The streetcar chasing case is structurally similar to the case of, say, a hungry lion chasing an antelope. This suggest that the disappearance of the self in the streetcar-case is structurally similar to the antelope-chasing-case. And this highlights the primacy of a pre-conceptual self-less mode of engagement with the world (or constitution of an Umwelt). But it may also obscure an asymmetry that becomes salient when, say, the man chasing the streetcar notices the number sign on that car and realizes that they’ve been chasing the wrong one. In that case, the motivation for chasing it lapses. And, most importantly, the reason why it lapses is because the man always had been not only chasing the streetcar with a view of catching it (like the lion was chasing the antelope, with their own hunger and need for food never being thematized as such, or even so much as thematizable by it) but chasing it in order to arrive at such or such destination, or potentially meeting someone in it, etc. The man was not just behaving under the impetus of a raw instinct or as a result of an act of unstructured (that is, non-rationally structured) affordance grasping. The affordance structure is maintained, but the constitutive ends that belong to the man’s being-in-the-world are defined in terms of chains of affordances such that the man’s world is navigable through exercises of practical reason, and the constitution of this space of reasons makes the “I” reappear, in the background, ineliminably, or so it seems to me.
Sure, but we are on a philosophy forum ! That kind of extra self-consciousness is presupposed. A person “isn’t rational” if they can’t suspend their “truths” into beliefs that others may criticize.
What I’m saying is just pushing that further. All of us, as rational philosophers, distance ourselves from some of our beliefs. But one belief we often don’t question is the belief that there is something more than warranted belief.
So rationality is presupposed as pursuit of “truth,” when it’s not clear that “better beliefs” won’t work as the goal.
Must rational inquiry converge ? That’s like the community of scientists all agreeing. So does science die ? Because where is the criticism ? From what other perspective ?
Sure. In ordinary language, I’m fine with using “true” as others do. I act with the same confidence. To me strong, shared belief is the same, in practical terms, as “our truth.”
Yes indeed ! And that’s why I point out this blind faith. “Strong” philosophers “hear the hollowness” of this or that “basic word.” Or they notice an assumption so that it becomes questionable, optional.
I’m in the crazy US also. I feel you.
Beautiful ! Yes, I agree. There is an “empirical subject” who “becomes self-present.” World-tacitly-for-me is “grasped” as world-explicitly-for-me.
from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye.
Selfhood is “essentially temporal.” Individual human bodies, immersed in community, are trained to enact the “time-binding” institution of selfhood as responsibility for the body that then “hosts” this “target for praise and blame.”
I believe that cooperative rational inquiry presupposes a “forum” of enactings of “self” versus “other.” Of course Brandom gets something like this from Kant and Hegel.
It’s one name on the stone above one corpse, right ? Why do we speak of a single “soul” or “mind” in each body ? I don’t ask this as someone losing my minds.
Imagine a man whose memories on the even days of his life comprise the events of all these days, skipping entirely what happened on the odd days. On the other hand, he remembers on an odd day what happened on previous odd days, but his memory would then skip the even days without a feeling of discontinuity. If we like we can also assume that he has alternating appearances and characteristics on odd and even days. Are we bound to say that here two persons are inhabiting the same body?
In the context of this thread, do we demand that reality itself be coherent because we, as individuals, must (strive to ) be coherent as performers of this evolving self-referential temporal unity ?
My larger view is that “the world itself” is a “system of faces,” each with this for-a-subject-like character. But it’s messier than that, because the “unity” of the stream is “instituted” or “enacted” rather than absolute. To what degree is the moment, something like a fugitive aspect of the world, penetrated by past and future ? How does the past exist ? What I suggest above is more like the sketch of an alternative path into the woods as the sun goes down.
Great post, my friend, if I may call you that after all of our wrangling !
I’m glad we agree here. The territory or “the truth” is a sense of oncoming further revelation, often toward the crystallization the situation. We get more pixels.
“Truth” suggests the convergence of the map, and I think this captures our comportment toward empirical states of affairs. So-and-so is “actually” guilty or not because it’s hard to resist a sense that enough perceptual access would settle the issue.
Does it make sense that the world itself could show itself incoherently ? Let’s say that I saw the suspect commit the murder, with my own eyes, and later saw some other person commit the murder, with those same eyes. I’d question my sanity.
