I’m not sure there’s anything worthwhile in the idea, but it pleased me. What I was really hoping was that there’d be some way to formalize and then measure the process of iteration and refinement of theory (using evolutionary game theory). Pie in the sky, but food for thought.
My working theory is that this is apples and oranges: belief formation is exactly what you describe in the first sentence; what you describe in the second and third are not quite unrelated to the first, but might as well be.
Affirming or asserting a belief, with the commitment that entails, is a social thing; we’re looking at a process of negotiating, within a group, toward communal action—in its origin, anyway. The tools of that sort of negotiation, of course, get repurposed. This is the use I make of the famous Sellars quote:
The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says.
I read “justifying” here as “justifying to others”, supporting what I say with reasons, asking the same of them, and so on. (Note that it’s not “what one believes or thinks” but “what one says”.) But that’s not the process of belief formation at all.
There’s a lot to say about commitment, but the point here would be that it’s a social matter. The idea of making a commitment to yourself, a private one, is not entirely ridiculous, but it doesn’t have the sort of teeth that commitment to others, given in the presence of others, does.
That’s a snapshot of the plates I’ve been juggling for a while. Sometimes a post is one of the plates soaring into the air, and sometimes it’s one crashing to the ground uncaught.
The measurement problem in quantum physics has never been about observers—it’s about interaction. The usage of the term “observer” in it is simply because of the experiments in which “measurement” and “observation” are the key interactions. That’s why the von Neumann interpretation has been ridiculed in quantum physics research.
The interaction-cause of collapse in observation has less to do with observation than with the fact that, in order to make an observation, you need a physical interaction with the observed object—either a probe, a photon bouncing off it, a charge changing it, etc. You cannot observe something without a physical interaction, and this interaction collapses a quantum state.
So I don’t see how it can be postulated that “reality itself is not mind-independent.” It is this phenomenological stretch that I think takes things too far, especially when using a misunderstanding of quantum collapse as “proof.”
I am not rejecting phenomenological concepts—I just don’t think they precede reality. Every proof we have points to the experience of reality being mind-created, lagging behind “actual” reality, drawn from certain narrow perceptual limitations that were key for the level of navigation we, as an animal, needed on this planet, for the traits we developed.
And I think this is an outdated look at science, using a critique from a time when modern scientific methods weren’t even in actual practice. There is no conflict between phenomenology and science today in the way you frame it; the acknowledgment of human perception and the perspective it yields is included in research, but we also know more about perception and about the limitations of our perception for the purpose of understanding reality as it really is, independent from us—which is also why the von Neumann interpretation got ridiculed. It’s an outdated understanding of consciousness, which spawned the entire pseudoscience New Age quantum mysticism movement fueled by the Wigner paper.
The point being: yes, there’s a separation between the reality we perceive and the measurement results when doing scientific research on reality, but it’s a heavy stretch (based on quantum mysticism) to go from that to claiming reality itself is partly formed by our consciousness.
There’s also no evidence that our consciousness has any more of an active role in the progression of reality than any other physical object in the universe. Why would it be considered a precursor to reality when actual evidence points to it being caused by reality (an experience playing out after external reality already happened)? It doesn’t matter if that experience is microseconds after external reality—it concludes any simultaneous experience of reality as an illusion, brought on by prediction simulations intertwined with a sensory data summary.
It’s this gap that’s at the core of the problem with us navigating reality. Even if our internal system is fast, it’s not fast enough for us to function in sync with reality. It needs automation that forms an action/reaction response.
But this provokes a further question: if our navigation of reality feels like free will, how can it lag behind? And it is from this that my theory stems—that we are autonomous beings operating on an action/reaction algorithm, while the experience we have of this operation makes us unable to experience the automation itself, but rather the result of it as if it were in the absolute present. A necessary illusion for an adaptive computation to not collapse its operation.
What meaning? These statements appeal more to mysticism and religion than anything else. It’s a form of blaming math and science for the problem of finding meaning in our existence. Such a conclusion requires some form of certainty that there’s an ultimate meaning that can be attained by the messy, and almost always extremely biased, perspective of the human perspective and psyche.
It ends up being a false dichotomy in which the scientific findings about reality are in opposition to the phenomenological experience of the mind. As far as I see it, it seems more like a rejection out of a need for that ultimate meaning, brought on by the existential crisis that much of science has brought mankind by the evidence that exposed old human biases in explaining the universe around us.
