ignore that self-consciousness is making a particular distinction between different sorts of experiences. None of the objections you gave to the content address what Hegel was talking about. How can you possible assert "the emperor's new clothes" when you don't even know what is being spoken about?
I'm not saying you should or need to know what Hegel is saying either. We all have our particular interests. No-one needs to know everything or a specific philosopher. My point is just that you keep making pronouncements of meaninglessness when you don't even know the potions you are talking about. Why are you moved to dismiss field of study you don't know nothing about? Am I going to go around saying nuclear physics is meaningless just because I don't understand its ins and outs and it's complex to learn? This sort of response doesn't reflect truth context. A combination of "I don't understand it and won't take effort to learn" are not grounds to degree a field of study meaningless or mistaken.
I'm pretty sure I didn't say that, and I have read them to some extent--I was required to--but if you could quote where I said that, maybe I'm just not recalling what I wrote.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Which is relevant to what?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Just to use that as an example, what sort of "essential" should I have read it as?
I understand that you may be getting tired of my longwinded responses, so I leave this here just in case a part of you is still a little curious. And of course it's your business if you want to write Hegel off as a windbag, and all of us Hegel lovers as confused , pretentious fools.
That said, here goes one pretentious windbag in defense of another pretentious windbag:
For me the whole approach of one looking for something one already agrees with seems questionable. I'd say that we learn to think differently and more comprehensively from philosophers. They aren't sets of propositions to be graded like an algebra quiz, nor should we expect theorems from them in terms of our own axioms. We must learn their language and grasp them as a whole, just as we grasp who our friends our as a whole to make sense of their individual utterances.
Any philosopher able to our expand our thinking significantly would almost have to appear strange to us in proportion to their potency. The more deeply they challenge our basic approach or grasp of the situation, the less initially intelligible they will be, since they are talking to us from outside of what we take for granted, with words that we can only interpret in terms of this same taken-for-granted.
Because they are initially unintelligible and challenging, we are on the lookout to save ourselves the trouble of understanding them. Since humans often do just talk confused nonsense (a nonsense that stems from mental sloth), we are tempted to throw challenging thinkers in the same bin as the mentally slothful. Couple this with the snottiness of youth that takes such difficult thinkers for its hero and condescends to others in a jargon that it itself only half-understands (without the modesty to admit this), and it becomes even easier to call the whole thing a scam.
We can argue to ourselves that anything valuable must also be easily digestible. But I'd say that ideas being easily digestible depends on them already fitting into a fixed paradigm or pre-theoretical grasp of the situation. Extending this, intellectual revolutions would be trivial affairs, and one might wonder why humankind didn't almost instantaneously leap to the educated common sense of 2018. If you answer that it takes time for technology to develop, for languages to evolve, for wars that expand more enlightened political ideas/ideals over the globe, etc., etc., then you are already Hegelian. Asking Hegel to be compressed into a one-liner is the kind of approach that Hegel opens his first book criticizing. Asking for one of his ideas out of context is more reasonable, but expecting a valuable idea to 'live' in one pithy proposition assumes something about meaning and language that thinkers like Hegel challenge.
You even outright denied your comment were based on anything these philosopher had said or writing (i.e. that what you are saying isn't based on what texts say). The content of the argument is relevant because that is what you are attacking. You are saying it is worthless and meaningless. If your claim was accurate, it would be true the claims in the text were incoherent, worthless, meaningless, etc.
"essential being" refers not to any sort of essentialism whereby some particular form is said to necessarily be given with something, such as "humans are necessarily greedy."
It refers to an ontological/metaphysical/logical notion about existence, a fact of belonging to a necessary unity (hence the use "essential").
I don't agree with the notions of progress that you seem to be assuming by the way.
In general, if I don't agree with what someone is saying, and especially if in addition I think that they're saying things that are incoherent, I feel that they don't communicate well, etc. it's not going to work to assume that the fault is mine rather than theirs, especially not over some extended period of time.
That's a different idea than whether I understand or am familiar with everything someone is saying on first blush. There's a way to show that an author is thinking and communicating clearly and coherently even though some material, some vocabulary, some ideas might be unfamiliar.
First off, what are those quotes supposed to be supporting?
That you don't read these philosophers because you think they are just delivering meaningless words.
I'm then extending it into the point your criticism don't actually address their arguments and form a reasoned conclusion they are speaking incoherently.
I certainly didn't write anything like "I haven't read them" in anything you quoted. You're bizarrely interpreting that into what I wrote, indicating that you don't reason very clearly yourself. So let's figure out how in the world you're interpreting "I haven't read them" into what I wrote.
Sure, I can relate to that. But this prioritization of agreement/disagreement over a sure grasp of what is being said is not my own preference. As Hegel would say, we find nothing quite right. We just assimilate what is good into the rest of what we know. We blend two wrong perspectives together to get a less wrong perspective.
Anecdotally, I've had a love/hate relationship with Heidegger. I would sometimes want to vomit at the way he expressed himself (or was translated in some works.) I'd write him off. I especially hated and still hate 'Being.' But again and again other thinkers who were clear and important to me referred back to Heidegger (like Rorty who writes quite clearly). So again and again I returned. Finally I found my way in, and his work from the mid 1920s is some of my very favorite philosophy. Will it appeal to those with very different initial concerns? Perhaps not. What we expect from philosophy opens or closes the worth of various philosophers for us, it seems to me. On the other hand, some philosophers can persuade us to grasp philosophy itself a new way.
With Hegel it was always the PoS that people praised just as B&T is the Heidegger work most talked about. But I found my way in to both thinkers by starting with briefer, clearer writings. I am not at all done grasping their visions as a whole, but I have grasped them sufficiently to be very glad that I kept wrestling with their strangeness. I'd be surprised if you don't have some favorite thinkers who were difficult at first. Is there not some kind of leap of faith that we take which motivates us to push through? As I said, it was other people who were clearly not fools who kept me from writing off thinkers when I was strongly tempted to. Of course it is ultimately very much your business whether you bother with Hegel. Hell, maybe he will just continue to bore you. I really don't know how it is for other people. I just have a vague sense that we are roughly alike which can sometimes be misleading.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I agree, and sometimes the same philosophers do a better job of this at some times than at others. I still maintain that the most revolutionary thinking must almost by definition look like nonsense at first.
*I promise to stop trying to talk you into liking Hegel. It's been fun trying.
That also sounds like some explanations of the hermeneutic circle. Is it the same thing?
