Heidegger

He was actually a member of the Nazi party, and a lot of his thinking, especially his later (post-1933ish) thinking is clearly marked by it - there's a strong kind of blood-and-soil element to his aesthetic thought, certainly.

Some of his earlier, more existentialist (though he totally disavowed the term) stuff I still think is interesting - or rather useful, because even when he was talking total bollocks it was still interesting, if you see what I mean.

As for good criticism - I'm sure there's loads, but Terry Eagleton's chapter on him in The Ideology of the Aesthetic is the only thing that comes to mind (though it's many years since I've read it). Derrida was always sympathetically interesting on his stuff too, and there was loads of stuff about his nazism in relation to his influence on both existentialism and deconstruction - but that's unhelpful because I couldn't tell you what any of it's called. Actually, I've just remembered there's Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity and Lyotard's Heidegger and 'the jews'.

The Adorno's short and in print - but I must confess I never finished it.

Don't blame me if it causes unscheduled naps - I fell asleep in a pub reading the thing a few years ago, missing an appointment to look at a house in the process.

This is the edition I was talking about anyway (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jargon-Authenticity-Routledge-Classics/dp/0415289912/sr=8-1/qid=1167925407/ref=sr_1_1/203-1082044-9424735?ie=UTF8&s=books)

Heidegger is one of the most intresting filosofists in my understanding. He was far right (but not rasist). He joined nazi party in 1933 and become rector of Friburgs University. But after 10 monthes left university.
After his filosoficle "turning" of 1935 he moved to anarchism. He never was an anarchist but he critisised industrialism and totalitarism. His ideas become the bases of green movement in Germany. I've red positiv text about him odf some spanish anarchists.
And here is my artikle but it is in russian
http://zhurnal.lib.ru/m/magid_m_n/xaidegger.shtml

Heidigger also worked to get Edmund Husserl -- a German Jew and the founder of phenomenology -- fired at Freiburg.
Heidegger's writing style is elitist -- constant neologisms and obscure terminology that make it difficult to understand what he is going on about.

Since you've asked about things to read, for a critique of so-called "post-structuralism" and the people who base themselves on it like Derrida, I highly recommend John Post's little book, "Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction." His alternative to the anti-realist philolsophers like Derrida et al is a materialist theory of meaning developed by the American feminist-materialist philosopher Ruth Garrett Millikan.

I wrote a brief introduction to some aspects of her
theory for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/states-of-affairs/biosemantics.html

But this is from the point of view of ontology rather
than philosophy of language/meaning.

t.

I found the following article on him interesting.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/apr2000/heid-a03.shtml

Red

Heidegger's writing style is elitist

I think it is strange to blame filosofist for elitist style. Filosofist is not somebody who make propoganda at the factory. Do you blame scientist for elitist style?

In order to be open to evaluation as to its truth/usefulness, jargon needs to be minimized and when it is used, it has to either be standard in the field, or explained or unpacked in ordinary language or language that is standard in the field. If this is not done, it becomes very difficult to evaluate. Heidegger is guilty of this. The excessive construction of neologisms and obscure terminology means that only a handful of graduate students who spend years at the feet of the "old man" are going to be able to say what he meant, and even then it is likely there will be useless disputes about "what he meant."
This writing style is clearly intended to be understood only by the "elect" few who have the time and resources to attend graduate school and spent a long time working out and pondering what is said. It becomes unaccountable to the broader public of readers. I have a PhD in philosophy but even i have a hard time figuring out what Heidegger is getting on about. This sort of style, i suspect, is intended to inculcate a false sense of "profundity" which I find not especially useful.

t.

i'd agree with syndicalistcat here, i'm reading Being and Time at the moment and the edition i have even has untranslated/unfootnoted greek and latin phrases/quotes throughout.

jargon needs to be minimized and when it is used, it has to either be standard in the field, or explained or unpacked in ordinary language or language that is standard in the field. If this is not done, it becomes very difficult to evaluate. Heidegger is guilty of this.

Comment
I partly agree with this if we talk aboute scientist.
But filosofist, painter, poet must not minimize jargon. We say in Russia: "Everybody wrights as he breathes". And you have right do not read it.

Reading of Heidegger is difficalte work of think. But it's o'key. It's like gymnastics. Very useful.

magidd, it sounds as tho you take philosophy as something like poetry, or music. There are actually some philosophers nowadays who take that sort of view (or say they do). But i do not agree. Before going on, I suppose I should mention i used to be a college teacher of philosophy, a philosopher by profession.

My view is that philosophy is about truth, like the sciences. In fact I think there is no fundamental distinction between philosophy and the sciences. Here I should maybe mention a trend in philosophy in the English-speaking world since the '60s. Kant tried to defend the idea that there was a fundamental distinction between philosophy and the sciences, by arguing that philosophy deals with apriori foundations of all knowledge or thought. But in the '60s Quine, an American philosopher, engaged in systematic attacks on the basis of the traditional post-Kant distinction between science and philosophy: the analytic/synthetic distinction and related ideas. A lot of philosophers were persuaded that Quine had shown that the old philosophy/science distinction was untenable. I agree with this conclusion. Just as scientists develop ideas that explain things -- hypotheses as they say in the academic world -- I think philosophy does the same thing. The distinction is that the test of a philosophical hypothesis is a bit more indirect than that of a hypothesis in an "empirical science."

t.

magidd, it sounds as tho you take philosophy as something like poetry, or music.

Comment
Yes. But there are different tipes of filosofy. Some of filosofists can be close to sciences. Overs like Heidegger are not.

My view is that philosophy is about truth, like the sciences.

Poetry and music are olso about truth. But there is another part of it. You can reserch the luddist movement in UK as scientist, historian. But olso possible to wright poem about it as lord Byron. Isn't that poem about the troof?

magidd: "But there are different tipes of filosofy. Some of filosofists can be close to sciences. Overs like Heidegger are not"

That is true. I take philosophy to be a search for truth. Music and poetry do react to facts, or describe facts, but it isn't so much about the search for truth as expressing an emotion towards it, or taking a stand about it.

t.

There is problem. Fact doesn't exsist withaut us. Emotion is the part of world. Subject-and-object thinking is not one possible way of thinking.

well, I don't agree with that sort of subjective idealism. The existence of a reality independent of human consciousness is a presupposition of language itself. Why do humans have the sentence-making capacity? It is a biological trait. It serves a biological function. "Functions" in evolutionary biology are understood in terms of contribution to survival, and the passing on of one's genes. Eyes have the "function" of sight because the past contribution of eyes to doing that activity in animals explains the continued existence, the persistence, of those structures in animals over the thousands of years. The sentence-making capacity of humans has tremendous contribution to "fitness," to our ability to survive and prosper as a species. If we consider the situation of an early human in a hunter/gatherer band many thousands of years ago, a hunter returning generates a sentence. It makes a difference whether the situation represented is a predator -- a large cat, say -- or a new source of food he's found. Let's suppose that, because of his sentence, the tribe now goes off and successfully returns with a lot of fish from a nearby lake located by the first hunter. The best explanation for this success is that his sentence referred to, represented, that situation of a lake full of fish nearby. The sentences of the hunter "adapt" the others in the tribe to that state of affairs, of a lake with fish nearby.

If sentences don't have the function of mapping onto, of representing, states of affairs in the world, how can we account for why the sentence-producing capacity has continued to be replicated for thousands of generations?

But this explanation presupposes that there are real states of affairs that sentences map onto when they are true. "True" is a word like "health," in that the absence of truth is a defect of a descriptive sentence, it is a sentence that failed to serve its biological function. "False" is like referring to a tissue or organ as sick, as unable to perform its function, like the bindness of an eye. If we ddon't suppose that sentences represent situations in our environment, how can we account for the fact that sentences are part of communicative behavior that leads to cooperative behavior, and people modifying their behavior in ways that indicates we have passed information to them they are using?

It is especially important for those of us interested in the class struggle to hold onto the notion of truth because when the bourgeois media or corporatiosn lie about the conditions of their workers in struggle, we want to insist there is a REAL TRUTH TO THE MATTER.

t.

I was making an anology. Ill health impedes the ability of an organ or tissue or other biological entity to perform its function(s). The issue is the ability to perform a function. The function of sentences is to represent a state of affairs that actually occurs
-- a fact, that is. A false sentence is defective in that it fails to perform its function.

t.

The existence of a reality independent of human consciousness is a presupposition of language itself. Why do humans have the sentence-making capacity? It is a biological trait. It serves a biological function.

Comment
But that is funny.
As for Biological function- it is scientific notion. But science is already based on the particular way of thinking. This thinking uses anyway the instruments of human consciousness: categorys of time, spase, color ets. So where did you find reality wich is "independent of human consciousness"?

"Where" isn't a proper question to ask in this context. You might as well ask "What does it weigh?" The question has no meaning. "Where?" would have meaning if you asking about the locaion in space of some spatial being such as a cat or a planet or a human being.