Is the incoherence of the world “sincerely” thinkable ? It’s a fair question. I’m tempted to say that it is. But a critic might say that I am merely allowing others to believe what I don’t believe. Or that I am playing with insanity from a safe distance. Which I am, but no-self in Buddhism is “crazy” for common sense.
We might class it as the poetry written by the happily intoxicated, but is the right dose of this poison salutary ?
So I really like this part of the Peirce quote:
cognizability (in its widest sense) and being are not merely metaphysically the same, but are synonymous terms.
This is, as you probably already grasp, what I meant by belief as the “articulation” of world-from-POV. Which I mean in the way of (early) Heidegger’s “significance.” So this articulation is fuzzy, with maybe a thematized relatively crystalline focus. For me there is no “perfect conceptuality.” “Quality” or “the sensory-affective” can “signify” in an especially instituted way.
Peirce’s ideal convergence for me is then a tendency for articulations to harmonize toward a more shared and more crystallized “final” articulation of the world that never arrives. A bit like Apel’s “ideal communication community,” which never had and never will exist, and yet we judge actual communication communities in terms of it. This ideal is “experienced and understood” personally, and yet as something trans-personal.
Absolutely ! Does ontocubism mirror an objective reality ? The question is absurd. It is “essentially” post-representational. Protagoras can be read as an ontoperspectivist.
But there are two entangled notions of perspectivity here. One involves time-binding subjects, the assumed unity of a world-aspect as a (unified) “streaming.” The other is a perhaps more basic “from-a-point-of-view-ness.” In visual terms, to oversimplify, the heads side of the coin or the tails side. Can I “think around” spatial objects as “given in adumbrations” ?
Is there a tacit for-me-ness in perception ? The manifestation of heads or tail includes no eye. The “implied eye” is not in the visual field. As I quoted elsewhere from the TLP. A related issue, what is the “affective” in terms of “present quality” ? Can we think feeling away from “for-me-ness” ? Of course I don’t mean explicit for-me-ness. Perhaps a confused wounded animal doesn’t remember itself at all but simply suffers. Is that suffering already “itself” a kind of “location” pre-conceptually ? A very strange issue.
Nice. We are on the same page. The aspect is “visceral.” Hence “moment” is a better as a more general and open term, even if “aspect” is a great pointer for visual creatures like humans, and perhaps especially philosophers, for whom knowing is often a seeing. “Theory.”
OK, great question. Possibility is fundamentally futural, fundamentally open. Some may intend it in the diminished sense of what they can currently expect or imagine. But for me, from the beginning of my ontocubic fever dream, I had Voltaire’s early sci-fi in mind, along the the phenomenalist streak in Kant’s CPR.
I can’t limit how the same object will manifest to others. How can I be sure that I am even discussing the same object with someone else. I can’t. This is why the ground is an abyss. Some parts of the articulation of the world that I suffer may remain stubbornly incommunicable. I emphasize “suffer” because I don’t like the way that words like “construction” betrays the way the world forcefully “addresses” us. Only tentative belief is something that we can play with. Strong belief, experienced or there as fact itself, plays with us.
A related point, largely inspired by Feuerbach’s reading of the concept of God as a projection of infinite human reason : Human reason is essentially trans-human. Our sci-fi tacitly illustrates this. A Klingon is “one of us.” Or perhaps the lady visiting from Neptune has what we call “sonar.” But we can “logically share” empirical objects with her anyway, just as those born blind can with the sighted. This gets us into the issue of “meaning” that partially repeats or synthesizes many signs over many qualitative styles of the world’s manifestation. Including those unknown to us, those merely darkly possible from over here.
I can see how it looks reductionist. For me it’s crucial that we consider the unbounded complexity of a “dance” that is fundamentally temporal-historical. I’d be incoherent to exclude what we are doing in this very conversation.
Agreed ! And I am passionate about “finding words for it.” I don’t want to block the road of inquiry.
Again, I appreciate your highlighting the special pragmatic take on this. Will better beliefs “work”? Probably, most of the time; maybe all of the time in our non-philosophical discourses. They will get us where we want to go.
But leave aside the question of whether rationality is presupposed as pursuit of truth. (Perhaps it’s merely posited as such, in a spirit of “let’s find out.”) We still have the problem of better beliefs. A non-pragmatist would not accept that what they mean by a “better belief” is one that reaches a certain goal of inquiry. They would insist that what makes a belief better or worse is how closely it corresponds to what is the case.