I'm no expert, but I'd say that they are related. (I can't guarantee that this isn't a misreading on my part.)
As I understand the circle, we have to start with a vague initial understanding of what we are questioning in order to ask our question in the first place. As we specify what it is we are asking about (the nature of truth, for instance), then right away we are forced to deal with other concepts related to the concept of truth. Do we have a perfectly clear grasp of these concepts? Probably not. And maybe the meanings of these related concepts themselves depends on our unclarified concept of truth. We seem stuck. But as we run around the circle, back and forth from concept to concept, the circle as a whole becomes illuminated and clarified, also clarifying the individual concepts via their place in this circle. IMV this does not mean we ever attain perfect clarity about truth or any of the related concepts. It only means more clarity.
I love the hermeneutic circle as a holist insight. It strikes me as a description of what we actually do without usually being conscious of it. Hegel's dialectic would seem to be part of moving around in this circle, increasing its circumference, since his dialectic is creative. Of course clarification is also creative. (more meaning, brighter meaning). Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are emphasizing different aspects of the same process, of course doing so as a part of that same process, allowing the process to become 'self-conscious.'
Sounds good, but that leaves us with 'it is what it is.' No, not even that. What does it mean for something to be? What do we mean when we say 'is'? If this seems a trivial question, that may just an indicator of our complacency.
Even 'the cat is on the mat' leads to endless debates about whether the cat is really on the mat or rather that just our seeing of the cat is on the seeing of the mat. And then what does 'cat' mean? Or rather how does 'cat' mean? We have a rough sense or picture of a cat along with the word, but I'd say that these rough senses (employed constantly) aren't quite right if one demands total explicitness. They are otherwise quite right practically, in that we have all the clarity that we usually need to keep the machine running (less theoretical life and its business.)
I wasn't saying that other people would necessarily agree with me. I can try to teach them to the extent that they're teachable, but past that, I don't see it as my problem.
Of course. Of course. But surely you embrace some kind of duty to defend your ideas or the desire to promote them persuasively, at least within certain limits. As far as I can tell so far, you have a different sense of 'the cat is on the mat' than others. For instance, on how this statement is supposed to be made true, etc.
I don't see any reason to believe this scenario is actually (as opposed to merely logically) possible.
Quoting macrosoft
There does not seem to be any other method that reveals actuality as opposed to mere imagination. Or to put it another way; there does not seem to be any other method to test imagination.
You didn't answer my question. Do you think science is deeper than prediction and control? IMV, saying that it 'reveals actuality' is already non-scientific metaphysics and goes beyond...prediction and control.
You write 'testing imagination.' And what is this imagination tested against? A public sense of reality, itself somewhat mysterious, I'd say. I can't make sense of testing a model against the 'thing itself.' We (roughly) fit models to measurements. What is it to make a measurement? What is it like to read a thermometer or count spider eggs? What is 'inter-subjectivity' really? We don't know exactly, but we know enough to get things done. This fuzzy know-how makes science possible in the first place. In some sense, science seems like a clarification of one aspect of this know-how.
The reason science is supreme when it comes to predicting and controlling public entities is because that is what makes science science, one might say. Any explicit method that reliably does so would seem to qualify. Science deals with what is public, not with what is real, I would say, except to the degree that the public and the real are identified. Once we see how our notion of the scientific real is largely just a matter of publicity (did we all just see that? can we do it like that again?), it's not so hard to understand that other kinds of differently public entities might also be investigated non-arbitrarily. IMV, this is what we are doing right now, investigating semi-public ideas, non-trivially possible because we speak the same langauge (and what are the depths of sharing a language?)
Assuming that science is the best way to predict and control nature as it is familiar to all of us, does this reduce philosophy to assisting such prediction and control? defending such prediction and control as the 'true' or only 'real' knowledge, so that philosophy is science's ideological bodyguard?
Must bringing certain presuppositions and unclarified notions to light within the fundamental approach of 'scientistic' metaphysics be interpreted as 'just trying to sneak in religion'? Or does such a bringing-to-light seek to avoid a kind of thoughtless religion that hasn't clarified its own existential investment in what can be reduced not only to 'knowledge is power' but to 'public power as knowledge.' I'm no saint. I worship the dollar and the belly too. I obey the clock that tells me anyone's and no one's time. But I can't pretend that inventing aspirin or cell phones or predicting eclipses or extinctions exhausts the meaning of being human, nor do I think this meaning is utterly subjective. Some of this shared meaning makes prediction and control possible/intelligible in the first place.
For instance, is the 'wrongness' of torturing kittens really less publicly accessible than the redness of human blood? If a few humans don't 'see' this wrongness, then are also literally blind humans who don't see the redness of blood. Logic itself seems to have a certain for-everyone nature that isn't trivial to explain. I'm not trying to answer a question here but raise a question where the complexity of the issue might otherwise be swept under the rug. What makes an object public? To what degree is language part of this and itself a kind of public object?
That we don't need for practical purposes to investigate this much is granted. That we wouldn't want to use our technologically provided leisure to think beyond what provides this leisure is more complicated. Thanks to science, we don't have to obsess over prediction and control all the time. Nor must we identity the most public experiences with the most real or most significantly real --if we even care much about the game of calling this or that 'real.'
Yes, because moral stances are simply individual's mental states, which aren't third-person observable.
Is that so clear? How does one distinguish between mental and non-mental in the first place? What is sensation? How do we learn to distinguish between dreams and the rest of experience?
Is a man with sight in a room with blind men able to comment on the color of things 'objectively'? Let's shift to light waves. If only 1 in 100 human beings could grasp calculus, then how science exists for them except as a minority of individuals who were eerily good at making predictions? One might say that their mathematical-conceptual system for building models is a strong way to perceive some strong but elusive notion of true-for-us, but certainly these entities (real numbers and functions) aren't the thing itself? We might say that the 'true-for-us' or the 'shared-world' manifests itself especially usefully through a certain mathematical-conceptual lens which reduces its ambitions to accomplish this reduced task spectacularly. --so spectacularly that its method has rippled outward into a metaphysics that is not part of the method itself. (?)
Quoting macrosoft
Do you deny that the kind of observation, employing unbiased analysis and synthesis, that is characteristic of natural science reveals what is really going on? For example that the heart is a pump, that heat causes many materials to expand, some to combust, others to melt, that animals and plants both consist of cells (with plants cell, unlike animals cells, having cell walls consisting of cellulose) and so on? I mean, the examples are countless. Are these not revealing actuality? I don't see how metaphysics comes into it at all. Can you explain why you think so?