Reality is made up of all the states of affairs that occur, and the particular entities and their features that make up these states of affairs. All of the states of affairs that occur make up the total history of the physical cosmos.
Now you could ask, in regard to any possible state of affairs, does it occur? And we could consider the reasons pro and con on that question.

t.

lem: "The question that interests me, is, yes, I suppose there is a mind independent reality; but why think that scientific truths are true about that reality?"

Well, I'm not quite sure what you're asking.

There are truths about, say, physical forces. Forces that existed before humans and will after we're gone, that act in ways we are not aware of now.

It's sort of built in to the relevant hypotheses that the things they are about exist independently of my perceptions.
So, if they're true, there are things that exist independently of my consciousness.

Maybe you're suggesting some sort of phenomenalist reduction of physical propositions, to re-interpret them as about "possible sensations" or something like that.

This notoriously won't work. The reduction can't be carried out. This is why phenomenalism, among academic philosophers, is of merely historical interest at this point, sort of in the category of interest in collecting American Civil War memorabilia.

The basic problem is that you can't reduce the notion of a physical capacity or possibility to actual sensations or experiences. When we posit, as a hypothesis, that things have capacities or powers -- and we do this endlessly, our language constantly makes these assumptions -- we are going beyond the content of actual experience.

t.

Now you could ask, in regard to any possible state of affairs, does it occur?

No i am not going to ask that right naw. I alredy had another qestion. Give me please example of "existence of a reality independent of human consciousness"

As I understand it Heidegger does believe in the existence of objective truth,

Comment
No he didn't. Or at list he trys to built new filosofy out of Subject-and-object division.

magidd:
"Give me please example of "existence of a reality independent of human consciousness"

A reality is independent of human consciousness, we may suppose, if it does not depend on human consciousness for its existence. The physical forces of the world do not depend on human consciousness for their existence. Had animals not come into existence, there would still have been the physical forces. Here is what you said earlier: "Fact doesn't exsist withaut us." It's not entirely clear what you mean by this, but there are many facts that humans have never become aware of, and new facts that we have yet to uncover. We have reason to believe this based on our set of very well-confirmed hypotheses about how the world is put together physically.

E.g. the existence of the sun is a fact that would have existed if humans had not existed.

As I said before, part of our reality is facts about what is possible and what is necessary. Things have all sorts of potentials or possibilities that could have been realized but weren't or that may yet be realized in the future -- the working class has the potential to liberate itself from the class system. Among these is the possibility that the sun could have existed were there no animals on earth.

t.

Ok I haven’t read Heidegger, nor have I studied philosophy. But I had a few thoughts on some of this.

syndicalistcat

A reality is independent of human consciousness, we may suppose, if it does not depend on human consciousness for its existence.

Yes that is all very fair and well, I think the point being made is that there is no way we can access to this reality outside of our conscious awareness of it. So as such, our understanding of this reality is always mediated by our subjective experience of it – this is something that we cannot transcend. Perhaps we can have more or less accurate conceptions of external reality and its forms, but as for knowing them “as they are”, I think this is impossible. The very fact of trying to conceptualise and understand these things is already a human project which is invested with certain aspirations, intentions and desires - we are speaking to, and make sense of, this external reality from a multitude of subject-positions.

You say,

syndicalistcat

E.g. the existence of the sun is a fact that would have existed if humans had not existed.

I think the fact is more that, in this example, the sun would not have existed as a meaning given object within a symbolic network (which is of course how we come to know it). In a practical sense our knowledge of the sun’s existence comes about through the ways in which it interpolates with the human project. Indeed talking of its existence before our own human existence is already transposing human concepts (say for example of being and presence) onto an area that we can only stand back and say we know nothing of, and cannot talk about as every act of doing so is already imposing a symbolic mandate, something intrinsically human, upon it. To talk of objects and existence is already to talk of concepts that are central to the subjective experience of being.

Anyway thats just some thoughts I had, I'm not wanting to take up a dogmatic position on it as I haven't really thought this fully through myself as yet...

There's two chapters in Adorno's Negative Dialectics about Ontology and Heidegger which I couldn't reproduce if I tried, but which make sense when you read them. They are a lot easier to read than Jargon of Authenticity anyway

lem: "I would say that the perspectives of a manifest object are inexhaustable, and in that way propositions on objects cannot be reduced to sense data."

well, i'm not quite sure what you're saying. Perspectival features of sensory appearing are what sense-data are supposed to be.

But nobody in perceptual psychology takes the sense-data theory of perception seriously anymore. A good thing to read here would be "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" by Wilfrid Sellars where he critiques "The Myth of the Given". The "myth of the given" is the idea that there is somehow a more certain realm of knowledge to be found in "appearances." This is an illusion. Our actual perceptual capacity is such that sensory experience never occurs without cognitive interpretation. This is because there would be no useful biological function to "mere appearances." The function of sight is to extract information about physical things in our environment. A good discussion of this is in J.J. Gibson's book "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception." Gibson talks about how vision is actually active, not passive, that animals explore their surroundings, with visual input and movement directly coordinated in perception.

johno: "Yes that is all very fair and well, I think the point being made is that there is no way we can access to this reality outside of our conscious awareness of it."

I think your point here is equivalent to the following: "We can't be consciously aware of things unless we are consciously aware of them."
That is a quite trivial truth of logic.

johno: "Perhaps we can have more or less accurate conceptions of external reality and its forms, but as for knowing them “as they are”, I think this is impossible."

What would it mean to "know things as they are"? if i put my cat on a scale and she weighs 13 pounds, i know she weighs 13 pounds. Isn't this a way she actualy is?

me: "E.g. the existence of the sun is a fact that would have existed if humans had not existed."

johno: "I think the fact is more that, in this example, the sun would not have existed as a meaning given object within a symbolic network (which is of course how we come to know it)."

But now you're bringing up another fact, a relational fact about the sun, it's role in human life and society. But that doesn't show that the existence of the sun is not a fact independent of human consciousness or human purposes ("the human project" as you put it).

johno: "Indeed talking of its existence before our own human existence is already transposing human concepts (say for example of being and presence) onto an area that we can only stand back and say we know nothing of, and cannot talk about as every act of doing so is already imposing a symbolic mandate, something intrinsically human, upon it."

Here I would say that we need to understand what knowing is. Humans have natural capacities to know. Our having these capacities is explainable in terms of animal evolution. They would not contribute to our survival if we were unable to know things about our surroundings.

One of the most successful and most basic human cognitive capacities -- the main way we have of knowing about, and guiding our way, in the world -- is the method of hypothesis and test. We constantly come up with ideas to explain things we experience. We do it without being aware we're using a particular inferential method. I walk outside my door and look down the block and see lights on Sami's convenience market, and infer "Sami's is still open." That's an inference to the best explanation for my current experience. I might be wrong of course. Maybe Sami closed the store but was in a hurry and forgot to turn off the lights. I can test my hypothesis by walking down the block to see if the door to the store is open.

Our capacity of making hypotheses is so engrained that it is hard-wired. The words we have for species like "cat" or "cactus" embody hypotheses. The word "cat" assumes a hypothesis that there is something in common among these furry things we encounter in virtue of which we can expect similar behaviors. Eventually it was discovered that there is a DNA design plan transmitted from parents, adn that cats share things in common thru the genetic copying process, but humans thousands of years ago came up with the shared nature hypothesis. Children learn to use this idea fully by the time they're four years old...that's why i say it's hard-wired.

Of course we can be wrong about things. But the thing about the method of hypothesis and test is that it is self-correcting. We have the ability to modify our hypotheses when additional info shows we weren't right before.

There are undoubtedly limits to this whole process. Sometimes people's judgment is distorted by powerful
desires or economic interests or whatever (consider the global warming deniers).

Now, in virtue of applying this human inferential method, of hypothesis and test, we develop an elaborate series of causal hypotheses about our world, about the various forces and structures that make it up and how they work. This contitutes knowledge about the world, at least to some approximation. This knowledge about the world warrant me in saying the sun existed before humans or animals on this planet did.

That's why I'd say you are, strictly speaking, wrong when you say we know nothing of the sun's existence before animals on earth.

t.

A reality is independent of human consciousness, we may suppose, if it does not depend on human consciousness for its existence. The physical forces of the world do not depend on human consciousness for their existence.

Comment
Strange... Then scientist talking about such things they generaly use notionts like "time", "extension", "reason" ets. But there are human notions aren't them? So again: what is "physical forces of the world wich isn't dependend on human consciousness for their existence"?

sorry, magidd, but i have no idea what you're getting on about. if you want to know what the various physical forces are, take a look at a physics or chemistry text. forces include such things as gravity, the chemical bond, magnetism, etc.

t.

lem: "You don't think that if the sense data of an object is infintely variable then that os one reason why an object cannot be reduced to propositions on sense data?"

yes, that is one of the reasons the reduction can't be carried out, but that reduces to the question of possibility.

lem: "That is on the assumption that we can unproblematiccally say that physical forces exist. Again, you don't take anti-realsim very seriuously."

the reason for taking phyiscal forces to exist is abductive (an inference to the best explanation). this is how we obtain most of our knowledge of the world around us.