Now of course we can bring these two views together by simply stipulating that the pragmatist’s goal is, and must be, just that: discovering what is the case. That’s “where we want to go.” But I don’t think the pragmatist can go along with that, or at least not under that description. It would be a pretty weak version of pragmatism.
In fact, this might be a good question to pose: Does the pragmatist want to re-describe what the non-pragmatist is doing, omitting transcendental terms like “truth”, while leaving the actual inquiry more or less the same? Or is the pragmatist proposing something more radical, and urging the non-pragmatist to see that their inqury is misguided, not merely misconstrued?
In terms of engineers getting out the next fix, juries convicting or acquitting, voters pulling this or that lever, soldiers pulling this or that trigger, sure. So pragmatism is boring in practical terms, which sort of amuses me. Because it just, from one POV, demystifies inquiry. If you go back and look, even sweet William James was the devil to earnest purveyors of Truth, and not only the theological variant.
When Rorty was dying, he regretted spending so much time on “fussy” issues, when he should have been reading Landor. But he was cursed with a gift for grand narratives about grand narratives.
Although presenting it invites criticism and the response to that criticism, I wouldn’t emphasize it as accusative. More like “hey but that’s not the only path here !” I don’t deny there is, in my case, a “wanting to share a poem.”
Like Rorty, I’d stress creativity.
Not mirroring but invention might be our focus. Not must or should but could. The mirror metaphor was itself an invention. Or not. We can exist in the question. Of course I don’t want to call the mirror metaphor “wrong” because it “fails to mirror inquiry.”
People would ( sort of ) ask Rorty to ground civility in rationality as the pursuit of truth. I’d say, inspired by him, that civility is rationality. You don’t ground civility in philosophy, you only have philosophy through civility. A tolerance of others’s perspectives, but within the bounds that we mostly don’t choose of what we find decent. Rorty talks about our thrown-ness in terms of an inescapable ethnocentrism. We can only see by the torch we have, and yet our community is maybe more aware of its contingency and thrown-ness, and is maybe more on the look out for novelty and the enrichment of our plurality than sin or madness.
This is bit like Feyerabend’s anything goes. It’s sort of obvious — in retrospect — that we don’t want to “automate” critical thinking, which is what mirroring the eternal essence of science sounds like.
Last point. Some ask the pragmatist for a criterion. What makes something useful ? Why is one belief better than another ? The more free a society we have, the less we need some intellectual come from the grave to tell us this as individuals. People just want this rather than that, because they expect it to make them happy. Civility is taking others into consideration, being willing to negotiate. Do we come together for truth ? Some of us sometimes perhaps. But mostly we need others to forgive us for not believing them, as we forgive them for not believing us.
Well, sort of. You have to admit that Rorty was strongly argumentative and even accusative when he spoke to his critics. He did think his path was the only path, at least if you wanted to avoid incoherence. But I personally resonate with being inventive and creative, like you.
Indeed. But can philosophy say anything besides “Too bad” to people who are made happy by greed and cruelty, and who have no interest in negotiation? I think Rorty’s answer was no; replying to these people is the job of rhetoric and art, not philosophy.
Rorty celebrated Dickens for making a difference by appealing to people’s empathy rather than by accusing them. That seems wise to me.
I haven’t talked much in this thread about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, or about Epictetus and Epicurus, but this kind of philosophy can be hugely important for individuals. Or Kundera, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Emerson, so many others…
And why not Deadwood ? A perfect show. Earlier my friend brought up the glorious Arrested Development, and the wit in its title.
I am roundaboutly saying that yes indeed art literature and all kinds of other stuff than philosophy proper gets the job done instead. Or is at least as worth trying. Really it all looks like a continuum to me. Nietzsche is a character like Hamlet.
This would make an interesting new thread. I think philosophy can appeal to people’s empathy too, but not reliably. More often it’s a matter of intellectual persuasion, which can devolve into bad-tempered hectoring.
The general point that metanoia is better accomplished through appeals to empathy is very true, I think. In my own experience of decades of advocating for animal rights, by far the most effective mind-changing tactic is to introduce someone to an experience that evokes their empathy, often by way of revulsion for what’s done to animals. I’m pretty sure I could count on one, maybe two, hands the number of people I’ve actually argued into veganism, for instance. The decision is far more often a simple line in the sand – “I can no longer tolerate being part of such a cruel system. My heart breaks when I see this.”
The ‘I’ that compares itself to other persons may or may not be invoked when running after a streetcar, but the ‘I’ as holistic structure of relevance and mattering participating in comportment toward the world is essential to the attuned understanding of any event. Far from disappearing, this ‘I’ is implicit in my consciousness of all objects of experience.