Quoting macrosoft
Why do you think it is mysterious? "A public sense of reality" simply consists in those things which are identifiably shareable such that nobody (except perhaps some idiot philosophers).seriously questions their reality. Actuality is what is publicly identifiable as real. What else could it be?
I deny the absoluteness of this 'really.' Making this narrative (science) the 'real' one is where metaphysics comes in.
Quoting Janus
I indeed agree that science is a central revelation of what is actual. But its power largely comes from ignoring the realm in which it has its foundation, a realm open to philosophy. I'm not religious in any typical way, so it's best to think of me as coming from a philosophical angle. To centralize science without further ado is like pretending we have eyes but no ears. Note that no one has really addressed my specific concerns about science-as-metaphysics (Note that my formal education is in science, so it's wrong to think that I am anti-science just because I ask more from philosophy than that it be the cheerleader or bodyguard of educated common sense. EDIT: not implying anything about your position in that last line --not sure where you are coming from yet)
Quoting Janus
One example: If we model reality with math and say that the model is good and reveals reality, we leave unquestioned how such models exist for us. How do we grasp real numbers? Are they real? Certainly the marks on paper are real. But this is not math. Science is caught up in a living intelligible discourse. While it can model this discourse in some ways (predict the next word I might type via machine learning), it is not clear that is even equipped to touch 'meaning.' Those who deny meaning would seem to have to do so in the very space of meaning. I don't know what meaning is, but I see the question.
Another example is the notion of a public entity. I think this notion is left hazy, precisely because we can get away with it and still have our technology. Are public entities fixed? Or did/can other communities recognize entities that we do not as public? This might sound like a silly question. But what is it that allows us to recognize a spider egg as a distinct public object? That one seems easy, and may be universal enough. But what is it to grasp a mathematical theorem as a public entity? None of this has any obvious bearing on the uncontroversial predictive power of science. It's about whether science can or is even interested in giving an exhaustive account of existence. If it does not even attempt to tackle issues for which its method is inappropriate, then making it the arbiter of the 'really' real is suspect, IMV. This fits the real to the method, not the method to the real.
Quite. Shouldn’t be forgotten that the rejection of metaphysics was a characteristic of both Protestantism - Luther called Aristotle a ‘son of the devil’ - and also the scientific philosophy of the Enlightenment. The whole effort was to concentrate wholly and solely on what was empirically observable and the mathematical analysis of its measurable attributes. The sense in which philosophy was critical of that, or even could be critical of it, was almost entirely forgotten, or rejected, until Philosophy of Science came along.
Splendid post. I had pasted a quote from earlier on in the thread in my scrapbook and compared it to a snippet from Aristotle.
Although it could be stated that the ancient conception of science is worlds apart from the modern because it was presumed to have bearing on both aesthetics and morality, whereas in the modern conception, these are understood as ‘social constructions’ i.e. without correspondence to anything beyond the social sphere. Whereas in Aristotle, there is still the suggestion of the contemplation of the eternal ideas as being in some sense salvific, that is as the aim and indeed consumation of the ‘life well lived’.
What exactly is "absoluteness"? can you spell it out for me?
And how exactly can philosophy be critical of " the whole effort to {... } concentrate wholly and solely on what was empirically observable and the mathematical analysis of its measurable attributes' when it comes to the question of how we are to understand what actuality consists in? Doesn't actuality consist in what is empirically observable (what is publicly accessible in other words)? What else could it imaginably consist in? (Of course there is also the actuality of individuals' experiences, But that is not actuality in the public or scientific sense. obviously).
I think we share a sense that philosophy should not collapse into something 'small,' dazzled so much by the undeniable public power of science that it is afraid to investigate that which makes science possible and yet may be resistant to the scientific method, supposedly 'subjective' 'meaning.' Is meaning subjective? What is meaning? Whatever it is, science lives 'in' and 'as' such meaning. To be clear, I think it is 110% fine that science just takes such meaning for granted and builds its models. Most of life is like that. It works with a pre-loaded intelligibility which it need not question. On the other hand, philosophy seems like exactly the human pursuit that digs deep, 'uselessly' or for 'existential reasons' or out of curiosity. It does question 'educated common sense,' or is all such questioning ridiculous? Philosophy makes the sensible, worldly people giggle. Is philosophy essentially worldly and respectable? Or is it a little foolish, like a child? Or maybe it is especially serious. Or both.
I am really only opposing a philosophy that adds to this modelling without perhaps confessing that it is wrapping a metaphysics around it --and 'my' critique is far from new. I'm just exploring this critique, bringing old thinkers to life in my own mind.
Who said that philosophy should not investigate supposed "subjective meaning"? It's trivially obvious that science cannot investigate that! But what do you think phenomenology consists in?
Is 'subjective meaning' really real, in your view? And if it is trivially obvious that science exists as 'subjective meaning' (at least part of it) and trivially obvious that science cannot investigate 'subjective meaning,' then science cannot reveal its own actuality? Or not in its fullness? Does science even exist (in its living essence as meaningful discourse) for itself?
Do we really disagree? Or what?
Not publicly, as I've already said. I can't see anything puzzling about the distinction between private and public actuality.
You may be missing something then. How does meaning exist? How can science be shared if meaning is not somehow public? How is the spider egg interpreted as a spider egg? How is the number of spider eggs written down in a book for others to read?
It's been awhile, but I remember the Vienna Circle struggling with questions like this. What is an observation? Is it really so trivial? Or are we employing a know-how that we take utterly for granted and don't even think to investigate because it is too close? And you mention phenomenology, so I am surprised you have no idea where I am coming from.
What motivated my initial interest in philosophy was the possibility of spiritual illumination or enlightenment. Actually when I first went to Uni it was by way of a quaint custom called ‘the mature-age entry exam’ which it took at the not-very-mature age of about 25. But the main part of the exam was a written comprehension text on Bertrand Russell’s splendid essay Mysticism and Logic. And that more or less set the tone for the subjects I then went on to study. Goes without saying that nobody had much of a clue about what I was really interested in, but I found plenty of clues, hints, and fragments, so to speak. But that has culminated in a somewhat religious kind of philosophy, although possibly ‘religious’ is not actually the correct word, in that it’s not oriented around mainstream religion. Anyway, I have never wavered in my pursuit of that understanding. There’s bits of it in Hegel, Plato, Aristotle, and the pre-moderns, but not much since!