Pheonomenology is not anti-realist, by the way. Husserl assumes the existence of a wide range of entities, including Platonic propositions as well as concrete situations.

lem: "One thing I want to know from types keen on science, is how do you explain the existence of laws, and what are they?"

Laws can of course be explaind as consequences of other laws. The existence of the basic laws I personally regard as constituting the nature of the physical cosmos. It's possible to regard the physical cosmos as necessarily exising, in which case its existence, and thus the existence of its nature (the basic laws) requires no explanation in anything further. Laws are generalizations of the basic capacities of things. See Cartwright on the laws of physics.

t.

lem: "Doesn't she think that only phenomenological laws are real, so there are no basic "laws" of the universe.

If we cannot explain the *nature* of what necessarily exists... well isn't that the original problem that explanation seeks to undo... I mean, you are treating certain facts as brute facts, aren't you? You are left with certain things that cannot be explained, its just that you dogmatically assert that they do infact exist."

By "phenomenological laws" do you mean things like Ohm's Law? I think she thinks the laws propounded by physicists are some sort of approximation, that the ultimate reality is actual capacities of things. I think she's right about that.

But if laws are capacities, they are possibilities. And ultimate possibilities not further explainable are what "natures" are supposed to be, as traditionally understood. If we take this seriously, then the basic laws, whatever they would be (and we constantly change our approximations) would at least point at the basic nature of the physical cosmos. But why think the physical cosmos doesn't exist by nature? I did my PhD disseration on the issue of possibility and necessity and I've come to the conclusion, after years of thinking about this, that there is no possibility other than physical possibility. If this is so, it follows that the physical cosmos exists by nature, as traditional philosophy thought that God did. So if the basic laws are trying to point to the nature of the physical cosmos, the answer is that the physical cosmos exists by nature, it is what it is and couldn't be otherwise, and that is what explains why there are laws ultimately.

I'm a materialist but I'm willing to let the Buddhism of my "ex" have its day, if you see what I mean. My grandmother, a tough garment worker, told me "'God" is just an old-fashioned word for the universe." And there's a sense in which I think she's right. Spinoza also held a view something like this.

t.

lem: "the lecturer wanted to explain phsyical necessity (part of what makes a law) through universals Eek!"

I completely disagree with that approach. It's basically circular. You can't reduce modality (possibility and necessity). It's bacic.

lem: "You are a naturalist?" absolutely.

lem: "Could it be argued that there could be something more to the nature of the basic states of the unievsrse than possibilties: which we could not know with naturalism. I mean, my doubt is that, you have a few brute facts in your theory: can you show me that these are not hiding things from view that naturalism cannot explain"

well, i suppose it's a question of what explanations are. but ultimately a nature is just those possibilities of a thing that are basic, and underived from something more basic. That's what it is. See C.D. Broad's famous discussion of natures in "The Philosophy of McTaggart."

I could explain this in terms of modal logic. There is a system of modal logic called S5. A basic axiom of this system is: "Whatever is possible, is necessarily possible." This principle was first articulated in the 13th century by John Duns Scotus. I tend to think this principle is true. But then it tells us that ultimate possibilities are self-explanatory and require no further explanation.

t.

Bhaskar? Ugh! I have objections to him similar to the post-modernists, even tho he is a realist, like me. He's an elitist in terms of his rhetorical style. Gets in the way of clear understanding and your ability to test what he says yourself.

Ideas can always be mistaken, must always be subject to revision. That follows form taking the abductive method as basic.

Phenomenologists as alternative to naturalism? Well, it's true they claim they are inspired by Descartes and his problematic. So, i guess in that sense they are opposites of naturalists, who reject Descartes' problematic as fundamentally mistaken. There is a basic contradiction between the phenomenogicial method and Sellars' arguments against the "myth of the given." I discussed Husserl's theory at length in my dissertation, but I ultimately opted for naturalism, as you can see. I think there is the problem that human experience always involves cognitive interpretation as a component, that is, this is a problem for the phenomenologists. So there is a sense in which phenomenology is invalidated by its own method.

t.

syndicalistcat

What would it mean to "know things as they are"? if i put my cat on a scale and she weighs 13 pounds, i know she weighs 13 pounds. Isn't this a way she actualy is?

Well yes, but only within a given set of culturally shared propositions, understandings and beliefs. I really don’t know if I’m making a trivial point or not, nevertheless - I am saying that we come to know these things in a way that intersects with human purposes, which in themselves are socially and culturally determined within a particular historical period. You talk about measurement in pounds, about “my” cat – these conceptions are obviously culturally and historically specific relating to a particular episteme. (Of course in normal conversation it would be absurd to make all of these qualifications).
syndicalistcat

me

I think the fact is more that, in this example, the sun would not have existed as a meaning given object within a symbolic network (which is of course how we come to know it).

But now you're bringing up another fact, a relational fact about the sun, it's role in human life and society. But that doesn't show that the existence of the sun is not a fact independent of human consciousness or human purposes ("the human project" as you put it).

[/quote]
I am saying that to say something exists or to say that it doesn’t exist, here we are already using human concepts to understand the objects of interest. It can only be said that something does exists or doesn’t exist when there are humans with the cognitive capacity to make such a judgement. And for me presence and absence, attachment and separation are central components of our understanding of the world given there central role in the development of self and other. In this sense the subject understands the object in a distinctly human way and we cannot step outside of this.

...perhaps this is missing your point...

interesting thread - haven't got time to read it all now...

for lem:
I think Levinas critique of Heidegger ontological project really key - 'Ethics as First Philosophy' will prob articulate this, also maybe beginning of 'Totality and Infinity'.

For short article on the relation between Heidegger's politics and work can look at Mark Bevir 'Derrida and the Heidegger Controversy: Global Friendship Against Racism'.

Okay, let me start by recommending the Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at:

http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html

They have an entry on Heidegger, which I've not read.

lem: "The only thing I have found disturbing was how utterly right Descartes seemed, how he seemed at_first_glance to have answered a very important qeustion: and yet that no-one takes him seriously."

Descartes totally dominated philosophy from the 17th century until about the 1960s.

The fundamental error in Descartes, IMO, is that he assumes that the only way to warrant a belief, such as in the existence of the physical world revealed in our sense perception, is thru a deductively valid argument.

An argument is deductively valid if and only if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false if all the premises are true. The truth of the premises absolutely guarantees the truth of the conclusion.

Descartes doesn' show any real appreciation of the abductive method (inference to the best explanation). Why should we be so concerned "certainty" in the way D. is? Abduction is in fact the primary inferential method for humans to acquire knoledge about the world. Deduction does come into play, as when you're seeing what follows from a hypothesis to know what to test for, to check that hypothesis. But deduction does not have the pre-eminent cognitive role that Descartes thought it did.

lem:
"I asked the HPS lecturer whether the existence of laws can be explained. He replied that Wittgenstein said that *all* explanations have to stop somewhere." Well, we can't construct an infinite sequence of explanations -- Aristotle made that point.

lem: "But I am still unsure if this lets naturalists off the hook. You say that laws exist through modal logic."

Not exactly. What I'm suggesting is that basic possibilities are necessary. Again, this is just an assertion of Scotus' principle: "Whatever is possible, is necessawrily possible."

If we think of the natures of things being constituted by their basic possibilities, as C.D. Broad suggested, then their natures will be necessary. The reason this is relevant is that we typically seek explanations for things that are contingent.

Something is contingent if it is possible that it might not occur, and possible that it will occur. Events are (as far as I know) always contingent. So we look for explanations for why the event did occur, since it was possible that it might not have occurred.

But if something is necessary, it doesn't make sense to seek an explanation for it. And I'm suggesting that the basic physical laws give sort of the nature of the physical cosmos, and in that sense do not require a futher explanation. I should point out that this is an idiosyncratic view of mine.

lem: "Can we explain the existence of modal logic?"

well, i'm not quite sure what you mean. A "logic" can be understood as a human phenomenon, like when we say that a certain scientist came up with a certain theory. Or do you mean, can we explain modality itself, the fact that somethings are contingent and some are necessary? If we take seriously the Scotist principle of the necessity of the modal, modality itself doesn't require an explanation because it is a necessary feature of the world.

Consider the fact that there are both particulars and features ("universals") in the world. Can we explain why that exists? Do we need to explain it? All of the empirical sciences assume it but don't explain it.

lem: "2. Doesn't Scotus' theory apply to every existing thing?"