I wouldn’t say that they’re pre-given in the sense of just sitting there waiting to be read-off of our experiences. Consider an analogy: in statistics we try to identify intelligible patterns in data. This usually involves fitting curves to sets of data points. Is the resulting curve in the data? No, not exactly. But that doesn’t mean the curve is just a conceptual fiction. The curve is an intelligible pattern that explains the data. And insofar as it does that successfully, I think it only fitting (no pun intended) to say that it captures something real in the data.
I think history tells a different story. Consider what the average European believed about the world 1000, 5000 or 25000 years ago. Just think of all of the ignorance, all of the false judgements, all of the bad decisions, all of the harmful actions that have been taken during those stretches. To say that we just instinctively know what is real is, I think, to grossly overstate what pre-reflective experience is capable of delivering.
I guess I’m not sure I understand the basis for saying that objects are illusory. So far you’ve made two arguments, one from change and another from fuzzy boundaries. I’ve argued that both actually presuppose the reality of objects. Now you are saying that, pre-linguistically, there is no perceptually separate object. But that’s kind of like arguing that nebulae aren’t real because they can only be seen through high-powered telescopes. I agree that certain cognitive operations are required in order to recognize objects as objects. I don’t agree that this makes objects illusory.
Why should we privilege non-dual, pre-linguistic experience over intellectual insight and reasoned judgment when it comes to the determination of what is real?
Why should the origin of a category in pre-reflective experience have any bearing on its truth-aptness? A category, once articulated, can apply truly or falsely. That is, truth-aptness is feature of categories as articulated, not of their pre-reflective precursors.
I don’t buy into the notion that we’re forced to choose between process and substance. I think the world has both. And when you take a close look at Whitehead’s metaphysics, you’ll find that he still posited eternal objects that “ingress” in actual occasions to generate stable, enduring objects.
I can agree with you if consciousness is understood as the “being” of the world itself. The world itself has a “subjective structure.” What obscures this, in my view, is the taken-for-granted positing of the scientific image as a “substrate.” The encompassed map is mistaken for an encompassing arctic wasteland. A legitimate sense that the world is fundamentally a forum blocks access to often awkward attempts to “speak” this “subjective form” of the world.
“Consciousness” sounds in the ears of most like a “stuff” within the world, not like a synonym for its very being or presence.
If one says "consciousness is being itself, " one sounds to another one like the most solipsistic of idealists. And yet this is the “pure realism” in Wittgenstein’s TLP. But only via a “seeing” of “the ontological difference.” Sounds like mysticism, is perhaps on the edge of it. Yet I find it conceptual. But what is the conceptual ? What is it for a concept to be there ?
Perhaps you are with me on this, and we are finding words to understand one another.
You criticism mirrors a bit @Jay’s challenge to @j_j regarding the reality of phlogiston, and to the suggestion that beliefs conditioned by phlogiston theories are cases of the world presenting a different face to inhabitants of this paradigm (whereas Jay suggests that we must have a standard for favoring Lavoisier’s over Priestley’s view of the nature of combustion). My thought reflecting on this dispute was that there is an important difference between, say, the shift from the Phlogiston paradigm (as a process of release) to the paradigm of Oxygen (as a process of addition), on the one hand, and something like the shift from geocentrism to heliocentrism as an interpretation of phenomena like sunset and sunrise, on the other hand. I think attending to this difference may enable us to thread a middle path.
A naïve Popperian falsificationist conception would simply cast both paradigm shifts as being characterized by an increase in “verisimilitude”. Popper claimed that scientific progress can be characterized as the replacement of falsified theories by not-yet-falsified ones that, in virtue of their greater empirical content (as measured formally by their degree of corroboration, which increases through surviving falsification attempts), constitute a better approximation to the truth (with “truth” being understood roughly in accordance with a Tarskian correspondence theory). This contrasts with the Kuhnian view, in which there need not be any such formal/conceptual bridge and the replacement of one paradigm by another occurs only when the “normal science” research programme motivated by the first ceases to be productive as compared with the second.