Hi, Janus. I was responding to your 'really' above. This is the metaphysics. I get it. I trust science so that this 'really' is natural and defensible in many ways. But it implies that non-scientific experience is unreal. Since I think science depends on 'ordinary consciousness,' the world of tables and chairs, I can't embrace the notion that the chairs and tables are not real while electrons, etc., are.
Mach resisted the atomic theory as being descriptive of what was 'truly' there. They were handy virtual entities (fictions) for getting good predictions. Evidence became stronger so that he looked silly, but I always liked his skepticism. I'm not adopting his philosophy as my own, but I think I saw where he was coming from. He thought of science (if memory serves) as the economic description of patterns in sensation. But there are problems with this. We don't work with 'sensation.' We already see the tables and the chairs. We understand measuring instruments. This basic intelligibility of the world deserves contemplation, I think. The meaningless world is an abstraction useful for certain purposes within the meaningful world. In some very important sense this meaningful world is also in the meaningless world.) Aporia. But this doesn't mean the meaningful, ordinary world in which ideas are somehow shared is an illusion.
A second theory might understand science as the modelling of relationships between measurements. Where does the 'hidden but truly real' have a place in this perspective? Is the ordinary world real or an illusion? Or is all of this a function of the language game we are playing in a particular context while engaged in a particular purpose? Is meaning 'fixed' enough to begin with so that metaphysics is possible is a certain 'perfect' way? I am primarily trying to light up the question, not answer it.
I suppose for me philosophy is just one of the deeper aspects of being human. IMV, it (among other things) dissolves or problematizes the everyday understanding of terms (which is why you put 'religious' in quotes.) In some ways it is precisely this thrust against educated common sense (or all that a community takes for granted) --ideally because it has a larger view on existence that no longer fits in that everyday taken-for-granted obviousness.
Right now you have loaded the question. This is a fallacy according to any list of fallacies by any philosophy organization. A loaded question is a form of affirmation of the consequent or even shifting the burden.
:up:
I relate to this too. I didn't know what exactly I was looking for, but it was always a thrill to see the world from a wider perspective, having synthesized painful contradictions both in thought and action. Hegel speaks to me in this regard. Existence is describable as the process of its own self-clarification. Since language/meaning is so deeply a part of this (and so mysteriously public/social), it's hard to imagine stopping with prediction and control that cannot give an account of its own possibility.
And I think that most would agree that the point of prediction and control is to create the leisure, abundance, and safety to pursue the heights of feeling and thought that are possible in such conditions. Philosophy in that sense is the blossom, while natural science is the leaves and stem --mentioning here only the conceptual heights which are by no means all that we care for. Then of course philosophy is a passionate, potentially ecstatic 'how' of being human. For me it opens more doors than it closes.
I think it is acknowledged by science that any entity that cannot be directly observed is a mathematical model. Of course it is assumed that there is something energetically real there which is being modeled, but that we cannot visualize it adequately (and thus must rely on our mathematical models for understanding) simply because our abilities to visualize have been conditioned and limited by the perception of observable entities.
By meaning I presume you are referring to indemnification and reference. If we can identify and agree about the features of public entities (which we certainly seem able to do), what more is required for shared meaning?
And of course all of this is fine, but (from a philosophical angle) how does this unseen something exist? What is the gap between our models and what they model? Do scientists even need to take a position on whether electrons or quarks are anything more than useful fictions? Perhaps you see where I am coming from. We have prediction, control, and a certain language game. The details of the language game are mostly unimportant to most, who mostly want tangible, intelligible results in the 'lifeworld.'
What I think is questionable is adopting virtual entities as the 'real' world simply because these virtual entities are part of the creation of technology. I do see a certain aporia, but I would leave it undecided and just endure it. The lifeworld is 'in' the deadworld is 'in' the lifeworld is 'in' the 'deadworld' is....
I think you are ignoring the complexity involved. And really identification-in-common is already mysterious, already a form of shared meaning. We don't see different patches of sensation. We see the same chair and know that we see the same chair. And this is the small stuff.
Science itself is an intelligible discourse. Did Einstein's consciousness exist? How could his ideas be shared? I'd say something like 'brains are networked,' and the individual human brain is to some degree an abstraction, at least if we are concerned with the brain in its 'natural' (social) condition. But this is to speak a lingo or organs, when I am really pointing at something that we are doing right now --imposing on some imperfectly public meaning-space.
Since this is a fundamental part of being human, it's hard to imagine not addressing this space (from within this same space.) And discourse about experience as a whole must take it into account since such a discourse lives in this space. We can ignore this space and look outside at more reliably shared public objects, but we still move in this space even as we reason about these objects and illuminate their nature. It's mysterious and yet utterly familiar.
What point exactly are you wanting to make when you say "of course all of this is fine'? Given that the question cannot by definition be answered the way you are wanting to ask it; is the question really of any use?
That itself is a good question. And it brings me back to the ultimate authority of science being grounded in utility, public utility, the things that everyone wants, including me. An earlier issue I brought up was the tension between the pragmatic/instrumentalist monkeys-using-tools vision supported in some sense by science with a more passionate concern with what is 'really' there that is almost always at work in philosophy. Does utility = truth? I have defended such a position before, but I no longer think it makes sense. Truth cannot be pinned down like that. Our sense of 'true-for-us' eludes exact conceptualization, it seems. Meaning is not atomic or explicit. Proof? No proof, if meaning as it exists for us is not recognized as 'real' in the first place. Otherwise I'd say just examine your consciousness as you read.
I have been trying to light up the mysterious in what is easily taken for granted. It is 'obvious' that meaning isn't public, such is one of many public meanings. It is 'obvious' that science doesn't address meaning, and yet it is obvious that science exists as meaning. If all the scientistic philospher is saying is that science reveals some part of public existence extremely well, then who could disagree with that, except maybe to obsess over the words and miss the spirit of the remark?
Not only do I not deny the elusiveness of the word 'meaning,' I suggest that this elusiveness is there for the taking generally in language --which only exists distributed across a time that seems different than physics time (which itself exists within this kind of meaning-time.)
It's been fun talking tonight. I finally have to go to bed. Hope there are no hard feelings despite our slightly combative discussion.
Goodnight. And FWIW I think the depth of your posts has improved considerably over the years. ;-)
Yes. It couldn't be more clear in my view.
Quoting macrosoft
Mental phenomena are such as thoughts, ideas, concepts, etc. They're only first-person observable. They're what it's like to be a brain in particular states. Non-mental is all phenomena outside of that, phenomena that are outside of brains, outside of persons' bodies, etc.