Sure, but to its nature, not its existence. I suppose you could then say, well, the necessity of the basic laws could only show that the nature of the physical cosmos needs no explanation, not that its existence needs no explanation. I think one could put forward the hypothesis that the existence of the physical cosmos is necessary, and this is why it requires no further explanation.

lem: "3. Can you explain... that the possibilties of a thing are what is most baisc about that thing? (Sorry if you have already, the point on Broad seemed like it was just a linguistic one)"

I'm not saying that these are the most basic things about something, but that they are the nature of that thing, so that it would cease to have those features only if it ceased to exist. A block of metal could only lose its conductivity by ceasing to exist -- as a metallic structure, the atoms that make it up might continue to exist, but in some other configuration.

lem: "4. Can you explain how possibilties are articulated?"

I'm not quite sure what you mean. We're talking here about causal powers or capacities of things. These can be reflected in various laws, which attempt to express how certain capacities are related to behavior. Ohm's Law for example denotes a basic capacity of all pure metals and metallic alloys.

lem: "Sorry to ask so many questions, but what exactly is epistemological naturalism?"

Descartes viewed epistemology in terms of principles about what we OUGHT to believe. He treated epistemology as analogous to morality, that we have epistemic obligations.

Epistemological naturalism is more concerned with how in fact we do know things. Richard Feldman's essay here might help:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-naturalized/

me: "What would it mean to "know things as they are"? if i put my cat on a scale and she weighs 13 pounds, i know she weighs 13 pounds. Isn't this a way she actualy is?"

johno: "Well yes, but only within a given set of culturally shared propositions, understandings and beliefs."

No, the fact represented by the sentence "Lucy weighs 13 pounds" is not dependent on the existence of sentences, human beliefs or cognitive states (abstracting of course from the actual dependency of the domestic cat species on the human species -- i could have talked about the weight of something not dependent socially on humans such as a rock). The ability of the sentence to denote that fact does depend upon its human social context. So you seem to be confusing the fact and the sentence.

johno: "I am saying that we come to know these things in a way that intersects with human purposes, which in themselves are socially and culturally determined within a particular historical period. You talk about measurement in pounds, about “my” cat – these conceptions are obviously culturally and historically specific relating to a particular episteme."

The way we know things are not the same as the facts we know. That is my point.

me: "But now you're bringing up another fact, a relational fact about the sun, it's role in human life and society. But that doesn't show that the existence of the sun is not a fact independent of human consciousness or human purposes ("the human project" as you put it)."

johno: "I am saying that to say something exists or to say that it doesn’t exist, here we are already using human concepts to understand the objects of interest."

Of course. I didn't say that human sayings or human knowings are not dependent on human concepts or human interests. Which facts we show an interest in, which entities we select to have words for, these depend on human social purposes, and I say "social" because nobody runs their own language. But, again, the fact that a certain leopard weighs 40 pounds is not something that depends on human language, purposes, or cognitive states. Now if i describe that fact by saying "Chima weighs 40 pounds," then that sentence has the social context and dependencies you refer to. But it is necessary to distinguish the sentence from the fact it denotes.

johno: "It can only be said that something does exists or doesn’t exist when there are humans with the cognitive capacity to make such a judgement. And for me presence and absence, attachment and separation are central components of our understanding of the world given there central role in the development of self and other. In this sense the subject understands the object in a distinctly human way and we cannot step outside of this."

sure. but my claim is about the mind-indendence of the physical cosmos within which we navigate and acquire information, and on which our existence is dependent. From the fact that my language and my knowledge is dependent on human purposes, social facts like language and so on, does not show that this reality, of the physical cosmos, is not mind-independent.

t.

quote: "As I understand it, naturalism takes Hume's conviction that it is psychologically impossible tot take the scpetic seriously - and runs with it. So that naturalism says that it can't explain certain things but that does not matter. I am wary if this is stretched to include all manner of things - fine if it was just one proposition."

well, i think it's more a shift in how to understand epistemological justification. As I pointed out, Descartes and Hume also had this idea that warrant in belief requires some really tight, deductive link between premises and conclusion. But this overlooks the crucial importance of inference to the best explanation (abduction). Also, the shift involves questioning the idea of a moral obligation to believe or not believe.

t.

lem: "Abduction, seems to me, to be the exact opposite of what the proponents of naturalism are viewed as: abduction is just intuition, disguised as "common sense"? Or mayve, mob-rule"

well, no. There is a logic to abduction. A hypothesis must not be refuted by facts inconsistent with it. There are a variety of criteria for telling how acceptable a hypothsis is. For example, if hypothesis H1 and hypothesis H2 try to explain the same things, but H1 makes fewer assumptions, is less complex, than H2, then, other things being equal, H1 is preferable because accepting it entails less risk of falling into error.

t.

Yes, the abductive method could be examined from the point of view of emprical/evolutionary psychology.

But i forgot to mention a crucial part of naturalism. The previous philosophy since Kant had assumed the analytic/synthetic distinction, the necessary/contingent distinction, the apriori/aposteriori distinction. But Quine's attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction also led to philosophers questioning the idea of apriori ways of knowing.

Naturalism assumes there is no special apriori way of knowing about reality that could justify philosophy as a field firmly distinct from the sciences. if there is no special philosphical way of knowing, no apriori access to the world, then the abductive method, which is an empirical method, becomes fundamental, and there is no way of making a distinction betweem philosphy and science in the way that had been done since Kant. This busting down of the walls between philosophy and science (walls created so that philosophers could claim a separate field) is behind the rise of naturalism.

t.

lem: "Is one an epistemological naturalist if and only if, we hold that only the scientific method can indentify the proper way to establish what is true."

if you read the lead paragraph in that piece by Feldman i cited, he says that the most extreme form of epistemological naturalism is that the way to find out how people know things, the conditions of knowledge, is thru empirical/evolutionary psychology. this would be akin to what you are suggesting above. but Feldman points out there are less extreme forms of epistemological naturalism.

Naturalism is also a metaphysical view, that the only things there are are the entities that exist in the physical cosmos, that is, the natural world. This is typically taken to embrace physicalism, that is, the view that everything can ultimately be explained in terms of physical forces, the sort of ultimate entities and laws posited by physics.

And because naturalized epistemology rejects apriori knowledge, typically, they will also try to construe mathematics as having an empirical foundation. So, for example, if i see two cats curled up on the sofa, among the things I see is the twoness of this group of cats. Penelope Maddy has tried to work this out in her book on mathematics.

t.

lem: "Are you are hardcore epistem-natiralist?"

I don't know. I don't believe there is any such thing
as apriori knowledge. It's hard to see how there could
be. How do brains have such a capacity? Thus i tend
to believe that even the law
of non-contradiction is merely a well-entrenched
empirical hypothesis. The law of non-contradiction is
true because of the way the world is structured.

t.

What would it mean to ground science? Justification of methods lies in their ability to lead to truth.

Husserl's method wasn't just empirical, as the whole introspective method, of "bracketing", would seem to imply. In fact Husserl was a metaphysical Platonist. If we consider a perceptual situation, such as my looking at leaf, a variety of concrete states of affairs appear to be presented in my experience. I can describe one of these facts by "this is green." For Husserl, there are two entities that correspond to the sentence. There is the concrete state of affairs that consists in this leaf having this particular shade of green. This state of affairs wouldn't exist without the leaf and that feature, as it is simply made up of them. H. wants to say this concrete state of affairs is the denotation or reference of the sentence. But he also wants to say, in the manner of Frege, that the sentence has a "sense" (Sinn), that this is an eternal, necessarily existing entity, a Platonic proposition.

H. takes this view as a way of dealing with hallucination. When you "bracket", you don't assume there IS that state of affairs with the leaf and the color feature. But there is a "meaning" to the sense perception anyway. So what corresponds to "this" in the proposition? Here is where H. takes the view that the use of "this" here can be "reduced" to a definite description "the thing that is here and so on has the property of being green". This theory was developed in the early 20th century when the theory of names or designators as definite descriptions, developed by Russell and Frege, was generally accepted. In the '60s/'70s period a number of English-speaking philosophers critiqued the Russell/Frege theory, and it is now generally regarded as inadequate, especially in dealing with a very direct reference to something in your perceptual field, as when we would use a demonstrative like "this". The other defect in H.'s theory is that it seems to unnecessarily duplicate entities. Why suppose there is both the concrete state of affairs, this leaf being green, and an abstract eternal proposition, that this leaf is green? I don't see why we should posit Platonic propositions at all. I think that we can do without them by supposing that it is the concrete states of affairs that are what sentences stand for.

But in that case, what happens if this is a hallucination and there is no leaf? I think in that case we simply have a cognitive failure, a failure of a cogntive state, percpetion in this case, to actually pick out something even tho it appears to. Perceiving is a biological function and sometimes a biological organ can fail in performing its function. We can describe what the perception is like, by analogy with perceptions that do not fail. From the fact that we can't tell the difference "internally" always it doesn't follow there is not in fact a distinction between a cognitive state that succeeds, and thus has an object, and one that fails, and thus has no object, even tho we may think it does.