And as the goalposts were shifted further and further from the realm of religion, folklore, and mysticism, it prompted a rejection that required the tools of science to turn science on its head—a creation of opposition, of separation between the mind and the measurements of science. To return value to the human experience as the true reality and science as the devil blinding us from the ultimate meaning of life.
Even though the experience of our consciousness isn’t at all ignored within modern scientific research.
And I think this is why my theory about experience isn’t jiving well with your take on phenomenology: because it’s based on a scientific perspective that includes the experience itself as part of reality, without adhering to the idea that consciousness is necessary for it to exist. A rejection of an “ultimate meaning” and that quantum mysticism of consciousness is causing reality. Because those rather fall under the requirements for maintaining some higher existential role for humans than there’s any evidence in nature and the universe for us to have—an existential need for purpose, rather than an honest look at human existence as it most probably is.
And I think the conclusions you’ve drawn from Husserl are stretching them too far beyond what his conclusions were. As I see it, phenomenology isn’t really a critique of science, it’s a focus on the human experience as a perspective, which can be used even in synthesis with science.
Why must there be any form of control? Can’t the mind be just a more complex form of a natural phenomena acting and reacting with its environment, just like everything else in nature and the universe?
I think the idea of control and free will is ignoring the very plausible concept that neither of them exists.
It’s not a bad instinct — the iterative refinement of theory does have a structure that looks like it should be formalizable somehow. I’m just not convinced game theory is the right formalism for it, since the “opponent” (the world) isn’t really strategizing. But the impulse to find a rigorous way to model how inquiry actually progresses over time is a good one. Might be worth looking into some of the formal epistemology literature on belief revision — stuff in the AGM tradition — which tries to do something adjacent to what you’re imagining, without the game-theoretic baggage.
I like the honesty of that last line — I know the feeling well.
But I want to push back on the clean separation between belief formation and assertion. I think the split is doing more work than it can support. You’re saying: belief formation is just the predictive-pragmatic process, and the normative stuff — commitment, justification, reasons — only enters when we go public, when we assert to others. Sellars gets recruited for this because he says “what one says.”
But think about what actually happens when you inquire on your own. You’re working through a problem, nobody’s watching, and you entertain a hypothesis. You check it against the evidence. You notice it doesn’t quite hold up. You revise. That whole process — the checking, the noticing, the revising — already has normative structure. You’re not just passively updating like a Bayesian thermostat. You’re actively evaluating, and the evaluation has standards. Who are you justifying to? Nobody. But the justificatory structure is still operative.
The Sellars quote is great, but I think reading “justifying” as exclusively “justifying to others” is too narrow. The ability to justify is what matters — the capacity to give reasons, which is present in the act of judgment itself, whether or not anyone asks for them. The social practice of giving and asking for reasons doesn’t create that capacity; it makes it visible, exercises it, refines it. But it was already there in the private act of judging responsibly rather than just guessing.
So I’d say the social dimension is genuinely important — I don’t want to downplay it — but it’s not constitutive of normativity. It’s one of the crucial arenas where normative commitments get tested and sharpened. The teeth of commitment don’t come from the social consequences of breaking it. They come from the fact that if you affirm something you know you don’t have grounds for, you’ve failed as an inquirer, audience or no audience.
Now, one could try to argue that the solitary inquirer is just running an internalized version of the social practice, arguing with an imagined interlocutor — but I think this gets the order of explanation backwards. You can only internalize a practice you already understand, and understanding that the practice involves holding yourself to standards is the normative capacity in question. The social story explains how the capacity gets developed and refined, not how it’s constituted.
You need to read the discussions we have been having with Patterner, and understand how we came to the questions. Remember there hasn’t been any conclusions or answers at the moment. There are only questions arisen and inferences.
If you trace the discussion, it is based on the law of cause and effect. Every phenomenon in universe works under the law, hence we are presuming that mind also does too.
That sounds like a light minded speculation with no supporting arguments.
That’s a very good question. When we assume free will, we assume a break between the mind and the cause/effect relations by which we describe the physical world, what you call the law of cause and effect. This leaves Christoffer’s answer as ineffective
It’s very doubtful that everything which occurs follows the law of cause and effect. Quantum physics has demonstrated this, and the quantum understanding has designated that things like individual nuclear transmutations in radioactive decay are “random”. When things are designated as random this means that it is believed that they do not follow the law of cause and effect.
Quantum mechanics deals with possibilities, and this presents a very peculiar problem which can be explained with the follow example. Suppose there is a thousand possibilities as to what will happen in the next moment, within a specified context, and only one of those possibilities will be actualized.