Quoting macrosoft
Re "sensation" you'd have to be more specific. What sort of sensation, or a sensation of what?
Re dreams/other stuff, for one, for me at least, dreams have a very different phenomenal quality compared to anything else.
Why don't we just start with that, since that's already potentially at least four different topics.
Some info/resources that might be helpful:
http://healthland.time.com/2011/10/05/reality-check-why-some-brains-cant-tell-real-from-imagined/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01393/full
https://www.sharecare.com/health/schizophrenia/what-is-schizophrenia
Of course I know what you mean in the everyday sense. Who doesn't? We start from this what-everybody-already-knows. IMV, you are repeating this as if it's an insight or a kind of progress in the discussion. I, on the other hand, am problematizing a distinction. If you uncharitably read philosophy as insanity, this would only support my point (not really mine) that paradigm-shifts are unintelligible nonsense at first. In this case, the paradigm-shift is mostly old news, since I am really just working through insights that are more than 100 years old.
So I'm crazy, Hegel is crazy, Heidegger is crazy. Everyone not immediately intelligible is crazy, because they try to extend and enrich 'common sense' by rooting out its blinding presuppositions. As we see the limitations of our current way of talking, we can only express these limitations to others in this same limited language. Argument is secondary to the disclosure of new concepts/entities that can only be argued about once they are grasped (become sufficiently public.) The space of shared meaning (which you haven't really accounted for as far as I can tell) is enlarged by metaphors and distinctions. We do not compute on some fixed, finite set of atomic meanings. Such a grasp of the object assumes that philosophy can work like that most normalized of discourses, mathematics. What is ignored in this pursuit of an ideal epistemology (math's) is that it comes at the cost of completely ignoring what is being talked about. A theorem is certainly true, but what it means 'floats free.' The epistemology is perfect at the cost of ignoring meaning altogether. The object is fit to the criterion, which 'truncates' what is living in it.
If we really take our own difficultly to grasp new ways of thinking and talking as the insanity of that new way of thinking, then our poor quantum physicists are crazy (or were crazy.). And every schoolchild's calculus teacher is a lunatic. Surely most would be ashamed to call these disciplines crazy. Why? Primarily because science and math are directly associated with worldly power. Even if no one 'really' understands QM (per Feynman), it gives us the internet. The complacency of well-fed common sense may well scoff at the funny way their apparently useless philosophers talk about talking. And, indeed, there are crazies enough out there. And one is free to sleep through what is awkwardly mysterious or problematic in one's default method. This is even the rule. We might even say that philosophy is the ecstatic self-mutilation of encrusted common sense. It hurts to think in new ways and yet it brings joy.
Quoting macrosoft
Personally I'm not comfortable speaking for what everyone knows.
Quoting macrosoft
I was answering a question you asked. You asked "How does one distinguish between mental and non-mental in the first place?" If that question isn't what it appears to me to be, how am I supposed to know that? You seem to be literally asking how one distinguishes between mental and nonmental, as if you might not know. What am I supposed to be answering instead of what it seems like you asked?
Quoting macrosoft
"Problematizing"? I would guess that means "trying to make a problem out of"? Why would you be doing that? Boredom?
Quoting macrosoft
You're referring to my comments later in the post I take it.
I sincerely believe that some people have problems delineating mental from nonmental, dreams from reality, etc. That's a medical issue, often a mental illness issue. You're not arguing that some people don't have those problems or that it's not a medical issue, are you?
Quoting macrosoft
What paradigm shift, what insight, exactly are we talking about?
Quoting macrosoft
"Enrich common sense"? I hope they're not endorsing some vague notion of "common sense." I'm certainly not.
What "blinding presuppositions" are we talking about? Why don't we get specific?
Quoting macrosoftYeah, I don't believe there is any such thing per se.
Anyway, we're again doing like a laundry list of different topics, and what exactly does any of this have to do with what we were just talking about? Why can't we focus on one thing at a time instead of flitting about from topic to topic like a squirrel with ADD? (And where the different topics are like nuts that we're desperately trying to build a huge store of prior to winter.)
It has been fun! These kinds of subjects always offer a good bit of a mind workout. They can be somewhat frustrating though, due to the "ordinary language on holiday" syndrome they often embody! Certainly no hard feelings on my part, despite the fact that my tone can seem strident at times.
Quoting macrosoft
I think Aristotle's answer suffices: "To say that that which is, is not, and that which is not, is, is a falsehood; therefore, to say that which is, is, and that which is not, is not, is true." This can be taken in a deflationary sense as equivalent to Tarski's formula; not much progress over 2000 years!
The word 'truth' is itself polysemous, so none of this is exactly apt when it comes to thinking about so-called poetic or religious truths.
But to return to the OP; when a question like "Is idealism irrefutable" is asked, then we are dealing with the kind of logic that strictly propositional notions of truth operate within, because there is really no sensible question at all of "refuting" poetic or religious truths. I believe this is a source of great confusion in philosophy; which is amply demonstrated on these forums by the proliferation of superficial religious topics and posts.
Well said, and I feel the same. I try to be forceful in pursuit of clarity, but sometimes in retrospect I'm afraid I verged on rudeness or being too strident. Frankly philosophy excites me so much at times that I can't stop thinking about it. And I only 'want' to stop because the real world demands other things from me --intellectual things, fortunately, but not as wild and free as philosophy.
Quoting Janus
I think we agree quite a bit here. Part of me even wants to radicalize this. Even thinking of a finite set of meanings seems to betray the phenomenon of meaning to some degree. I am tempted to say that meaning is better modeled by R than N, and that individual word meanings or sets of meanings are still just useful abstractions, potentially misleading us in other contexts. Wittgenstein's 'language on holiday' is a great insight, but perhaps one retort would be that it sometimes accomplishes something to experience a word present-to-hand.
Quoting Janus
I agree that that is what the OP presupposes, that questions about idealism are sufficiently sharp for an equally sharp notion of truth to be applied. But in my view we can only get this in mathematics. Even in mathematics we get this by ignoring meaning altogether epistemologically. Perhaps my fundamental point is that a typical ambition to do math with words ignores in its lust for certainty that language is far too slippery and flexible for that. I advocate a holism that I see as our usual mode of understanding/using language, which lies inconspicuous in its closeness to us.