I highly recommend Ruth Garrett Millikan's theory of "intentionality" based on the notion of functions.

t.

lem: "Bell thinks that H. and Frege are quite different, and perhaps that the critique of Frege is not relevent."

Well, Dagfinn Follesdal doesn't agree. He sees H. as strongly influenced by Frege. based on my reading of "Ideas," I tend to agree.

lem: "H. isn't quite different to standard Platonic realism, as e.g. he was quite solipsistic."

That's a misinterpretation of H. Why would there have been any point to H. introducing the concept of "bracketing", then? if he were a solipsist, there'd be no difference between a bracketed and non-bracketed cognition.

lem: "I mean, from what I can make out, nat-epi says that epi doesn't work, so it can't."

Not quite. They are proposing a different interpretation or theory of what epistemology is. This means they are proposing a different theory of warrant or justification.

This is why I asked you what it would mean to ground science. The question of epistemology is about warrant or justification.

if one is interested in warrant, then it seems to me one has to look at human cognitive functions. how can you address the question of warrant without an understanding of what human cognitive capacities are?

Let's say you think humans have a certain cognitive architecture. This was developed, via evolution, to extract information about states of affairs in a certain environment, and via language, to convey this information to others, to facilitate cooperative behavior, which has been hugely important to human flourishing and success as a species (so far, there are no guarantees in evolution that we won't be killed off).

Now you say I've not provided "evidence" that science leads to truth. But, as I've pointed out, one of the most basic inferential strategies that provides justification is abductive inference, inference to the best explanation. What we've found is that this method generates beliefs that have been confirmed and become entrenched for this reason. Their confirmation, and the lack of better explanatory hypotheses, is then the justification for this method.

Justification has to do with how we are led to true beliefs.

t.

in addition to naturalized epistemology, there is one other variation from traditional epistemology worth considering, this is so-called "standpoint" theory. This has been particularly developed by feminist epistemologists. A good summary is at:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/

However, "standpoint" theory applies in the case of any social structure that divides into groups, so that one group is an oppressed group. The idea is that people in the oppressed group can, or are more able to, attain a clearer understanding of the oppressive features of society than those in the more privileged position. This applies to the working class in relation to the dominating classes -- class standpoint epistemology -- as well as to the position of women, and it could also be developed in regard to structural racism as well.

If we take the class variant, the idea is that through their position in the system of production, their immediate experience with the consequences to their lives of being a subordindated class, and the potential to develop an understanding of other possibilities and the exploitative nature of capitalism, through the class struggle, and solidarity, which develops class consciousness, there is a kind of knowledge that class consciousness gains for the working class which is not as accessible to those in the dominating classes, who tend not to see the true nature of capitalism due to their class position.

From the point of view of standpoint theory, traditional epistemology, including the phenomenological approach of Husserl, is too individualisic, it focuses only on the evidence that the individual has in abstraction from the social context.

t.

lem: "If all you can do is provide evidence of states of affiars then all your reasoning is contingent and doubtable."

Not all contingent...that doesn't follow. I would say there are many necessities in the physical world, e.g. that metals conduct electricity. But certainly all doubtable, yes. I don't think there is such a thing as incorrigible belief. That was a quixotic quest of the old Cartesian epistemology.

lem: "Do you reject all the phenomenologists on account of the Frege critique/H. essentialism."

I don't quite understand your question. I don't reject essentialim, which is not the same as H.'s Platonist
ontology. I do reject the idea of the "given", except
maybe in a very limited sense, because perception is embedded with interpretation layers, and because i don't agree with H.'s solution to "intentionality". I prefer the materialist account of intentionality given by Millikan. On H.'s theory, intentionality becomes an irreduciblly mentalistic feature of reality, not explainable in principle in physical terms, which is inconsistent with physicalism.

t.

lem: "Maybe it just that I have help for a while that a justified belief is a belief that is true, or a belief that under standard conditions we ought to believe. Maybe not, but we can't empirically confirm any belief beyond all doubt. So no belief is totally justified."

A justified belief need not be true. For thousands of years the most educated opinion thought that Euclid's geometry was true. There was nothing here in our terrestrial environment that could falsify the axiom of parallels. The Newtonian pysicists were justifed in their belief in the axiom of parallels, but it turned out to be false.

I don't understand why you think that beliefs must be "justified beyond all doubt" in order to be justified. Why require a super-human standard?

The function of belief is to guide, or be the basis for, action. The quality of the evidence one has reason to want in order to accept a belief will depend on how important to you the actions are that ride on that belief, i.e. how great are the stakes? The greater the stakes, the more confirmation you are rational in trying to obtain.

lem: "But I don't think you can justify science with science: its circular. So contrary to epi-nat
there is some need for armchair philosophy."

I didn't say it was "science" that justifies science or whatever. That is too positivist an interpretation for me. I said that the abductive method is very basic. But the abductive method goes beyond the communities called "science." Their methods are refined from our basic abductive capacity to meet the needs of their particular field of study. But a "science" is a social group. Why privilege that particular social group? Part of my point in mentioning standpoint theory is to question that.

Abduction is hard-wired in us and is constantly used in everyday life. As i say, it goes beyond science.

So then, I guess, your question is: "How can abduction justify abduction? Isn't that circular?"

First, I would point out that circularity, as an epistemic defect, only applies to linear chains of reasoning, in particular, deductive chains. That's because in a deductive argument, the conclusion has no more acceptability than the premises. If the premises are to convey acceptability onto the conclusion, the conclusion cannot be embedded among the premises.

But abduction is not a linear method of reasoning. Hypotheses gain support from each other, not just from the data they are posited to explain. The justification of an abduction is due to its place in a web or network of beliefs. Because abduction is not a linear method of reasoning, "circularity" is not well-defined for abduction and is therefore not a valid objection to an abductive
argument. The point is that hypotheses fit together into a whole web or scheme of ideas that explain our world. It's the fit of a hypothsis with the whole that is relevant to its evaluation.

lem: "It (philosophy) doesn't, get, anywhere. Maybe, because it doesn't articulate with any (questions, experiences) I find meanigful."

Philosophy is a process or activity. The problems don't get resolved but the potential answers get honed and reduced to the most plausible ones. This is analogous to the idea that scientific theories over time, thru practical test and debate, get modified to get a better approximation to what the world is like.

Academic philosophy is a very abstract subject. I'm entirely sympathetic to your feeling that is lacking in social relevance. That is part of the reason i'm not still in the academic world.

t.

i'm not a Quinean. I agree with Quine about some things like his critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction. But Quine was an old positivist empiricist, who did tend to privilege science. I wouldn't agree with the more extreme naturalizers of epistemology. I think the argument I gave in relation to abduction is how to answer the skeptic.

t.

The sceptic says that if your evidence for P is E, and P does not follow from E by deductive certainty, you have no basis for P because it might be false, given E. I'd just point out that it is false that one does not a justification to believe P, based on E, if P doesn't follow deductively from E.

The sceptic needs to prove that human purpose requires us to have this level of certainty for believes, in order for a belief to serve its human function of grounding/guiding action.

t.

Then you need to explain what or who you mean by "the sceptic." A sceptic concerning the independent existence of the physical world typically argues that we don't know of its existence because its existence doesn't deductively follow from the existence of sensory experiences. This was Hume's reasoning, and the reason historically for idealist or phenomenalist reductionism.

t.

This has been interesting.

1. One thing that occurs to me in the argument around realism/anti-realism is that there is often confusion regarding the idea that something objectively exists because the different notions of objective are not grappled with.

For example, objective can mean extra-mental. By this notion, both society/social relations, even insane ones, are objective.

However, objective also relates to extra-human, as in the extra-human physical world. This is a very different kind of objective from society, which while extra-mental, is in no way extra-human.

To take up the 13 pound cat, cat, 13, pound, weight, are both mental and extra-mental, but not extra-human because they are idealizations. However, the object we denote and attempt to make a statement re: is extra-human, that is, it exists objectively of us (though one can get picky and argue that most house cats are at least largely products of human breeding, and so one then merely retreats to objects on the bottom of the ocean or planets or some such.)

The problem is that we are always only approaching the cat as something for us. Why is the cat an object for us? How is it that this thing appears to us at all? It is not its knowability that is per se the problem, as it was for Kant, but its very appearance for us as an object of our consciousness, and our subsequent reflection on our own consciousness, that is at issue for Hegel.

2. I find it interesting that syndicalistcat argues that the critique of the split between science and philosophy effected by Kant is only recently critiqued in a serious manner. Schelling and Hegel both, quite immediately, critique this distinction, as they are obliged to in their rejection of the noumena-phenomena dichotomy and Hegel especially in his attempt to grapple with the subject-object problem. His dialectic is animated by this problem, as well as by most of the other classical 'big questions' of philosophy.

