Heidegger

me: "To say that history has meaning thru our interpretation is fairly unproblematic since humans give meaning to our world; meaning isn't a non-human thing."

lem: "You seem to be reducing something meaningful to an objectivist world view."

I'm not a subjectivist. If we have a theory about what meaning is, the justification for that will be "objective" in the sense that others can evaluate the reasons. But what I was saying is that humans create meaning, there is no meaning in non-human reality. On the other hand, that doesn't make it "purely subjective" either, not on the theory of meaning I advocate, since I see meaning as having a social dimension. The reference of language, its ability to stand for or describe situations in the world, is created by us through a process of social negotiation or coordination, using inherent capacities that we have such as our inherent logical frameworks built into the underlying grammar of all languages ("deep structure"), and our sentence-producing ability.

lem: "You are a moral realist?!"

Well, i'm an ethical naturalist, i think ethics is rooted in human nature.

lem: "You take the two things that make up causation and posit them as real, and this inefernce does does not have to be justified because realism is unproblematic?"

no, i'm not saying they don't have to be justified. As I said earlier on, I think the justification lies in an inference to the best explanation. We have various hypotheses about how things work, and we test these and if they survive test, they are considered confirmed unless we come across a better idea or contrary data that leads us to modify our original hypothesis. but in looking at how human explanation works, through explanatory hypotheses, these hypotheses often posit capacities, tendencies, abilities in things (and people and social structures), and we use these to explain why particular events happen. So looking at how explanation works, I say, based on the fact this way of looking at things works in the sense of being confirmed by experience, it gives us reason to accept this ontological distinction between capacities and events.

When I said these things were "unproblematic" for me, that just meant they weren't inconsistent with my own outlook.

t.

lem: "When I say objectivist I mean looking for a view of the phenomenon from nowhere or everywhere: which I see as a reduction."

That's a strawman. Nobody advocates that. Objectivity comes about as the result of a process of social interaction, in which people propose ideas or courses of action, and others evaluation them, give reasons pro and con, people have the opportunity to test the other's ideas, and so on. This is part of the whole idea of practical test of ideas. Those ideas that hold up against this sort of social process of practical test acquire a certain objective validity.

lem:
"Don't you think that our world of meanings is layered ontop of scientific explanation or at least entities? So to give anexplanation of "meaning" that chimes with scientific explantion, is to reduce the phenomenon."

I guess I don't understand you. It seems to me that if you think that meaning is entirely subjective, you're begging the question here. You need to provide a reason for that view, not assert it as if it were uncontroversial. I think that view is inconsistent with the existence of language. Each person doesn't run their own language. This means there must be a realm of meaning, the core semantic content, that has a social determination. It's also true of course that words may have different connotations or associations for one individual than another -- that is the subjective dimension of meaning, but that is accounted for by the differences in beliefs, experiences, etc. between individuals.

But, again, I recommend the Post book. He explains how pieces of language have social functions, and how it is possible to show that "intentionality" is explained in purely physical terms, in terms of behavior and social relations. By "intentionality" I don't mean the ordinary sense of "on purpose" but the technical philosophical sense of "being directed towards an object, which may or may not be there." This "ofness" was considered the distinctive mark of the mental by Brentano, and Husserl, who was a student of Brentano, holds this view. On the phenomenological view "intentionality" is irreducible. But Millikan's theory of intentionality shows that this isn't so, that it can be accounted for in terms derived from evolutionary biology.
But i'm not going to reproduce Post's book for you here. The debate is complicated, has been a major focus of philosophy for the past 40 years, and is explained very clearly by Post.

lem: "I meant not justfied further. simply to posit the reality of any entity science has as a tool would be foolish if e.g. science were contingent, which seems possibe."

I'm afraid I have no idea what you mean here.

lem: "My original with what seems to be similar to your view is that it can't explain the existence of entities that to me (and I assume most people?) look like they need explaining."

Again, I don't know what you mean by "explaining". And which entities? Events? Capacities? People constantly take these for granted. In fact our assumption of them is hard-wired. Children understand, for example, the difference between a manifested behavior or state of something (events, actions) and its underlying nature or capacities, which may be hidden and not manifested, by the age of four.

What is it that needs to be "explained"?

lem: "Eta: Abduction seems to be a very subjective sort of inference."

Why? There are criteria for its evaluation. Kathleen Moore's little workbook "Inductive Arguments" which I sometimes used as a text book when I taught logic classes, has a very clear discussion of the criteria used to evaluate competing hypotheses to explain things. I'll mention some of the criteria here:

1. You can test the hypothesis to confirm it. This means you figure out some proposition P that must be true if hypothesis H is true, given the other things we know about the world around us. You then test to see if in fact P is true. The strongest test is thru controlled experiements. But there are a variety of techniques that can be used.
If we find situations where H seems to presuppose or predict that P would be true and P is not true, that undermines the hypothesis.

