I agree that we are expressing such is the case. Yes. But I call that belief. I grant that we tend to assume the “univocity” of the world. If I saw a man in a blue shirt walk by, then you would have also, had you been where I was. The world “said” something to me, and I expect it to “say” the same thing to you. (I just picked up a great little book on dialogism.) Mostly it does, well enough, or the forum would collapse. But eyewitnesses don’t always agree, and the forum still makes sense for a world that is discordant or polyvocal to some degree.
So a person can modify the way they understand their own presentation of claims. Instead of “this is the way the world,” they now have “this is how the world currently shows itself to me, but I am aware that the world “exceeds” me.” I think we both agree that inquiry presupposes the “surplus” or “horizon” of the world. But I suggest that we need not conceive this surplus as univocal. It suffices that we can all benefit in unexpected ways from discussion with others. Maybe neither of us converts the other but both of us are modified beneficially ( from our own POVs) by the friendly collision of perspectives.
I can’t agree. All we need, to oversimplify, is a tension between expectation and perception. I expected X, but was surprised with Y. So I update my beliefs as I struggle out of the initial confusion. What matters is, to oversimplify, “pain and pleasure.” Inquiry, excepting the high-level stuff that is adjacent to play or art, is initiated by pain and confusion.
If the modification of my behavior transforms pain into relief, then I have figured something out that’s perhaps worth remembering and sharing with others. “Your mileage may vary,” we say, but if the mileage always varied, we maybe wouldn’t bother sharing.
So I will grant that there’s a “hope” in sharing a thesis that it will be recognized as a “gift.” I think we tend to think of this in terms of accuracy and truth, which is probably grounded in “seeing is believing,” but I think a more general conception is helpful here. Creative apes get together to trade tricks.
Not every trick will work for every ape. The world is more wild and polyphonous than that. I stress the teeming “surplus” of the world, relative to the prejudice that “constitutes” me, in order to assure you that I “feel” the issue of “being accountable to the world.” I just don’t conceive of this issue in terms of “mirroring” a singular truthmaker-for-all. The world can be understood to speak with many mouths, even to contradict itself. Yet individual forum goers don’t have that luxury, so we tend to “force” ( project) univocity on the world itself.
Beautifully said ! To me the forum is the world. Through phenomenology or “making it explicit,” we overcome a tendency to imagine ( but only theoretically ! ) a bifurcated realm of two kinds of stuff.
One virtue, in my eyes, of this kind of “lifeworld positivism” ( which includes something like direct realism) is that it is concordant with how we live as non-philosophers. Not only are we more theoretically coherent, we are more coherent as the living synthesis of practical problem-solving ape and explicater of the general situation of such apes, with a special focus on knowledge as relatively warranted belief. We come to know what knowing itself is.
For me, the world is fundamentally a forum. If there is such a thing as science, then the world is fundamentally a forum.
As I see it, (empirical) science is conspicuously responsible to experience in the sense of theory-laden perception. Popper discusses “basic statements.” Did the thermometer read 40 F at 3 AM ? “Well Larry wrote it down in his log, and we trust Larry.” The tacit assumption is that witnesses are inter-changable. This assumption tends to work out for us, which is how I’d explain that “obviousness” of “omniscient narrator,” which I question in this thread.
We need not assume in the first place that “wrong” is best understood in an a-perspectival fashion. Joey thinks he’s a great Chess player, but “everyone knows” that Joey is mid. You and I will probably agree with everyone, and we will explain our agreement in terms of our individual but probably similar appropriations of the norms mostly implicitly governing rationality. To me this is all the “really” or “actually” that we need. I can be very confident that someone is “wrong,” but I can also explicate this confidence in terms of strongly preferring my belief to theirs. Of course I will be tempted to call my belief “true” and my rival’s belief “false.” But I can become a little more wary about assumptions as I take the project of explicating knowledge more seriously. “Practically speaking, the concept of truth is harmless and even handy. Theoretically it’s messier than rival approaches.”
Let’s set aside the mirror metaphor for a moment and imagine a situation. “I think she likes me, but what if she rejects me when I ask her out ?” While we “live in” our strong beliefs, so that they aren’t even “visible” for us, we often act in a context of imperfect certainty. Usually there is food at location X and time T, but sometimes there is not. We’re hungry so we risk the effort and energy to get there, because the expected value is positive.
The world “happens to us.” It “addresses” us in ways we do not expect. Our belief is in constant collision with perception. For Gadamer, existence “is” thrown projection, something like hot wax trying to find a serene relative stasis.
Also : many who believe in “truthmakers” take the “true world” to be crystalline or determinate. All ambiguity is in the mind-stuff of agents. The world itself, pre-articulated implicitly by the ideal witness, is untainted by such confusion.
But I work from the anti-bifurcation principle that “experience is world.” The world itself, which is always world-from-POV, is fuzzy here and solidified there, for now.
Peirce, to me, is just incoherent at times, like all of us. Probably doesn’t need to be said, but I don’t think either of us invoke Peirce as an authority. I just credit him for cutting through the noise now and then.
Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else.
On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe.
This is the resolution of tension I mentioned earlier. A perception surprises us, pains us. We work to settle our belief in the new context that includes that painful surprise.
Hence, the sole object of inquiry is the settlement of opinion. We may fancy that this is not enough for us, and that we seek, not merely an opinion, but a true opinion. But put this fancy to the test, and it proves groundless; for as soon as a firm belief is reached we are entirely satisfied, whether the belief be true or false. And it is clear that nothing out of the sphere of our knowledge can be our object, for nothing which does not affect the mind can be the motive for mental effort. The most that can be maintained is, that we seek for a belief that we shall think to be true. But we think each one of our beliefs to be true, and, indeed, it is mere tautology to say so.