Since the central theme is language/meaning in which all of these topics appear, we have really been talking about one thing, something like the being of meaning. If certain common-sense assumptions about the way that language/meaning is 'supposed' to work are 'seen around' by returning to the phenomenon itself (just look at the living process in your own mind), then a kind of background know-how is foregrounded along with an essentially historical 'connectedness of mental life.' I can say this with confidence if not with proof because the shared meaning space includes this sense of shared-ness.
I think you misunderstand me because you are trying to fit the terms I use into your fixed metaphysical meat-grinder. You want them to have sharp atomic meanings to correspond to the very fantasy that they deny, which is that words have ever had sharp atomic meanings independent of context. Context sharpens meaning (but never to perfect resolution) and such context is necessarily historical, caught up in a time that is not the simple time of the clock. This is made clear not only by phenomenological investigation ('first-person' is an imperfect pointer here) aided by 'formal indications' (the pointers to these inconspicuous or 'covered-over' phenomena contributed by others) but also by a sincere wrestling with the problem of interpretation. One has to care about understanding the other (grasping new ideas that don't coddle your lingo) more than one cares about playing a kind of argumentative sport. I am quite capable of playing that sport, but it's an inferior way to spend time IMO. Let's leave uncharitable misreading (misreading itself may be the only kind in absolute terms) to the politicians.
Hmm, I sure haven't been talking about language and meaning, aside from my comment about "shared meaning." So this is a good example of why your approach may not be as fruitful as you might want it to be. If you want me to talk about language and meaning, just say, "Hey, so what do you think about language and specifically meaning?"
Re meaning, my view of what it is/how it works is this:
Meaning is the mental phenomenon of making what are basically conditional, implicational associations--in other words, both connotational and denotational assocations that mentally function in the manner of "if this , then that
Meanings, as something inherently mental, the inherently mental act of associating, can't literally be made public. They're not identical to sounds we make, gestures we make, strings of letters or symbols, etc. And they can not literally be shared, either in the sense of display, or in the sense of two or more people possessing the same one.
Disclaimer: revisiting After Finitude makes me suspect that the following is a very poor exegesis of the argument, and probably should instead be taken as a bodge inspired by the argument towards the broader theme of speculative materialism in ontology, at least insofar as I understand it. Ho hum, I'm glad this isn't peer reviewed.
Broadly speaking, since your position largely follows correlationist tropes Meillassoux deals with in After Finitude, I'll continue my exegesis of his critique rather than writing my own with my own idiosyncratic concepts.
I would not be so sure that the thought I quoted is consistent with Meillassoux's project; rather, he seeks precisely to demolish the idea of the conditioning subject within it that appears as given within every apprehension. While you have positioned your idea as essentially Kantian in nature, it is only Kantian in heritage. Thought of the regularity in nature has obviously changed through the history of philosophy; from the atomists who dared to think the being of nature and its regularity speculatively - as attempts at conceptualising the real, to the 'Copernican turn' from Kant onwards which grounds the possibility of empirical science through the (transcendental) regularity of our perceptions. Though the post Kantians expanded the emphasis on finitude (a lot), the critical correlationist argument is codified in Kant (but best exemplified in early Wittgenstein and Heidegger). So, for Meillassoux, there is a transformation which occurs to thought of the real in the change from speculative metaphysics to the critique of reason which has a dual character.
(1) The annihilation of the ability to conceive of absolutes; laws, regularities; in the real (even the real of ideas) except through the indexing of their conception to the reciprocal relation of the subject and being/world. This position encourages thinking the existence and behaviour of entities as extrinsic to all conception, but their being remains given within apprehension. This has an effect of denying the autonomy of the real.
So, dually:
(2) Meillassoux would rather reinvigorate conceptualisation of the real by insisting upon our capacity for reasoned engagement with it. This space of questions requires a metaphysics under which the real is treated with autonomy from humans; which is to joyfully affirm that our metaphysical conceptions are motivated by the real precisely to the extent our concepts are sensitive to its dynamics.
The elevation of finitude by introducing the exterior of thought - its topics and targets - to the interior of the human apparatus of conception denies the autonomy of the real which thought tracks in the same breath it reduces such thought to the category of intuition beyond critique; since all thought now suffers from its finitude rather than simply having its relation to being constrained by it. We can see these dualities as associated with poles of skepticism (1) and dogmatism (2), in which the annihilation of the absolute produces dogmatic intuition as much as it produces an excess of skepticism about our ability to think the real.
As he puts it:
So, philosophy can and should concern itself with a real indifferent to its conception, and perhaps raise that indifference to a methodological principle for a speculative metaphysics about it. ;) Against dogmatism emphasise contingency, against skepticism emphasise that contingency's necessity.
@macrosoft this is part of the response I'd give to you on the 'thread' you suggested, but tracing the reinvigoration of metaphysics by emphasising the autonomy of the real (viz; becoming) and our ability to track it with good concepts takes a lot more effort than this exegesis.
OK, we are back on track and really talking again.
I largely agree with what you say above, though maybe it doesn't exhaust 'meaning' for me. I don't think we really can 'exhaust' a word. Btw, how do you categorize the associations themselves? I like meaning-as-dynamic. I see the value of meaning-as-act. But wouldn't most of us (and maybe) you want to point at something 'immaterial' associated with your definition above? Is what you are communicating pure act? Or various associations?
I agree that meaning is not 'in' the marks or the noises in some simple way. Nor is meaning 'literally' shared from an important perspective. But my sense of the inexactness of meaning inspires me to question the very way we talk about meaning. Maybe you think I am trying to say something 'supernatural' about shared meaning. No. I am trying to say something about the phenomenon of meaning, the way it exists for us in a kind of public way.
To exist in meaning is to exist in a language that is not completely or even mostly private. In some sense the 'subject' that thinks is not simply an isolated subject. IMV, the fact that we can look at brains separated in space (air-gapped brains) inspires us to neglect the living sense of connectedness we have as language users. We have a 'wireless' connection to an elusive meaning space. If we insist on interpreting this from an atoms-and-void perspective, the meaning is trapped 'in' a subject. I make a mark or a noise and then someone else can bring this mark or noise alive 'in' their own consciousness. This is a reasonable and even natural approach, but I think it's limited to work only from within this perspective. Why? Because it begins with a notion of the objectively real that doesn't consider how the phenomenon of meaning complicates this notion. I'd say that any explicit theory of the objectively real depends on a softer, out-of-focus notion of 'true-for-us.' Explicit theories of the objectively real seem, in my view, parasitic upon the shared meaning space that they tend to interpret in a way that makes this less visible. My theory is not an explicit theory of the real but rather a pointing at a fundamentally in-explicit ground of all such theories. This sense of language and meaning also questions basic notions of the subject and the object as useful for one purpose but perhaps inappropriate as a description of our ordinary, pre-theoretical mode of existing in the world.