In light of this, what I want to argue is that while Popper gets the view of theory-laden empirical content roughly right, Kuhn better captures the relation between “incommensurable” paradigms. In the case of the shift from Priestley’s to Lavoisier’s conceptions, we might say that the second paradigm performs better, or should be seen to perform better, by Priestley’s own lights (and by the lights of his contemporaries) since they shared norms of explanatory fruitfulness, whereas in the second case, we can conceive of farmers, or the “common man,” holding on to the geocentric view, not as an astronomical theory, but as a practical way to track the Sun and the diurnal cycle for practical purposes in ordinary life.
A Popperian objection to this would be that the pragmatic truth of geocentrism, thus conceived, is parochial and lacks universality as compared with the heliocentric paradigm. But what this overlooks is that the parochiality of the conception is precisely what enables it to track (and make intelligible) the phenomena that are of concern to the man in the field. This is quite unlike Priestley’s phlogistic conception, which was of little use to the “common man” and was actually aiming at tracking generalizable laws of chemical transformation, thereby establishing a standard of adequacy that the Oxygen paradigm better satisfies.
And similarly, with @EQV’s example, we can come up with many features of egalitarian pre-agricultural tribal life (think of the Amazonian Pirahã people, for instance) that, however parochial, reveal some features of our civilizational progress to be harmful to human flourishing, and that reveal this without suggesting a notion of universal “convergence to the truth” from outside of our practical and parochial form(s) of life.
The difference I see here is that this example is all within conceptual space, whereas I was questioning the idea that identity is given pre-conceptually.
Sure, but I wasn’t talking about metaphysical beliefs/explanations for what we experience, but about our instinctive ability to, for the most part, most of the time and eventually if not immediately, tell the difference between real sensory experiences and hallucinatory experiences.
I didn’t say that objects are illusory―I said that the perceptual separability of objects is illusory. This is why identity is fuzzy not rigid, because objects are always given against, and as inseparable from, their surroundings and conditions of appearing.
I think intellectual insight and reasoned judgement is secondary to and derivative from pre-linguistic, that is unthematized, experience. The former can render the latter more or less explicit, but something is always lost or left out in making the implicit explicit.
I don’t see unity, identity or essence as categories but rather as purported attributes. I have no problem with looking at things in terms of unity, identity or essence, but I find to be not truth-apt or even coherent questions like ‘are unity, identity and essence real apart from their functions as concepts, as ways of thinking?’.
I agree insofar as I think we are forced by the dualistic nature of language to think in terms of processes and things. But I think we can think in terms of things without buying into substance ontology. Under my interpretation, for Whitehead processes, actual occasions (of experience) can be understood as things (in the broadest sense) which are in turn congeries of process and relation.
Whitehead’s eternal objects I understand to be possibilities, potentials, qualities, attributes, relations, that are instantiated in actual entities or occasions of experience. I see this as being very far from any kind of substance ontology.
All that said, I’m not attempting to convert you to my way of seeing things. I think all ways of most broadly conceiving of things are approximations. All can be thought as true in some sense(s) and also false in some sense(s)―and in acknowledgement of that, I’m just reporting how things seem to me.
So I acknowledge my bias in thinking some ways to me more apt or less approximate than others, but I don’t imagine there is any absolute fact of the matter which could determine their ultimate truth or falsity.
I see the difference you’re pointing to between, on the one hand, the switch from Priestley to Lavoisier and, on the other hand, from a heliocentric to a geocentric theory. Yes, it would be hard to argue that heliocentrism “performs better” for those who track the Sun for practical purposes. But does geocentrism perform better either?
I don’t think the Popperian objection would be only that geocentrism is parochial. Popper would, I think, also claim that the statements that the geocentric farmer makes have been falsified. He would disagree that this series of falsifiable claims in fact makes it easier to track the Sun.
Consider: Do I, a heliocentrist, have more difficulty tracking the Sun than the farmer? Surely not. I merely describe what I’m doing in different terms, and Popper would say that these terms are not merely different but also correct, as best we can currently judge (i.e., falsification has failed consistently, and we have a robust theory that explains why).
The question of why someone might hold on to a falsified picture – whether there might be some additional, not strictly practical gain in doing so – is a separate one. There may indeed be such gains. But as far as I can tell, the farmer gains nothing practical that I don’t have. Remember, my heliocentrism includes a simple way of talking about why the Sun appears to move, which is more than adequate for anyone’s daily purposes.
Yes, of course!
Perhaps. But, this is where I would want to say that “salutary” and “true” are not picking out the same thing. Even a false belief can be salutary in the right circumstances.