IMO, Hegel is a realist, in so far as he does not deny the independent material existence of the natural world, but he does reject that there is a Subject-Object relation in Nature, insofar as only a being with consciousness, which nature does not have, is properly a Subject. Human social and intellectual life, including the natural sciences, is the product of a subject-object dialectic. For him, and IMO for Marx, humans are only human insofar as they are not natural but social beings and their possible capacities are only meaningful and developed through social activity (which IMO for Hegel is primarily the activity of consciousness, whereas for Marx it is both ideal and material social practice in which material activity has pride of place.)

As such, there is an implicit criticism of Heidegger and Husserelian phenomenology in Hegel's phenomenology and logic.

3. At the same time, Hegel would clearly be an opponent of the law of non-contradiction as an absolute or even as generally true. Analysis has its place, but synthetic logic does something fundamentally different in the reconstruction of the relation between essence and appearance or content and form, in which contradictions do exist, not merely paradoxes.

4. It would be interesting to compare say Marx's notion of what makes the proletariat a universal, revolutionary class with that of standpoint theory, which it certainly could be read as reducing class to just another kind of oppression without getting at the root.

5. This discussion, in its own way, very much reminds me of the discussion about Radicals and a science fetish, as the terms of logic and method raised by syndicalistcat are very much those used by Gurrier, though with greater philosophical sophistication and nuance, and the arguments against him seem very much familiar as well. Happily, I think lem is getting more useful engagement here than there, but the essential lines of contention are not that different.

I think lem said that science abolishes philosophy if one takes syndicalistcat literally. I would rather say that what happens in the 20th century (or rather which coheres in the 20th century) is a split between the reduction of philosophy to the problems of the philosophy of science or logic and method (logical positivism, logical empiricism, analytic philosophy), on one side, and the growth of irrationalism and lebensphilosophie on the other (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, existentialism, etc.) Their split indicates a certain crisis in the possibility of philosophy to proceed rationally that marks the end of philosophy as science, much Ricardo marks the end of political economy's scientific period and its descent into vulgar economics with its own scientistic (socialist, Keynesian) and irrationalist (Marginalist, Schumpeterian, monetarist) extremes.

That of course is a big claim which I will be hard pressed to back up on a listserve :D

Chris

Woh! You've covered a lot of territory, Chris. I confess, I have a hard time making sense out of Hegel. Partly this is the style in which he writes. I think it's not quite correct to say that Hegel rejects the categories that Kant organized in his treatment, tho it may be that my explanation of the way that the old distinctions have been undermined was not clearly explained. I think Hegel attempted a particular way out of the problem that Descartes posed. Descartes looks inward to conscious states to find a ground of certainty, to rebuild knowledge on. But then it becomes a problem how to validate our claims to know of the physical cosmos, which we take to exist independently of our consciousness, indeed as the physical world is perceived by us to be. In the 18th and 19th centuries the most popular solution was idealism -- the reduction of the world to the contents of consciousness. In the end this is not a solution at all because the reduction can't be carried out in practice, in terms of unpacking our physical world language into a language with referentce to consciousness. But Hegel was one of those who tried this tack, as I interpret him. That is, he is an idealist, and as an idealist that shows he is still trapped by Descartes' problematic.

All idealists, except for an extreme solipsist, agree there are things apart from the consciousness of this or that human. But that doesn't make them "realists". Realism concerning the physical world that presents itself in sense
perception is the view that this world, and its various forces, exist independently of all consciousness.

This is also shown by Hegel's use of the term "dialectic" to allegedly refer to an, as you put it, "ex-human" reality. The word "dialectic" was first coined by Aristotle to refer to the social process of trying to convince others of something by giving them reasons, and the back and forth of objection and reply and so on. A dialectic, in other words, is a debate, and its components are the assertions and pieces of reasoning that actors in that process create.
As such, it's hard to see how, say, physical non-human reality has any "dialectic." It all seems like a bad metaphor. Engels, unfortunately, also tried to carry over this piece of baggage from Hegel, but it becomes even more obtuse for Engels since he's a materialist.

Of course, we can see debate and conflict in society as involving "dialectical" components, but these should be at the level of the "superstructure" for a marxist.

redt.: "To take up the 13 pound cat, cat, 13, pound, weight, are both mental and extra-mental, but not extra-human because they are idealizations."

Well, the problem i have here is that it's not clear what you're using the words "13 pound cat", "cat", "13", "pound" and "weight" to refer to. When I talk about my cats, I don't take myself to be talking about "idealizations", tho you could reasonably say that in my thinking and referring to them i make use of concepts that are "idealizations" in some sense. I'd call that a "conception" but i think we agree there is such a thing. But it's in my head, and is thus not what i'm talking about when I'm talking about the black furry things chasing toy mice on my floor.

But then you add: "However, the object we denote and attempt to make a statement re: is extra-human, that is, it exists objectively of us". But i don't think you should want to say that "idealizations" exist independently of us.

Marx, as i read him, is a realist. He believes there are in the world independent of human consciousness "laws of motion," that is, capacities, tendencies, forces. Marx did his PhD dissertation on the debate in Greek philosophy of science between Aristotle and the atomists, and Marx was influenced in his thinking by Aristotle. For exampel, Marx's ethics, to the extent he can be said to have any, seems to be a kind of "human flourishing" ethics, a naturalistic ethics grounded in human nature. Of course it's controversial as to whether Marx has any clear moral theory at all, as in the controversy over whether M. thinks capitalism is unjust.

redt.: "It would be interesting to compare say Marx's notion of what makes the proletariat a universal, revolutionary class with that of standpoint theory, which it certainly could be read as reducing class to just another kind of oppression without getting at the root."

well, standpoint theory isn't a metaphysics, but an epistemology, so it isn't about "reducing" something to something else. There are a variety of different "standpoints" since there are a variety of different oppressions. Standpoint theory doesn't propose a theory about the nature of these various oppressions (tho it may make use of such a theory such as marxism or feminism) but is about how they affect knowledge.

redt.: "I would rather say that what happens in the 20th century (or rather which coheres in the 20th century) is a split between the reduction of philosophy to the problems of the philosophy of science or logic and method (logical positivism, logical empiricism, analytic philosophy), on one side, and the growth of irrationalism and lebensphilosophie on the other (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Husserl, existentialism, etc.) Their split indicates a certain crisis in the possibility of philosophy to proceed rationally that marks the end of philosophy as science."

The analytic tradition also generates its own attacks on realism (Quine, Putnam, and others). The "linguistic turn" of the 20th century generated its own "linguistic idealism" (like Saussure's post-structuralism) just as Descartes' "epistemological turn" generated idealism and phenomenalism and, eventually, both phenomenology and logical empiricism/positivism.

You are willing to take much more seriously the irrealist, irrationalist, post-modernist, post-structuralist, etc. than i am. But, of course, I'm a realist. The best defense of realism against those trends that i've seen is John Post's little book "Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction."

As I've mentioned before, he proposes there a materialist theory of meaning and intentionality as an answer to those anti-realist trends. Very easy to read and very well done.

t.

In your first point, you are correct and even when I wrote it I was not quite happy. It is not that Hegel dispenses with Kant's treatment of form and essence per se, but that he transforms it, just as I think it is fair to say that Marx does not reject the problem Kant poses of transcending both idealism and natural-scientific materialism. Whereas Kant tries to sustain the two, Marx attempts a resolution of the problem. This is what is going on the These on Feuerbach in my opinion, which is even more critical of French materialism than of idealism.

More on the rest later, my sone just appeared with dinner for me: eel roll!!! My favorite!!!

Chris

Mmmm, I am not saying that idealizations exist independent of us, I am saying that idealizations are not merely in our heads or a product of individual brains, but that they are products of social practice, which is both ideas and material relations. I do not take the base-superstructure comment as more than a metaphor. Hans Georg Backhaus has a very good discussion of it in his marvelous essay Between Philosophy and Science in Open Marxism Vol. 1. It is an excellent essay, one of the best treatments of the matter in English IMO.

As for Hegel and Descartes, I tend to think that he considers Spinoza, Hume and Kant's resolutions of the problems Descartes addressed as unsatisfactory. However, I also see Kant, Aristotle and Schelling as Hegel's main invisible interlocutors in the Phenomenology, with Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, most of the Greeks, and Fichte as secondary, though I doubt it would be possible to do any kind of simple association as Hegel touches on something from such a wide range of philosophers before him at one moment or another that even scholars have a hard time discerning it.

Chris

The funny thing about Hegel's language is that he was specifically attacking the horrid academicism of Wolffe and Kant and wanted to write in plain language (he was a high school teacher for many years, after all, in a gymnasium), but his speculative use of many words where he tries to evoke the meaning and its opposite, its simultaneous truth and untruth, makes some of his work especially difficult. I have labored for hours over a single paragraph, and while it is rewarding IMO (and makes me think that much Hegel scholarship is shoddy or shallow, incl notables such as Findlay), it is not easy going.