Hey, just to get a sense of where you are coming from more generally, have you read Groundless Grounds? Do you find that kind of grasp of our situation correlationalist? At the moment that book presents roughly my own perspective and focus, which I mention to contextualize some of the themes I'm exploring.
A hint at what I'm trying to say: I think we listen from and speak from a background that philosophy tries to grasp or compress into a foreground. This background is too rich ( a set of positive measure) for this to be accomplished. Attempts to make the 'dark place' from which we listen and speak explicit interfere with other such attempts. It's as if a set of positive measure is trying to fit itself into a set of zero measure --the attempt to capture R with Q and somehow say finally what it means to mean.
Not read it, it's been on the pile for a while. Though so have most books I've heard of. I summarised my perspective recently in a PM to @StreetlightX, I would be surprised if Street couldn't give you some nice input on the book!
I'm not clear what you are suggesting here. could you elaborate?
Quoting macrosoft
I think the notion of 'absolute' meaning is incoherent; but I also think that meanings in everyday discourse including the empirical sciences are sharp enough that we get what is going on. Even when it comes to, for example, Freudian psychology, we can get the meaning of 'ego', 'superego' and 'id'. The problems only arise when we ask silly, inappropriate questions like 'are ego, superego' and 'id' real, substantive entities, though?'.
I'm not sure there is any meaning at all in mathematics, beyond our ordinary, empircally derived notions of number and the ways in which we can elaborate those. The rest would seem to consist in conventionally established formulaic operations, and the discovery of new formulaic operations that are implicit in the ones we are already familiar with.
Why would you believe that it exists in some public, not private way?
I'd say consider our experience right now. Are we not in some sense sharing a meaning space accessible in some sense also to everyone following our conversation right now? I am trying to do justice to that in-some-sense that doesn't impose a visually-inspired 'air-gapped' metaphysics on it -- a metaphysics that ignores the very thing that makes it possible, the in-some-sense-public-ness of meaning.
I think it might be more accurate to think of public and private in terms of a continuum. Some language is more or less universally intelligible to speakers of that language. Other language is trickier. And sometimes a 'global' sense is public while individual terms are understood differently. For instance, a neural network on the same hardware (fixed set of neurons) can learn approximately the same model with wildly differing 'weights' from neuron to neuron -- as function of its initial random state. The 'model' (meaning) doesn't live in the individual neurons or any particular connection between the neurons but is distributed across them all. The model is emergent and cannot be atomized.
The discourse of public/private is caught up in this same indeterminacy of any particular atom considered in isolation.
I agree, but I think the fantasy of that kind of meaning is at heart of some approaches to metaphysics.
Quoting Janus
I agree here, too. We get what is going on well enough indeed. This well-enough is the 'field' of meaning. We can roughly atomized a word, but we do this of course by linking it to other words. This spiderweb is a very rough approximation, IMV, of the fluidity and mastery we have in our a-theoretical use of language. We have more mastery than we can justify or make explicit with this same mastery.
Quoting Janus
I'd say that when we do mathematics that we indeed employ some kind of intuition that is hard if not impossible to make explicit in a non-controversial way. Indeed, much of this is connected to its empirical application, but there is IMV some genuine intuitive meaning in some of the more outlandish mathematics --an infinite tower of infinities each more infinite than those lower on the stack. Or infinite dimensional vector spaces. Seems to me that metaphor/analogy is central to mathematics along with quasi-Kantian 'intuitive' space and the grasp of 'pure unity.'
Maybe one of my themes here is that we tend to deny or avoid issues of meaning where that meaning cannot be made sufficiently explicit. But at the same time our basic existence in meaning is an existence in something that is more fluid than crystalline. If we insist that only the crystalline is 'real,' then we do so within the same 'fluid' that is therefore unaddressed or even unreal. And I also cannot make this point in a crystalline way, since I am ultimately pointing phenomenologically toward a blurry truth derived from introspection.
Excellent sketch of your general position (which I happen to find congenial). Thanks.
Hah, I actually never got round to reading GG, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Braver's A Thing of This World. Heard plenty of good things about it though.
It's pretty great. In some ways I don't get the full value, because I sought out the book already convinced of some version of what Braver calls 'original finitude.' I will be looking into some of Braver's other stuff when I get the chance. He's got me wanting to read On Certainty in a new light, which he ranks as equal to PI.
I don't believe so, no. And I think that folks believing that that's the case wind up saying a lot of things that are (rather obviously) incorrect, sometimes where there are things of a lot of practical importance at stake.
Here's an example: having a problem with someone suggesting that blackface Halloween costumes are acceptable, especially to an extent where you believe that this indicates that the person is racist, and where you believe that it justifies that person losing a job.
The beliefs that something like that are racist are rooted in beliefs that meaning is not personal and subjective, but in some way communal and objective (or even more absurd, somehow "systematic" and abstract yet real (in the sense of being an objective fact)).
But that's not correct. Meaning is only personal and subjective, and no one is racist unless they explicitly have racist thoughts in mind.
So that's an example of why beliefs about this stuff matter, why it matters if we believe something that's not actually correct ontologically.
I am all for "meaning(s) which cannot be made sufficiently explicit"; poetry, music, visual arts, the arts generally. I'm not sure there are such meanings in mathematics though; maybe in intuitive feelings some may entertain about mathematics and its relation to reality, I guess.
For me those kinds of 'meanings" are purely affective and any attempt to derive something propositional from them is doomed to incoherence. So, I don't see it as a matter of avoidance but of "leaving well enough alone". But there will always be those who believe in a pure intellectual enlightenment in some such manner as Plato is usually interpreted to hold, and mathematics often seems to be held as the exemplar of that.
I'm surprised to hear you say this. Is it meaningless to you that a set of n elements has 2^n subsets? Would a proof of this just be a string of dead symbols for you? Or would something like 'getting it' occur? I am assuming that a set of n elements and its powerset also had some kind of intelligibility for you just then.
Quoting Janus
If you are saying that we can't get away with an undisciplined appeal to intuition in mathematics, then I agree. The formalist epistemology is a kind of hygiene. In math we really can build concepts that only expand and never shift at their foundations. What the calculus student learns about continuous function remains true for the student of topology.