2. The wider the variety of situations where the hypothesis has been tested and the more it holds up to these tests, the stronger is our rational confidence in the truth of that hypothesis. But it never reaches certainty.

3. There are a number of ways we can evaluate competing hypotheses. Suppose we have two competing hypotheses, H1 and H2, to explain the same experiences or events. If H1 is more complicated and requires making more complex assumptions, then H2 is a better hypothesis than H1, other things being equal, because the more things you must assume, the greater the risk of error. This is known as the Principle of Simplicity or Occam's Razor. To say that H1 is simpler than H2 implies that, if we don't have special reasons to favor the more complex hypothesis, it is less likely to be true.

4. Support or consistency with other things we know, such as other hypotheses that seem fairly confirmed as part of our network of beliefs about the world. The more out of whack a hypothesis is with the other things we know, this casts doubt on the probable truth of that hypothesis, unless we have some extra special reasons for it.

This method is not "subjective." That's because if you propose a hypothesis, others have to be able to put it to the test. This means you need to be able to explain it clearly and there needs to be some clear consequences of it so that we can test if those hold up. When a bunch of people have independently checked or tried unsuccessfully to refute your hyothesis, it begins to build up an objective status, as something that has been verified by others.

Let me begin with some advice in regard to your academic studies. What philosophers really love is reasoning -- arguments. You can advocate a view your teachers don't agree with, but what they will like is if you can argue really well and clearly for your viewpoint. Of course, if the class is an historical study of some dead guy, then you need to try to understand him.

lem: "I meant the inference that the primordial reality of capacities and events is the hypothesis most consistent with things we know. How could we test it?"

Good question. I think we can test ontological hypotheses indirectly. The distinction between events and capacities is a presupposition of all of our explanatory practice. It is therefore indirectly confirmed when causal hypotheses are.

There have been attempts to get rid of the positing of capacities -- Hume, Mach, and the logical empiricsts didn't like capacities, they preferred to replace them with "regularities of events." But all of these attempted reductions failed, they didn't work. That is a kind of test the alternative hypothesis failed.

lem: "Again, sorry I meant the development of science is contingent."

Well, of course. It's a human activity.

You ask for an explanation of "How events and capacities come about." Well, do you mean individual events? Individual events we explain by positing both a structural and occasioning cause. For example, the bridge collapsed. Upon inspection it was found that the bridge had shown signs of stress, as trucks have gotten larger it was causing stress on the steel and the joints. A big 18-wheeler loaded with bags of cement was the last straw, the passage of that truck was the occasioning cause. But the overloading of the bridge relative to its capacity was the structural cause.

But maybe that's not what you're asking. Are you asking how in general the world came to be divided into events and capacities? I'd say that is a necessary feature of a physical world, it couldn't have been otherwise. And things that are necessary don't usually require further explanation. We ask for explanations where something is contingent, because it could have failed to occur.

lem: "Your taking elements of human experience and trying to explan it in terms acceptable to science. Seeing as you think that scientific explanations are more basic than human experience, isn't this reductive?? "

You keep coming back to "science." If you pay attention to what I say, I don't keep appealing to "science." Why, then, do you always construe what i say in words other than what I use? The idea that only "science" has authentic knowledge of the world is a view called "scientism." I don't agree with scientism because I think it is elitist. This brings us back to the importance of class standpoint epistemology.

When I introduced the method of hypothesis and test, I made a point of noting that this is used constantly in everyday human life, that it is a basic human cognitive capacity that everyone has. This means that abductive inference is much broader than the practices of the communities called "sciences."

Moreover, the viewpoint about truth and intentionality i have referred to constantly is a philosophical theory, not a scientific theory. It is true that Millikan's theory is based on concepts derived from evolutionary biology. It is a materialist theory of human language and meaning and "intentionality."

You need to explain what you mean by "basic"? Are you assuming some foundationalist epistemology that views all knowledge as built up from immediate experience? I'd point out that this conception of human knowledge has been a failure. It can't account for what humans know. This is precisely why philosophy over the past 40 years or so has moved away from Descartes' problem. Foundationalism is now widely in retreat in philosophy.

Nonetheless, even Millikan's theory does have a role for grounding in our sensory interaction with the world. Hypotheses are judged by their ability to account for our experience. Thus if we have a set of physical hypotheses such as physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, a fundamental test is their consistency with what we observe in our experience. Experience is thus not rejected. It is still regarded as a basic test.

But introspection should not be taken as the final word, especially as introspection has proven to be an unreliable method. This is a problem for Husserl's method.
Experience is one thing, accounting for it is something else. All our experience is interpreted, and this involves hypotheses, even as unconscious assumptions.