If we propose that it is purely random chance, which one will be actualized, that proposition would be unintelligible nonsense. It would mean that one of the possibilities is actualized without any cause of it. It’s nonsense because we have a specified context, and we see no evidence of anything within that context as causing the observed change, but instead of assuming a cause which escapes our observational capacity, we assume the change occurs spontaneously, without cause. To say that something occurs spontaneously without a cause renders the occurrence as unintelligible.
On the other hand, if the supposed “thousand possibilities” in the example, are each truly possible then we cannot assume that the occurrence follows the law of cause and effect. So this leaves us with the conclusion, that if those possibilities are truly possible, then something must select from them, and this selection process is what causes one rather than the others to be actualized.
In other words, when we assume that there is real possibility as to what may happen, to make this intelligible to us, we must assume that some form of “agent” selects from the possibilities. Then there is a “cause” of which possibility is actualized (random chance being unintelligible nonsense), but it is not consistent with the law of cause and effect, because it is a selection.
A mind that does not think does not necessarily entail a lack of mind, otherwise we are going to say that a person under anesthesia has no mind, when it would be more accurate to say that such a person is unconscious.
But a mind lacking thoughts permanently, may be no mind at all, that much seems reasonable.
And this makes sense too. Very little is understood about the brain to create experiences that match the intensity of real life. But that is a lack of knowledge and sophistication.
On the other hand, people have strong hallucinations or otherwise altered states that often feel “more real” than the ordinary world. We cannot will away hallucinations any more than mystical experiences and the like, but agency does matter, absolutely.
I agree that our consciousness is not a precursor of reality. However, now that we are here, we certainly play more of an active role in the progression of reality than any other physical physical object (that we are aware of) in the universe.
I know I’m in the vast minority, if not entirely on my own, with this idea, but I believe it does entail a lack of mind. Just as a bunch of motionless people on a court with a basketball entails a lack of basketball game. The potential is there is each case. Players, ball, and court means a game can take place. A brain means thinking can take place.
I don’t know if anyone disagrees so far, but that’ll change now. The basketball game is nothing more or less than the passing, shooting, dribbling, time outs, etc. I think the mind is nothing more or less than the thinking.
We don’t say there’s a basketball game separate from those activities. I say there isn’t a mind separate from the thinking.
There is no basketball game that’s inactive. There’s either shooting, passing, dribbling, etc., taking place, or there isn’t. I say there is no mind that’s inactive. There’s either thinking taking place, or there isn’t.
A proper understanding of just what the so-called Copernican revolution was getting at, shows the dynamism of your third way to be not the case. The entire German Enlightenment idealist paradigm is built on what he was getting at, in exact opposition to your third way claim.
These long drawn out comment/response entries, while fun to both read and write, tend to diminish the import of the original. Words and intentions get twisted and we forget what the objection actually was.
I’m aware that by the same token as the Kantian position supersedes the Aristotle/Thomist, so too does your third way supersede the Kantian. I just don’t agree with your descriptions for how it goes about accomplishing its goal.
A81/B107: “…. Now this is the listing of all original pure concepts that the understanding contains in itself a priori, and on account of which it is only a pure understanding; for by these concepts alone can it understand something in the manifold of intuition, i.e., think an object for it….”
Yes it is. There is nothing any of those words represents that didn’t originate within your intelligence, which is, probably safe to say, inside you. That water freezes accords with concepts of understanding; why water freezes accords with principles of reason.
We don’t care about the sentence. I said understanding succeeds when it thinks the relation of its conceptions conforms, but I could have said doesn’t contradict. I also said when it’s all said and done, meaning the tripartite methodology of the faculty of thought writ large, comprised of synthesis, judgement and reason. I didn’t feel the need for the technicalities.
Be funny, wouldn’t it, if understanding lamented to the rest of the system, hey don’t blame me; intuition wouldn’t let me do that. The rest of the system then fires back, just do your own job.
(A52/B76: “…. these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. Understanding cannot intuit; intuition cannot think. Only from their unification can cognition arise. But on this account one must not mix up their roles, rather one has great cause to separate them carefully from each other and distinguish them….”)
Time is what it is about that given material, and the sorting of judgements relative to it, particularly the quality thereof, re: validity/invalidity, according to their respective relations in time, is entirely an internal systemic capacity. Or, if you prefer, “entirely done by us”.