Quoting Janus
I'd say that mathematics has two faces which are often seen from a distance as one. Its epistemology is (ideally if not practically) computable. In theory a proof can be converted to machine code and checked for correctness. But the whole enterprise is pursued sometimes without obvious worldly applications because there is some internal meaning beyond that. Such internal meanings are much like the meaning of everyday activities shorn of their concrete details so that only structure remains. For instance, our notion of a set functions informally in everyday life. I think both the epistemology and the intuitive content speak to a desire for something timeless. Really they need one another, because no one cares about an eternity of finite strings of ones and zeros that a meaningless program happened to accept. And intuition is kept social by being channeled through certain publicly embraced rules. In math we really can control the language, though we mostly do so where something is actually being said.
Actually I have no ide3a what it means beyond the mere assertion that it is so. If I did get it it would be a logical intuition, not a mathematical one, since I am poorly trained in math.
Quoting macrosoft
es, i imagine mathematics is an abolsutly rigid, crystalline formal structure, and so it would seem to be a very poor tool for capturing the dynamism of reality. It seems to me that in its applied dimension it renders the dynamic organic as static, mechanical for the purposes of measuring, calculation and prediction. Not denying that it might have a kind of fascinating, crystalline beauty for its disciples, though.
Quoting macrosoft
Sure, like any human generality it must have its affective dimension. It seems humans are often affected by particulars only insofar as they are generalized; 'it is normal to love one's parents' and so on, as we are conditioned; but I would say that the more potent affection is for the singularities of our experience; which cannot be generalized and may only be evoked by poetry and the arts.
You are right about that formal structure. What is fascinating is the attempt to capture flow in that formal structure. This attempt gave rise to a crisis in the foundations of math, a real schism. Related to the capture of flow was the creation or discovery of a 'new' infinity, that of the continuum. The same types of proof (diagonal proofs) were also used to show the theoretical limits of computation. This stuff is only meaningful or informative to the degree that it's not just symbols being moved around like chess pieces. Understanding them changes what one would bother try to do or would expect from a computer.
Quoting Janus
I think you are missing my point. I'm not talking about feelings. I am talking about intuitions of 'pure form.' Or rather intuitions of almost pure form, since there is still some drag in material. We need the visual prop.
Yeah, it's interesting to think of the different ways in which painting, for example, can capture flow; life, movement, intensity; very different than mathematics!
Quoting macrosoft
OK, I'm not sure what you are going for then. You mean generalized forms likes cones, cubes, spheres and so on; or something else?
Indeed. We have this theme of becoming in philosophy, mathematics, painting, music. Music is maybe supreme at this.
Quoting Janus
Sure, those are good geometric examples. We grasp what a perfect circle is, never having seen one. And there are also the intuitions that ground arithmetic. Let's get primitive (Hilbert and others did) and think of tally marks. I, II, III, IIII, IIIII, .... We happen to use a verticle line there, but we know that more than that is intended. We could also use o , oo, ooo, oooo, ... We have a basic grasp of 'pure unity,' of a kind of pure object that is nothing but this unity. Some mathematicians start from these tallies and try to catch the continuum by building the rationals and then the real numbers, the 'continuous' numbers. Others do it with set theory, so that one builds at an even lower level using the idea that one thing is contained in another (the bubbleverse.)
Music (as performed) is an essentially dynamic form, whereas as painting, for example, is not. Having said that there is a dynamic performance in the reading of poetry (even silently to oneself) or the looking at painting, (and no doing in the doing of mathematics!).
Quoting macrosoft
Yes, though in way I think this notion of 'identity pure and simple' is the very exemplar of the reduction of dynamis to stasis. All very essential to intellectual grasping; something whole and complete to hold (yet it keeps slipping from the grasp, nonetheless!).
Indeed. That is part of what is so fascinating about pre-rigorous calculus. The 'infinitesimal' was a philosophically problematic grasp at pure becoming. And as you hint at, much of our discourse seems to be trying to grasp becoming in terms of being.
Quoting Janus
I agree that painting isn't dynamic in the same way. I suppose one could think of the eye scanning this and then that. But for me the strong analogy would be between music and the movement of concepts.
While I don't disagree with you that idealism constitutes a valid view of the world, it must also allow that within the world of ideas there is also the one that an external reality does exist.
No it's not. The idealist's claim is thought/belief based. Thought/belief requires an external world. The idealist employs a misconception of thought/belief by virtue if conflating rather complex thought/belief with one element therein...
Perception...
That notion(the idealist notion of "perception") is the only problem.
Agree. Define the mind as the conscious thread of activity plus memory only. Then when in a conversation with another, you can extend "I think therefore I am' to 'You think therefore you are'. That proves the existence of separate consciousnesses; IE separate minds as I defined them.
I suppose you could counter argue that all the minds are physically colocated.
Even if we took this for granted, it does not mean that idealism must be true- perhaps some form of dualism is true.
Quoting philosophy
Even we took this for granted, it only reveals an epistemic limitation of what we know.
Quoting philosophy
I am certain that some philosopher might agree with you, but not from the two points you made. Quoting philosophy
The better question is what good reason is there to believe in X?
Think about the claims made by people who say they were abducted by aliens; they are typically unfalsifiable, but there is no good reason to believe them.
The problem that underscores is not a problem with the notion of realism per se but the wonky, completely unsupported and kinda dumb notion of the world "being just one way," or there being some preferred perspective/reference point. The world is reference-point relative, perspectival (in a figurative as well as literal sense). The differences are real. The world is not identical from any two different reference points.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I mean this is a forum about idealism.
But there is a practical point in putting forward these kinds of views. For example, I might think that creating art is the supreme purpose of life and is more important than, say, science. Or I might think that there is a God. There's only a point in pointing out that all of these things; logic, mathematics, ethics are reducible to a subjective viewpoint if someone is trying to tell me that I'm objectively wrong.
And I think the prevalent, accepted view of our times is that science is the supreme authority on everything. We have a kind of reverence for the scientific method. We believe in pursuing a constant search for scientific 'truth' regardless of whether it has any agreed-upon usefulness.
Insofar as we can all agree that it's on our side there's no reason to question it: we're all agreeing to take the same leap of faith. But, in cases where it isn't, it's necessary to take it down a peg or two by reminding everyone that it has no more objective truth to it than any other ridiculous worldview.
I particularly think this when I see scientists scoffing at religion. (I'm not religious, by the way, I don't have a horse in this race.)