Chris

Hmmm, my point re: standpoint theory is that it is not sufficient, that in trying to address epistemology from the constitution of social relations, it tends to read, as I read your statement, as one where all oppressions are in effect equal or it is forced to say that it has no answer to the question. Marx and Hegel IMO reject such a separation.

As for irrationalism, i do not take it as more valid. i think that lebensphilosophie is a pox. It is rather that I see the two as poles which are both ultimately incapable of the kind of theoretical work that needs to be undertaken, indicative of a crisis which neither offers a way out of.

I also do not know why dialectic would be relegated to the superstructure. That strikes me as a very odd comment. Can you explain?

Cheers,
Chris

lem: "A recent book I read on Heidegger and Levinas, suggests that the driving force immanent to philosophy has more been that we do not know the things inthemselves."

this is a classic anti-realist gambit and you find it in Putnam and other places. I think Post has a reply to it in "Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction" as does William Alston in "A Realist Conception of Truth." basically it isn't clear what it would mean "to know something in itself." it may be based on some subjectivistic notion of what knowing is, that we only know our own internal states or some such...and that indicates a person is still trapped in the Cartesian box, where we are allegedly separated from the world behind a "veil of appearances" -- a view that doesn't square with the biological function of belief.

If you are ready for a more techical (but clearly written) discussion, you can take a look at John Post's "Terminal Philosophy":

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/~postjf/ch1terml.htm

But I'd recommend reading his little intro book first. Post explains the point i made earlier about how circularity doesn't clearly apply to abductive arguments, and thus the sceptic's argument that it is circular to use facts about our biology and so on is an objection that fails.

t.

lem: "If capacities just_exist, how do the things that they are capacities of come about? If again they just exist as laws are their nature, then this doesn't seem like a contingent fact: either way it didn't immediately grab me as a solution."

typically things that have capacities have structures that the capacities derive from. a chunk of metal has a certain matrix structure at the atomic level, and it has a capacity like conductivity in virtue of this. But those structures have capacities and wouldn't hold together without them. We can't assume there will always be grounding structures because that would lead to a vicious infinite regress. So the most basic physical tendencies must be capacities not grounded in more basic structures.

the laws could be regarded as presupposing the capacities; if you think of laws as the theoretical statement, the capacities are what would verify them, i guess. So we can say that Ohm's Law -- a particular formula -- refers to a capacity that all metals have.

lem: "Can one argue that apparances are external states?"

okay, first you need to differentiate the mental state of something appearing to you to be such-and-such from the the thing's being such-and-such, the state it appears to be in. The state of the thing's being such and such can exist externally.

lem: "How does one acknowledge subjectivity without splitting it from the world."

Again, check out the materialist account of intentionality ("ofness") described in Post's little book (ultimately based on the materialist theory of meaning and intentionality advanced by Millikan).

well, marx needs a social ontology because he assumes there are actual entities such as social formations (which have "laws of motion") and classes. These are social objects.

t.

er adorno would be the obvious choice i guess (the jargon of authenticity), though personally i think heideggers not really worth ''critiqing'' i mean the guy left the nazi party because it wasn't anti-modern enough for him. He's just a pathetic provincial landed peasant cunt who waffles on about oooh how lovely it would be to own a patch of land out of the city in the fresh air. No wonder he found that dull whining liberal academic hannah arendt attractive.

lem: "As I understand it, the law of gravity can be (stipulatively) derived from "water turns into steam when heated" only in conjunction with some initial conditions."

i don't think so, but this is a physical question, not a philosophical question.

t.

lem: "Your saying that there are a handful of basic capacities and these alone can create a magnesium atom?"

No. an explanation for any event, including the coming into existence of a magnesium atom, requires two types of cause: (1) a structural cause; this is a tendency, susceptibility, capacity, that is, what philosophers call a dispositional property; and (2) an occasioning cause, which is an occurent entity such as an event or action or process. Capacities are the structural components in causal explanations.

t.

The series of occasioning causes may be infinite. The theists of course will say that to explain the totality one must posit God, outside the physical cosmos. But that does not lead to a final explanation. That's because God's will to create such a world would be an unexplainable contingency. In that case, the addition of the God hypothesis adds nothing. Rejecting the God hypothesis, the nature of the world would be the basic structural causes. And these would be necessary. But you can't get rid of contingency, and thus something must be unexplained.

t.

lem: "But you don't seem to be arguing for the existence of just "something", but of specifically capacities or occasional causes. So is it ok to leave the problem?"
okay for me. My claim was that there is causality, and that this has two aspects, structural and occasioning (that is, capactities and events). This seems unproblematic to me, but I'm a realist.

lem: "Eraly H. says that history has meaning through the way in which the past is interpreted by the self (that cannoty exist separately from the choise of histroical mode but can choose differently). Later H. says that history has meaning and is driven by the tacit inter-relationahsips between epochal manifestations of being (i.e. philosophy)."

well, as i said at the beginning of this discussion, I don't profess to understand Heidegger and i'm not sure he has enough insights to justify expending the effort. 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. But the part about history being "driven by" philosophy i find rather bizarre, if taken literally. As Marx might say, history is driven by human practice, not by the efforts of the philosophers to understand it.

t.

lem: "You haven't made the best case for reducing everything (meaningful acts mostly?) to an understanding that is compatible with science."

well, i'm not a reductionist. I don't want to go into the details of a theory of meaning here. I would suggest reading the Post book that I referred to. The argument there is a long one.

lem: "And I don't think you can be called a realist, for everything if you deny the existence of mindindeoendent e.g. mathematics."

No, i don't deny the reality of mathematics. I just don't think it has an apriori basis, i don't think it consists of entities outside the physical world. If you mean I deny the existence of eternally, necessarily existing abstract entities outside the physical cosmos, yes, I do deny THAT form of realism, that is Platonist realism, and I am not a Platonist. Like Scotus, I believe the world of abstract objects exists in re, in the physical world. the Platonist view involves assumptions we don't have to make, in my opinion. but this is hurried, i'm about to run off to the gym.

t.

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.

I tried what I thought was reasoning in my last exam: changing sentences so that they implie further ones... etc. I failed so miserabley.

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"

How do we know this?

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?

If this does not make sense, then I mean that I would imagine that you think that the laws of physics/psychology are more basic than theoreis of meaning, in that the laws of physics/psychology imply theoreis of meaning but not visa versa.

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?

So, we discover the fundamental laws of the universe from which all other laws can be derived (don't know if you think that's possible)... there has to be capacities and events, but how do these laws in particular come about?

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.

So, yes, I can't grasp that the laws of the universe can be shown to be necessary.

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.

No, because I reject the sense-data theory of perception. Let's say I see a leaf, and see it as a certain shade of green, having a certain shape. Call this leaf L, and call its exact shade G. Then L's-being-G is a concrete state of affairs that exists and is perceived by me, it is the "object" of that perception. So, the leaf itself and the physical shade -- which is a surface light reflectance -- are consituents of the thing that is the "object" of my perceiving.

If this was a total hallucination and there was no leaf there, then my internal perceptual state didn't "latch" to any actual object, so there isn't really an "object" of perception in that case, it only seems as if there is.

I'm not sure what Merleau-Ponty means by "passive". He may be referring to the sense data theory of perception. But i reject that theory. I agree that perception is active, animals are continually exploring their environment and there is close coordination between movement and perception. Also, sensory experience is never without interpretation. So, what gets determined as the "object" will depend on the mindset, the perceptual dispositions and training, of the perceiver.

Let's say you're out in the African bush and you've never been there before and you're with a native guide. The guide says "Look at that leopard." But you can't "see" the leopard. Then suddenly a "bush" moves and now you see the leopard. The guide could see the leopard when you couldn't even tho the light input to the retinas was the same.

t.

lem:

I don't understand that at all: are you saying that the qualia "green" is a consituent of the concrete existant object? I don't see how you can be...

The qualia green would be a constituent of a physical state of affairs, this-leaf-here-being-this-green-shade.

Do yoou meean by rejeccting the sense data theory of perception that two people with the same pattern of activation over a retina can see different things?

That's not what rejection of the sense datum theory *means* tho that is certainly true. But a person who accepts the sense data theory might also agree with that, if they say that perception is a cognitive state that has a sensing of sense data as a component.

Is my understanding of "new realism" correct? I have trouble understanding what you are getting at, sometimes - I guess I';m just haven't learnt enough.

I'm not sure. Can you refer to a particular author?

t.

Perception is direct in the sense that there is no inference, and it is not in virtue of being aware of something else that I see this tree. Interpretation doesn't imply indirectness. Interpretation also doesn't imply anti-realism. If I see the cat's white fur, this is an awareness of the cat's fur being white that isn't based on or derived from an awareness of something else, such as "appearances" or sense data.

t.