I never said there wasn’t a structure; I’ve only objected to this third-way idea of what it is and how it manifests.
Greater specificity does not necessarily mean correct. A cognition of greater depth may, but it may not, represent the thing to which it relates. Correctness is merely an indication of form, the accordance or not with logical law, content be what it may.
Experience is that by which the relation of conceptions justified, and in which of course the correctness of form is necessarily presupposed.
Again, if genuine understanding is the faculty as a whole, then it is true the application of the categories is not enough for the distinguishing mark called cognition, just as the pure intuitions alone are not enough for sensibility, the distinguishing mark for which is called phenomenon.
The question itself arises from within the machinery, from which follows the machinery can provide the means to judge how to satisfy the inquiry.
One mustn’t substitute the philosophically uninteresting with the methodologically necessary.
Yes……
….and yes, which limits validity to form, but justification to content.
Nahhhh…..all I need is the necessary/contingent distinction. The rule vs the law; the fact vs the idea. And as far as I’m concerned, a cognition is valid iff its construction is justified, which just means I’m correct in the thinking of it.
I’m not going to, and no proper dualist ever should, admit to promoting that exercise, and I hope nothing I’ve said hints in favor of it. If you got that species of pointing from me, I’ll immediately recant, upon being exposed to it and its context. You know….to make sure you didn’t misunderstand something I said.
All the rest is equally susceptible to counterpoint, but then we’d have another one of those damnably long posts. So enough for now.
A proper understanding of just what the so-called Copernican revolution was getting at, shows the dynamism of your third way to be not the case. The entire German Enlightenment idealist paradigm is built on what he was getting at, in exact opposition to your third way claim.
These long drawn out comment/response entries, while fun to both read and write, tend to diminish the import of the original. Words and intentions get twisted and we forget what the objection actually was.
I’m aware that by the same token as the Kantian position supersedes the Aristotle/Thomist, so too does your third way supersede the Kantian. I just don’t agree with your descriptions for how it goes about accomplishing its goal.
A81/B107: “…. Now this is the listing of all original pure concepts that the understanding contains in itself a priori, and on account of which it is only a pure understanding; for by these concepts alone can it understand something in the manifold of intuition, i.e., think an object for it….”
Yes it is. There is nothing any of those words represents that didn’t originate within your intelligence, which is, probably safe to say, inside you. That water freezes accords with concepts of understanding; why water freezes accords with principles of reason.
We don’t care about the sentence. I said understanding succeeds when it thinks the relation of its conceptions conforms, but I could have said doesn’t contradict. I also said when it’s all said and done, meaning the tripartite methodology of the faculty of thought writ large, comprised of synthesis, judgement and reason. I didn’t feel the need for the technicalities.
Be funny, wouldn’t it, if understanding lamented to the rest of the system, hey don’t blame me; intuition wouldn’t let me do that. The rest of the system then fires back, just do your own job.
(A52/B76: “…. these two faculties or capacities cannot exchange their functions. Understanding cannot intuit; intuition cannot think. Only from their unification can cognition arise. But on this account one must not mix up their roles, rather one has great cause to separate them carefully from each other and distinguish them….”)
Time is what it is about that given material, and the sorting of judgements relative to it, particularly the quality thereof, re: validity/invalidity, according to their respective relations in time, is entirely an internal systemic capacity. Or, if you prefer, “entirely done by us”.
I never said there wasn’t a structure; I’ve only objected to this third-way idea of what it is and how it manifests.
Greater specificity does not necessarily mean correct. A cognition of greater depth may, but it may not, represent the thing to which it relates. Correctness is merely an indication of form, the accordance or not with logical law, content be what it may.
Experience is that by which the relation of conceptions justified, and in which of course the correctness of form is necessarily presupposed.
Again, if genuine understanding is the faculty as a whole, then it is true the application of the categories is not enough for the distinguishing mark called cognition, just as the pure intuitions alone are not enough for sensibility, the distinguishing mark for which is called phenomenon.
The question itself arises from within the machinery, from which follows the machinery can provide the means to judge how to satisfy the inquiry.
One mustn’t substitute the philosophically uninteresting with the methodologically necessary.
Nahhhh…..all I need is the necessary/contingent distinction. The rule vs the law; the fact vs the idea. And as far as I’m concerned, a cognition is valid iff its construction is justified, which just means I’m correct in the thinking of it.