Moreover, assuming that intentionality -- the "ofness" of the mental, the "meaning" of mental states -- is irreducible leads to an inconsistency with a materialist worldview. An advantage of Millikan's theory is she can show how "intentionality" -- what determines the object of a belief for example -- is socially determined in the context of our cognitive and linguistic equipment which is designed by nature via evolution. Thus there is nothing irreducibly mental on her theory. A belief ends up being a kind of mini-program in the brain which has a role that is determined by our evolution, a role in grounding action.

lem: "I'm just claiming that we do not expreience meaning in scientific terms: what would that be like? It seems wrong to try and explain it thus. Thats just not the meaning meaning has in our lives - we experience it as that thing whcich relates us to things and people. It seems reductive to explain it outside what is meaningul to our everydayness."

What having an object of meaning "feels like" from "inside" is one thing, but it doesn't follow that it tells us what it is or what links the mental state to its object -- it's "meaning." People can think they mean X when in fact they mean Y. This is what I said about the unrealiability of the introspective method.

On Millikan's theory of meaning, meaning is that which relates us to people and objects -- but she has a theory that makes this not a mystery, and a mystery is what you get on the irreducibly mental theory of Brentano and Husserl.

lem: "The standard phenomenological criticism of scientific explanation (both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger seems to use some variant of it) is that the meaing of, say, a hammer, is more than the sum of scientific facts about it, because meaningful experience is more basic than these scientific facts. So, to try and build up experience or the leftworld from scientifc facts is impossoible as it gets it the wrong way around."

Again, re-read what I say above about "science." The argument here is a strawman. The meaning of "hammer" in Millikan's theory isn't based on "scientific facts about hammers" but is based on looking at the social origin and nature of language, and how evolution has given us cognitive and linguistic capacities that make this social construction of meaning possible. Looking at meaning as wholly "internal" is too individualistic. Again, you do not run your own language. Since your language has meaning, it cannot be reduced to your internal mental states.

lem: "Could scientifc explanation account for something that is more basic than scientific explanation? I've yet to hear an argument against thsi tbh."

Again, what do you mean by "basic"? And what do you mean by "account for"?

t.

Well, reasoning is a practice. Like playing the piano, it can be improved through practicing it.

me: "I'd say that is a necessary feature of a physical world"

It's not the sort of thing that could be contingent. Things don't just *happen* to have capacities. Having causal powers is what it is to be a physical reality. Just as the basic laws are necessary so is the distinction between events and capacities, which those laws presuppose. What is contingent is what can change via the basic "laws of motion" of the world, that is, by way of the capacities that these laws posit. What it is to be contingent or possibly different is for there to be some path of possibility that goes there in terms of the ultimate capacities of things. I don't think there is any possibility other than physical possibility. To suppose there is, as philosophers have sometimes done, is not warranted. How could the prove there is some other form of possibility?

Again, what do you mean by "basic"? You've not explained this. You say you don't mean it in an epistemological sense as understood in a foundationalist epistemology, so i don't understand what you mean.

Millikan's theory of meaning is a theory of what it is, of how sentences acquire meaning, of how beliefs acquire "intentional objects", of what belief is. The laws
of physics do not imply meaning. There could in principle be a physical world without people. Evolution has very few "laws". It is about nature's engineering methods, so to speak.

But meaning, as a phenomeon, is accounted for in terms of physical forces. Maybe you mean "basic" in terms of causality or explanation. And, yes, the physical laws are more basic, in causality, than other capacities or laws. That's what it is to be a materialist.

t.

me: "Maybe you mean "basic" in terms of causality or explanation. And, yes, the physical laws are more basic, in causality, than other capacities or laws. That's what it is to be a materialist"

lem: "Yeah, the point I was making, and its not very important, is that this suggests to me that you are reducing meaning to something that fits with scientific explanation."

No. Physicalism does not have to be reductionist. Perhaps it is helpful to introduce the idea of properties that are *emergent*. At a certain level of physical complexity you get life, you can humans and thus language and social organization. Social and psychological properties are new properties. They can't be defined in terminology from physics, in my view. But their existence, the conditions of their emergence, can be explained physically. The Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an entry on emergent properties:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/

And, again, it isn't just a question of "science" but of not accepting something as a mystery, but looking for how it is explained in terms of physical forces and the material world. We are ourselves very complex physical constructions, we're animal organisms. Why shouldn't meaning have a physical explanation?

Laws can be thought of as complex properties that are general among things of a certain kind, like Ohm's Law which consists of a relationship between resistance, voltage (pressure in a circuit), and amperage (volume of electron flow).

Ohm's Law holds due to the underlying structure of metals, which generates their conductivity, which is a capacity.
The most basic laws are not grounded in any further structure because they are basic.