Colors, in my view, are surface light reflectances. This is a surface (or volume) property that derives from the molecular structure. I think we need to assume this in order to explain why we have color vision. What is the evolutionary point? Suppose you're a chimp in the rain forest. It's very useful to you if the yellow of a ripe banana stands out from the green background foliage. When a banana ripens, its surface chemical composition changes, and you get a different light reflectance.

It's thought that the colors of fruits and flowers co-evolved with animals. That's because bees have color vision, and the color of the flowers is an indication to them of the availability of nectar. The plants need the bees, or other insects, in order to be pollinated, so it is to the survival advantage of the plants to generate colorful flowers, to attract the insects, and it is a survival advantage to bees, which in fact have color vision, to be able to see these colors.

We sometimes only see a property in virtue of having certain cognitive dispositions. Our brains can be "calibrated" (via learning) to pick up, or locate, features we might otherwise miss.

t.

Let's say you see the thing there as a leaf. That is interpretation. You may just see it as a leaf without any conscious inference or apparent mediation. You're picking up directly its being a leaf, because you, through your life learning, have become calibrated to see these objects. It's psychologically direct, but you couldn't see it as a leaf without certain cognitive dispositions or capacities you have. Just as you immediately understand what someone says to you when they speak to you in English. You interpret the sounds as conveying a meaning. But you don't have to think about it. You see immediately what they are saying.

t.

I don't know what you mean by "mediated by concepts." Perception is a cognitive process, it involves the use of concepts. The word "leaf", when you hear it, evoks a concept. You exercise this concept when you look at trees.
Again, I don't know what you mean by "an object in itself".

t.

Why would the object be different if unperceived? Visually perceiving the object doesn't change the object itself. The surfaces reflect light. If I happen to be around the "collect" light refracted from its surfaces, I may see it, and thus "capture" information about it, such as its distance from me, its color, its shape.

I don't know what you mean by "mediated by conscious processes." If I see something that I am familiar with, like leaves, the concept leaf is activated and my awareness of it as a leaf is part of that percept. But it's not the case that i am aware of the leaf only in virtue of being aware of something else; i make no conscious inference about it being a leaf, its being a leaf is psychologically direct to me. This is part of the phenomenology of perceiving the leaf. That it *is* a percept of a leaf depends on the leaf actually being there. If it's a hallucination then it only seemed to me to be a percept of a leaf.

I don't know what "new realism" is.

t.

lem: "I don't see how the object-as-preceived and perceived-object can be the same thing if the object is interpreted? Is this evcn what you are saying? I also don't see how an perceived object (object-in-itself) can be in part greenness."

When we talk about things around us in the world, we don't use language like "object-as-perceived." This is philosophical invention. Inventions like this have to be cashed out in ordinary language, and they are warranted as technical lingo only if they are useful. I frankly do not find that way of talking useful.

Look at this way: Any given physical object has a myriad of features. We have sensory capacities which evolution has fitted us with. There are some properties which evolution itself designed this sensory equipment to pick up or capture. Our visual system is a color vision system. This means it is desiged by evolution to pick up the surface (or volume) light reflectances, that is, colors.

But physical objects have many other properties. The capacities or powers of objects we understand by way of hypothesis and test. A set of hypotheses about something make up a "theory" about that thing. We gain some of these theories when we learn language as kids, because we learn the theory of natural kinds, which is embodied in our language. This is the idea that things have powers or capacities that are more or less enduring and which account for their perceived behaviors. When I see something as a cat, I'm already attributing to it a set of powers or dispositions, a certain nature, a nature it shares with other things that I call "cats".

Now, let's take this cat here, Lucy. Lucy has black fur.
This fur remains black when Lucy isn't being perceived by me. Lucy also remains a cat whether I see her or not. Her nature doesn't change. This is so despite the fact that when I see her, to see her as a cat my incoming visual inputs are interpreted by my brain as a cat, using my cognitive dispositiions, my mental calibration as an organic tracker of features in the world. This just means that my sensory apparatus isn't designed by itself to track this property, but my brain has been calibrated to do so. Either way, I'm capturing properties the perceived object actually has. And it has thesse properties irrespective of whether I'm perceiving her or not. My brain's use of its cat concept in the perception of the cat doesn't alter the object being perceived. Rather, that concept makes me able to perceive a feature of the cat i otherwise might miss. A baby who hasn't yet developed this concept can still see and track the movements of Lucy. She just doesn't yet have the ability to perceive a certain property, this thing's having a certain nature that goes beyond, and underlies, the behaviors.

t.

Here is the situation. I'm looking at a leaf. It is a particular shade of green, I also see it as a leaf. What capacities am I using when I have this perception? If I didn't have the concept of a leaf, I wouldn't see it as a leaf. A baby wouldn't see it as a leaf. As we learn concepts about things in our world, we also gain the ability to recognize properties, to see properties, that we could not do before we had the concept. Adding the concept thus adds to what we can see.

There is a certain shape of glass and metal, and i immediately perceive it as a phone booth. I perceive the shiny stuff I can see through as glass, as a translucent solid. My perception has been affected by the concepts that i have learned. When light hits the retina there are only certain properties that your sensory equipment is designed by evolution to pick up, such as color and distance. But through learning, through acquiring concepts, you extend what you can see. You can see features of things you couldn't have when you were a baby straight of your mother's womb. Picking up properties of the things we see in virtue of having concepts is what it is for the brain to "interpret" the incoming sensory inputs from the retina. This doesn't mean you are not seeing what is there.

You can think of this as applying the method of hypothesis to expand our understanding of the properties of things, by making hypotheses about what properties things have. So if I see the shiny stuff as glass, I will take it to be hard, not something i can just stick my hand thru, like water. To say that a certain mix of stimuli at the retina leads to me perceiving this thing as leaf, is to say my brain has added to its abilities the ability to apply a certain theory about objects in the world, which i have learned...a great deal of this we learn when we are very little. Again, this doesn't mean the properties aren't really there. I'm talking about how we acquire the ability to perceive them.

The language of appearing makes sense if we are talking about illusions. A thing can appear to be taller than it really is due to some optical illusion or appear to be a color other than it really is. Our sensory equipment was designed in a natural environment tens of thousands of years ago, when so many industrially made products didn't exist. We can create colors, via paints, that we were not designed to differentiate from others. This can lead to problems identifying your car in a parking lot at dusk.

So, if you ask, "Am i seeing the thing the way it is?", this
makes sense if you fear that you are subject to an optical illusion. But somehow I don't think you were talking about optical illusions.

Maybe you are asking: How do i know that there is a world of things independent of my concsciousness, which I seem to be perceiving, and how do i know it has these properties that it seems to me to have? Is that the question you are asking?

t.

lem:

But my perception of the particular shade of green, is identical to the shade of green of the leaf if it is interpreted?

Does a tree falling in the words make a sound, and all that..

The green shade of the leaf is no different situation here than any other property that you perceive as a feature of something, or that you believe it to have, for that matter. You're asking about the mind-independent reality of things we perceive, of the world of physical things that appears to us in our perceptual experience?

It's part of our theory of this world that things in it do exist independently of your consciousness and that of other humans. We posit a physical cosmos in which we humans are animal organisms on this planet, and this cosmos has physical forces which we think account for how the world has developed physically and so on. This theory of the world we have is the simplest and most comprehensive explanation for our experience.

What we know is that we are animal organisms that have evolved in a particular environment, and this explains why we have the particular sensory capacities we do have. Humans have the same visual system as almost all other primates. This means we are able to pick out a broader range of colors than other mammals. In virtue of our acquiring beliefs about the world around us, such as beliefs about natural kinds which I mentioned, we see how this would be adaptive, in the sense of furthering the prospects of our species, and we can see how developing the ability to produce sentences to convey factual information to each other would be extremely helpful to coordinate behavior, and in fact the entire history of growth of human productive power would have been impossible without it. if we constantly got things wrong about the way the world was, that would not have been very good for our prospects of survival.

I'm mentioning here things that explain what i mean when i say the hypothesis of the physical world as we believe it to be is a hypothesis that offers the best explanation of our experience.

t.

lem: "But the properties of the book/the book as I perceive it/the patch of blueness I perceive infront of me (I'll call this A) has been interpreted. So if the object unperceived is identical to A, then it has been interpreted. But that is impossible."

You've committed a logical fallacy. The greenness of the leaf is perceptually interpreted by you only when you perceive it. It can't therefore follow that it is being perceptually interpreted by someone's brain when it isn't being perceived by anyone. Being perceptually interpreted by you is a relational property of the greenness of the leaf. The greenness of the leaf has this relational property only when it stands in the appropriate relation to you.

t.

When you are a newborn baby, you may perceive without interpretation. But it may be impossible for humans once we've developed a cognitive repertoire of concepts.

t.

some recently published letters from 1931/32 show him in deep admiration for Hitler and as a believer of anti-semitic conspiracy theories: http://www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2016-10/martin-heidegger-briefe-antisemitismus/komplettansicht