Right, and (again) this seems to be where we most clearly diverge. You seem to want to cash out the notion of Being (i.e. ideal convergence) purely in terms of an articulation that will never (and can never) exist. But I think this is (ultimately) incoherent. In order for the notion of Being to fulfill its function as a regulative ideal within the ecology of reason it must be posited as something more than an empty projection. The question, then, is whether it’s possible to take some kind of “meta” stance that allows us to treat this inflated notion of Being as if it were just an empty projection without collapsing reason itself. I don’t think it is, because every “meta” stance we might take is itself always-already a stance within the space-of-reasons. And I see this as the general form of the problem facing any deflationary critique of reason: insofar as the deflation is taken seriously, it undermines the force (and the coherence) of the critique itself.
But here is where we start to go in circles. I agree with you that the question is absurd: but only if ontocubism is true! After all, ontocubism is a theory. That is, it is a conceptual articulation. What is it a conceptual articulation of?
I grant that the “implied eye is not in the visual field”. The “I” is not itself just another object “thrown” before us. But, to your point, can there be adumbrations in the foreground without a horizon or background against which those adumbrations are given? And can there be a horizon without it being a horizon for-me, however tacit, unthematized and momentary this “me” may be? I tend to think not. To me, these seem to be something like the minimal structural requirements for conscious experience. But I’m open to exploring the issue further.
I think we mostly agree, though I don’t entirely relate to the imagery of the “abyss”. I think it’s fitting in the sense that it captures the inexhaustible nature of the ground. But where we characteristically diverge (perhaps) is over the question of whether this inexhaustibility should be understood in terms of an underlying chaos, incomprehensibility or incoherence evoking a sense of despair. It’s not that I would want to deny this element of experience — I don’t think we can or should deny it — I would only question whether it is the last word with respect to what Being is.
Well, yes. It was an analogy. It was meant to illustrate the point that abstractions are not in experience in the sense of being concretely present, and yet insofar as they legitimately explain what we experience, the intelligible patterns they express are real.
But my point wasn’t scoped to metaphysical beliefs/explanations. It was a general point about the relationship between the notion of “reality” and the faculties of understanding and judgment. Do you think it’s possible to recognize an experience as illusory without a conceptual grasp of the appearance/reality distinction?
But what do you mean by “perceptual separability”? If all you mean by this is “has a stable identity”, then it seems like this is a distinction without a difference because, in that case, to say that “perceptual separability” is illusory is just to say that “having a stable identity” is illusory. But what is an object but that which has a stable identity?
Sure, but I think this goes both ways. Yes, there is always an empirical “residue” left behind by an act of understanding and judgment, but (as I’ve argued above) understanding and judgment also grasp something that cannot be reduced to concrete experience alone.
Yes, and I see this as problematic. If we can’t say that identities are real, then I don’t see how we can say that objects are real, which ties back to the question above regarding whether objects are illusory.
I think the difference is more superficial than it at first appears. Whitehead tries to locate actuality within the purview of concrescence. The problem is that, without ingression, nothing is determinate. In other words, if you strip away eternal objects you don’t have pure actuality, you have nothing, or perhaps, you have pure indeterminancy. But this is just what Aristotle called “prime matter” which, if you think about it, isn’t the principle of actuality at all — it’s the principle of potentiality. In any event, I think Whitehead’s proposed “inversion” of the Aristotelian picture is problematic for a number of reasons that I’d be happy to get into. But since that’s not really the topic of the thread, I’ll leave it here for now.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The common farmer’s parochial geocentric view of the world is not operating on the same theoretical/explanatory register as modern cosmology. And so there is a legitimate sense in which it is not in competition with modern cosmology per se, and also a legitimate sense that it can even be said to be “true”. But we’d be remiss to overlook the fact that this parochial geocentrism legitimately doesn’t hold up when held to the standards of the theoretical/explanatory mode of inquiry. Indeed, we can now explain why geocentrism seemed plausible to the uneducated man in the field despite being wrong.
Yes, and I wouldn’t wish to suggest that modern Western societies have transcended bad decision making. If only that were true. Yet, at the same time, I would suggest that the ability to look back on pre-agricultural societies and identify certain practices as superior to our own in the production of human flourishing presupposes a standard of truth that transcends the merely parochial.
What sense is that? Do you mean: by tacitly adding “appears to” in front of all the geocentrist’s statements? But then there would be no difference between the two views, because the heliocentrist agrees that these phenomena do appear the way the geocentrist sees them. And yet do we really want to say that the two individuals are saying the same thing?