I’m not going to, and no proper dualist ever should, admit to promoting that exercise, and I hope nothing I’ve said hints in favor of it. If you got that species of pointing from me, I’ll immediately recant, upon being exposed to it and its context. You know….to make sure you didn’t misunderstand something I said.
All the rest is equally susceptible to counterpoint, but then we’d have another one of those damnably long posts. So enough for now.
Sorry, those up in the booth. Somehow I unintentionally posted, then when trying to intentionally post, the ensuing error message all but said I was repeating myself.
Me being me, got all pissed off, blaming things I don’t understand, not knowing everything I wanted to say was already out there.
Again, me being me, it takes me forever to come up with this stuff, so when I get told it ain’t going nowhere, I get a little, er, off kilter, shall we say.
I appreciate the acknowledgment that my position is meant to supersede the Kantian one rather than simply ignore it — that’s exactly right. But saying the German Idealist tradition was built “in exact opposition” to my third way doesn’t settle the question of which position is correct; it just identifies the disagreement.
And I’d actually push back on “exact opposition.” Kant himself kept introducing elements — receptivity, the thing-in-itself, the conformity of concepts to intuition — that sit uneasily within a purely constructivist reading of his project. The Idealist tradition after Kant recognized this too, which is why Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel each tried to resolve the instability differently. So the question isn’t whether my third way departs from Kant. It does. The question is whether Kant’s own framework can remain stable without something like it.
The word “contains” in the above passage describes the understanding’s native capacities for action, not a static inventory. I believe Kant would balk at a reading that treats the understanding as a mere receptacle for its own concepts. Consider B130:
"For it is an act of spontaneity of the faculty of representation; and since this faculty, to distinguish it from sensibility, must be entitled understanding, all combination…is an act of understanding.
…
To this act the general title ‘synthesis’ may be assigned…Being an act of the self-activity of the subject, it cannot be executed save by the subject itself." (emphasis mine)
See also A51/B75. I feel Kant was pretty clear on this point, so we’ll have to agree to disagree on this.
The molecular behavior that explains freezing doesn’t originate within me. I didn’t bring hydrogen bonding into being; I learned about it, and I could have gotten it wrong. If everything my understanding grasps originated within my intelligence, then it would be impossible for my intelligence to be mistaken about how water freezes — since I’d just be reporting my own contents.
But “doesn’t contradict” is much weaker than “conforms to,” and the substitution actually hurts your position. Lots of conceptual determinations don’t contradict a given intuition — that’s the whole problem of underdetermination. “The sound was caused by a bird” and “the sound was caused by a falling branch” might both fail to contradict the auditory intuition. Non-contradiction can’t select between them.
Here Kant says understanding can’t intuit and intuition can’t think — they have distinct roles. But this was exactly my point. Intuition contributes something to cognition that the understanding doesn’t generate on its own.
Time can sequence our judgments, but it can’t sort them into correct and incorrect. I judged “lake” at t1 and “not-lake” at t2 — time tells me the second came after the first. It doesn’t tell me the second is better.
The question arising from within the machinery doesn’t entail the answer is found there too. Hunger arises from within the organism — that doesn’t mean food does. The whole point of a question is that it registers a lack, something the questioner doesn’t yet have. And what satisfies a genuine inquiry isn’t just any internally generated determination that quiets the itch. It’s one that gets things right.
Correct by what measure? If the answer is “by the standards of the thinking itself,” you’ve gone fully circular. Every thinker, including the flat-earther, is “correct in the thinking of it” by their own lights. The necessary/contingent distinction doesn’t help you here either, because the question isn’t whether a judgment is necessary or contingent — it’s whether it’s true. Necessary truths can be unknown and contingent truths can be known. Neither category tells you whether a given cognition actually gets reality right. You keep reaching for formal distinctions — valid/invalid, necessary/contingent — to do the work that only a substantive relation between judgment and world can do.
Sure — here are the concessions I had in mind: you said concepts must “conform to” intuition (post 151), that intelligibility is a precondition of inquiry such that without it the intellect has nothing to work with (same post), and that correctness “relates to what is” as opposed to what ought to be (same post). Each of those grants that something not produced by the cognitive subject exercises authority over the subject’s cognitive activity — conformity is a normative relation, a precondition is a constraint, and “what is” is precisely the mind-independent real. I don’t think you need to recant any of them, honestly. I think they’re the strongest things you’ve said in this exchange. But they do sit uneasily with the official position.
We’ve both begun to repeat ourselves now, so I’ll bow out here. Feel free to have the last word, and thanks for the interesting and lively discussion!
