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That does seem to be the case. We can often articulate an enacted 'belief,' and it's tempting to think of the enacted belief as made of something like...

Or perhaps we could think in terms of a continuum. If I say 'hello' to an answering machine (if anyone remembers those), I'm making a noise. It's not ...

I think I understand your concern and agree. We do not 'construct reality' as a painter works with a blank canvas. We work within constraints, and 'th...

Right. It's fascinating how something inherited like this old bad idea can become the 'ground zero' of a game of doubt. I remember being stuck in this...

I don't think you grasp what I'm gesturing at, which is admittedly a strange thing. What is thinking? Does this involve 'mental' stuff? Why believe in...

Well said !

I agree, with the exception of the solipsism --if we even want to count that as skepticism. And even solipsism was/is a great goad for thinking about ...

By the way, I like the spirit of skepticism. I like instrumentalism as a philosophy of science. I somewhat object to saying that a table, for instance...

That kind makes sense. I think much of it boils down to how we use the word 'real' in various ways. I doubt that our skill at using this word can be c...

But if there are no others, what does convincing oneself mean? If I'm alone and there is no world outside me, it doesn't matter what I believe. It's a...

If proof means something like 'argument or sufficient evidence for the truth of a proposition,' then it seems to me that the very concept of proof is ...

I recently read The Social Construction of Reality, which is summarized: It doesn't matter if we call it 'culture' or 'spirit' or 'form of life' or an...

Right. I like what Dreyfus does with Heidegger. Of course I want to avoid getting swallowed by the jargon of any particular thinker, especially becaus...

I like the connection of philosophy to politics, but I think you are leaving out a big chunk of relevance. In the quote above you are using philosophy...

This quote seems relevant: This is why I think we can't have some perfect timeless rationality that can lift itself up by its own bootstraps. We are b...

I agree with what I think is meant by 'language is an external, public thing.' But it also makes sense that the social sphere leaves its mark on the i...

Nice. I'm not attached to 'presupposition.' We can say that language is existentially dependent upon the world, but the world-for-humans is existentia...

Maybe I first saw it in Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Or maybe in a Krishnamurti interview. But I don't know the original source...

I've always like that quote, but note that it also deflates enlightenment. Illusions are our special friends. The place where we meet is the stuff I'v...

I'm as full of shit as the next person, but I still think you are misreading me. Of course everything hasn't been great. This is the world we are talk...

Like I said, maybe I'm crazy, but I really do think that we are profoundly mythological animals and that our interactions occur within a shared galler...

One of the things I like to think I've learned from philosophy is a suspicion of definitions. The word 'philosophy' is alive and well as a token in ou...

Maybe I'm just crazy, but I think myth haunts everything. I was usually in bands with male friends, and we were all lit up by a fantasy of what the ba...

I'm not exactly clear on what you mean. I do see that anti-totalizers like myself are mostly ringing variations on Nietzsche. I haven't had the sense ...

I was hoping to squeeze more out of you on the totalizer versus the alternative. As I read him, the non-totalizer or aphorist is just as in love with ...

Yup, and so much of life depends on the skilled handling of the nitty-gritty. Skill is not a set of handy general propositions, though handling such g...

I like that. For me the traps might be personalities, where the danger is becoming fixed and predictable and essentially (?) a bad poet. Philosophy is...

In this context the issue is maybe a totalizing personal type, with which I associate an earnestness and a love of careful classification. The anti-ty...

I like that you are stressing the biological continuum. Yes, to me it makes sense that certain animals have something like concepts. As others have me...

Right. That makes sense to me. We could use the word skill for this knowledge-how. Skill is primary. We develop the skill of co-hosting a form of life...

I like this. I think we 'believe' in language this way, trust in it radically, as we trust ourselves to step around furniture. To question its reliabi...

Thanks!

I think 'belief' is OK as a metaphor, but I do see how it can work against expressing the stuff we may agree on. (I like what you have posted on this ...

Hello, everyone. Great theme. I checked out an excellent source mentioned earlier. To me it makes sense to stress social know-how as our immersion in ...