My conception of laws is one of a number of competing
theories of laws. The Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy also has an article on that:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/laws-of-nature/

Subordinate laws like Ohm's Law are accounted for in terms of more basic ones. Or, to put it another way, some capacities are explained in terms of other capacities. If I have the capacity to speak Russian, we'd explain that by my underlying capacity to learn languages, and other cognitive abilities, and the particular series of events through which i learned the language.

humans continually change their exact understanding of the "laws of nature," so we can say that we have gained better approximations, but it's not clear just how "complete" we'll ever be in terms of understanding nature. It's worthwhile having some humility in terms of our being limited, not knowing everything.

t.

Hussert's "phenomenlogical reduction" or "bracketing" was an attempt to get to what is uninterpreted. But the problem is, this doesn't appear to be possible. Sensory experience is always interpreted. This is why the idea of the "pure given" is a myth.

I think maybe you don't know what an explanation is. I've tried to explain that what needs explaining is what could have been otherwise. What "could" means here has to be understood in terms of what is physically possible, since there isn't any other form of possibility other than what can come about. Explanations are, as I pointed out, in terms of both an occasioning cause and a structural cause. The structural causes are capacities. Here i'm talking about explanation as causal explanation. This is not the same thing as analyzing something, trying to understand what it consists in or involves. Sometimes that is called "explaining".

As for the rest of what you say, I don't understand what you mean.

t.

Another point: Just because it seems to you -- perhaps having applied H.'s method -- that you mean X, it doesn't follow that X actually is your meaning. Meaning is socially mediated. It isn't all in your head. And you can make mistakes about it.

t.

What does it mean for S to be necessary? It means there was no way that not-S, or something incompatible with S, could have been brought about.

So, now, think about it, how do things get brought about? if T were something incompatible with S, and you say it is possible, that means there is some way to bring T about. That must mean that T could be caused or causally explained somehow. But for T to be caused or causally explained, it must be explained in terms of events and capacities that exist. The capacities that exist include the laws. So, if you want to say that some law S could have not existed, not held true, then you're saying that there are laws and events in virtue of which S would have not existed, or something incompatible with S would have existed. But if S is all the laws, for it to be possible for S not to exist, there would need to be laws -- laws included in S -- that could have explained S not existing. But the only things that can be explainers are things that exist. So if S hadn't existed, it couldn't explain anything. So, you can't explain the existence of the basic laws because there would be nothing in terms of which they could have been caused to not exist. If there is nothing in terms of which they could have been caused to not exist, then there is no real possibility of their not existing. If there is no real possibility of their not existing, that means they are necessary (see my definition of "necessary" at the beginning).

t.

I don't think i was trying to refute Husserl. I think you are treating him as an idealist. This is a common error. He was actually a realist.

I don't know that H. can be thought of as a response to scepticism, tho. How would he answer the sceptic?

the "reduction" is supposed to be a method to be more accurate about the actual content of our conscious states. His methodology is introspective.

t.

The physical world, the world that is "posited" by our perceptions, is not reduced to consciousness by H. hence he is not an idealist. if i have an experience of seeing a cat, this cat here, in the physical world is the "referent" of that perceptual experience. It is not the case that the referent or "object" of the experience is something mental.

ontology is about what is, not about any "mode of givenness".

t.

"bracketing" is merely a method, it doesn't mean he's being a sceptic. Bracketing is actually something we do. For example, if you here a story about Santa Claus, or you're reading a novel, there are many sentences you understand, but you don't take them to refer to something real. That is "bracketing".

H. doesn't believe in the "veil of perception", that what we see are sense data, not the real things. What we see, for H., are the real things. It's just that of course there is always the possibility that, in a given case, we are wrong, or hallucinating, or deluded. Mental states are "intentional" in that their "objects", what they are "of", might not exist even if that mental state exists.

t.

"realism" in philosophy has two main meanings:

1. realism about the physical world revealed in sense perception.

2. realism about truth, that there are entities that make sentences or beliefs true.

I'm a "realist" in both senses. In regard to sense perception, I think we perceive the physical world "directly" in that the "objects" of sensory experience, what we experience visually etc., are external physical states.

I think that states of affairs that obtain (hold, occur) are what make sentences or beliefs true, at least, descriptive sentences. Not all sentences are designed to represent a way things are. But of those sentences that are descriptive, they are true if the state of affairs they represent is real (actually occurs or obtains), false otherwise.

I think intentionality -- the "ofness" of human conscious states, that they are directed to some object, is a social construct, it presupposes that the person stands in a certain kind of social relationship. In my view, a belief is some internal brain state, like a mini-"program", that mediates between sensory input and action, and that it has this role in virtue of the success that this sort of state played for our ancestors; that's why it gets replicated, just as other biological traits like our sentence production capability, or our capacity for vision, get repreduced because of their past effectiveness for our ancestors.

Note that this is an ontological point of view. Not an epistemological point of view.

Some anti-realists, like Rorty, try to construe realism as a foundationalist view, which is to confuse ontology and epistemology.

t.