This is factually incorrect. As Brian Greene explains in The Fabric of the Cosmos (Penguin, Pp 96-97):
The explanation of uncertainty as arising through the unavoidable disturbance caused by the measurement process has provided physicists with a useful intuitive guide… . However, it can also be misleading. It may give the impression that uncertainty arises only when we lumbering experimenters meddle with things. This is not true. Uncertainty is built into the wave structure of quantum mechanics and exists whether or not we carry out some clumsy measurement. As an example, take a look at a particularly simple probability wave for a particle, the analog of a gently rolling ocean wave, shown in Figure 4.6:
Since the peaks are all uniformly moving to the right, you might guess that this wave describes a particle moving with the velocity of the wave peaks; experiments confirm that supposition. But where is the particle? Since the wave is uniformly spread throughout space, there is no way for us to say that the electron is here or there. When measured, it literally could be found anywhere. So while we know precisely how fast the particle is moving, there is huge uncertainty about its position. And as you see, this conclusion does not depend on our disturbing the particle. We never touched it. Instead, it relies on a basic feature of waves: they can be spread out.
Right! But that construction also includes what you’re calling ‘proof’. The hypothetical framework within which such statements are demonstrated is itself mind-dependent. You believe we can get outside that and see ‘reality as it is’ - but we can’t. At best we can arrive at inter-subjective agreement - observations which are confirmed across many different observations by many observers. But ‘the observer’ is never considered a part of that. This is where the problem lies.
Also incorrect. Husserl’s Crisis of the Western Sciences was published after Husserl’s death. He died in 1938. It was written in the period 1934-37. Husserl was fully apprised of e.g. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Bohr’s model of the atom.
Besides, Husserl wasn’t actually critiquing the methods of science (like lab protocols or peer review), but rather the philosophical foundations. He argued that science had forgotten it was a human activity rooted in the “Life-world” (lebenswelt) which itself is the source of the network of meaning and understanding within which observations occur.
This is rather at odds with humanism. Where humanist philosophies are explicitly concerned with questions of meaning and the significance of life, your intent seems to be to show that these are illusory or even hallucinatory.
The point of Husserl’s critique is that modern science has lost sight of the fact that science is actually a human activity. And why has it lost sight of it? Because it ‘brackets out’ the observer, the subject, in pursuit of an account grounded solely in the measurable attributes of bodies, the so-called ‘primary qualities’. Having bracketed out, it then turns around and says, either there is nothing called ‘mind’ there (eliminativism) or that it’s some kind of illusory projection of the brain. What it doesn’t see, is that this entire construction is itself mind-dependent. This is the blind spot of modern science.
From which:
…scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate.
So the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific.
Recent philosophers of science who target such ‘naive realism’ argue that science doesn’t culminate in a single picture of a theory-independent world. Rather, various aspects of the world – from chemical interactions to the growth and development of organisms, brain dynamics and social interactions – can be more or less successfully described by partial models. These models are always bound to our observations and actions, and circumscribed in their application.
All the subject does not produce from himself, is that which appears to the senses, the real existent thing, and specifically only the matter of that, extension or shape.
It makes no difference what those things are; they do not grant authority over cognitive activity. I make no mistake in limiting authority over, to occasion for, cognitive activity.
Mere extension has no authority, as the so-called Copernican revolution shows, even if as analogy thereof.
If we tell ourselves how the thing shall be known to us, that the plate shall be round, the cat shall have claws, A = A and every body is extended…….where exactly is authority to be found?
But you’re going to say the intelligibility of the thing is how we discovered it’s a cat, and the intelligibility of cats is how we discovered claws, weird eyes, twitchy tails and whatnot. Yeeeaahhhh-no.
But how can the intelligibility of a thing tell us of all things in general? If intelligibility is limited to that in which it is possible to discover things, it must follow there is no intelligibility in all that in which nothing is discoverable. Now, apparently, it occurs that the merely possible, is unintelligible, which is quite contradictory.
Oh no you don’t: don’t even go there: to think, which then must be supposed as pertaining to the intelligibility of something, is to discover things about it? No; to think is to put things in, not to discover what’s supposedly already there for no other reason than the thing has been a thought.
For the original position indeed. Never ventured far from it, I must say.
Still, too bad I wasn’t better informed of this third-way thesis of yours. Then I might attempt to deconstruct it as well as you’ve attempted to deconstruct mine. Then you could tell me how much I’ve failed just as I’m telling you.