There’s a tension in that last line. Belief is often described as “taking to be true.” But we all call our own beliefs “true.” So the word “true” doesn’t do anything but indicate belief. I grant that Peirce comes off as a “believer in truth” in the quotes you offer. But to me this is a regression from his stronger moments.
And, though these affections are necessarily as various as are individual conditions, yet the method must be such that the ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. Such is the method of science. Its fundamental hypothesis, restated in more familiar language, is this: There are Real things, whose characters are entirely independent of our opinions about them.
Here, for instance, I find the residue of monotheism. The ultimate conclusion of every man shall be the same. The “fundamental hypothesis of science” turns out to be something like “things in themselves” ? I can’t agree. I prefer Einstein, for instance:
…we attribute to this concept of the bodily object a significance, which is to a high degree independent of the sense impression which originally gives rise to it. This is what we mean when we attribute to the bodily object " a real existence." The justification of such a setting rests exclusively on that fact that, by means of such concepts and mental relations between them, we are able to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of sense impressions. These notions and relations, although free statements of our thoughts, appear to us as stronger and more unalterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed. On the other hand, these concepts and relations, and indeed the setting of real objects and, generally speaking, the existence of " the real world," have justification only in so far as they are connected with sense impressions between which they form a mental connection. The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand.
The bolded part hints at the need for social life for physical objects to make sense in the first place. The “physical object” is a relatively “public” object. Mill’s phenomenalism goes into more detail on this issue. We tend to share a “map” of enduring “possibilities of sensation,” and these mapped possibilities become “things in themselves” that are “more real” than the sensations that make them important in the first place. If eyewitnesses disagree, then both might walk away with doubt.
Social life is not necessary (apart from the initial enculturation involved in the acquisition of language of course). That said things are objects in presumably a non-reflective way for animals. Something will be an object for me, as opposed to an hallucination, if it persistently appears and is recognizable, if I can touch it, feel its surface, tap it and hear whatever sound it makes, smell it if it has any scent and perform whatever actions on it its form allows and so on.
That’s reasonable, but I think it misses something. If others’ perceptions don’t matter, then I am left with a “dream” that I can organizeinto more and less coherent-vivid components.
For context, I am especially interested in “the physical” in relation to the concept of empirical science. Perhaps I witnessed cold fusion in my lonely garage, but I can’t do it when others are around to witness the accomplishment. I may feel that my belief in cold fusion remains warranted, but I may understand why others can’t rely simply on my testimony. I grant that in fact we often do rely on testimony, but I think enough testimony from enough witnesses secures our belief in conditionally witnessing the “law-like phenomenon” ourselves. We don’t bother to fly out to the lab, because it’s expensive, and we are already sure enough to act on a sufficiently settled belief anyway.
Strictly speaking, redundancy theory isn’t the view that we use “truth” and “true” in order to express our personal beliefs. It’s the view that using the word “true” adds nothing to an assertion. In other words, if I say
“It’s true that injury leads to anxiety.”
This is the same as if I asserted in some context that:
“Injury leads to anxiety.”
My justifications for my assertion very well may be objective, for instance if I’m summarizing some research. In that case, it wouldn’t be my personal beliefs.
I want to point out that both these examples can be tendentious: They lend themselves to a view of truth as something that could never in principle be nailed down. That is, there can always be legitimate debate about great versus not-great chess playing. And presumably “I think she likes me” is an instance of a weak belief, not a strong one such as “The thermometer read 40 F at 3 AM”.
But it’s the strong beliefs, the ones that don’t come down to matters of consensus (in the common usage), which rightly concern @EQV.
Now I agree with you that the the “true world” position is implausible:
In fact, there’s considerable confusion about whether objective matters of Fahrenheit, and ideal witnesses, tell the whole story about truth. But I’m suggesting that we concentrate on these hard examples rather than relatively low-hanging fruit such as opinions about chess skills.
Is this right? That “I believe that X” means the same thing as “X is true” seems like a philosopher’s stipulation. To think this, you have to reject all our many subtle uses of “believe” and focus only on the one that emerges in two statements such as “It is true that the world is round” and “I believe the world is round.”
But what about “I believe it’s 8:30” (but I don’t have a timepiece to verify it)? Or “I believe what she said is true” (but I can’t be sure)? Or “I believe that there was no conspiracy to kill JFK”? These all have the form of “I believe that X, but I could be wrong”. This is a perfectly legitimate and common usage, and is meant precisely to drive a wedge between what I believe and what I am declaring to be true. “Believe,” in such sentences, doesn’t mean “endorse with all my heart.” That is one meaning of “belief,” yes, but not the only one. More often than not, we merely mean, “I tend to affirm this, but the truth may be otherwise.”
It sounds like we agree on the fact that inquiry presupposes a “surplus” or “horizon” that “exceeds” us. You said that we need not assume that this surplus is “univocal”. I agree, but I take it that you will also agree that neither should we preclude the possibility of univocity. And experience would seem to justify this. Are there cases of genuine equivocity? I think it depends on what you mean. Does the world present itself to different agents in different ways? Of course. But it’s worth noticing that, even in such cases, there is often a univocal explanation that renders the differences determinately intelligible. And when there isn’t such an explanation, the resulting puzzlement often provides the motivational basis for finding one.
So when you say that “all we need is a tension between expectation and perception” — yes, but this involves more than you are (perhaps) acknowledging. To ask a question is already to anticipate the possibility of a determinate answer. It’s not that the world always obliges, it’s that the act of asking a question presupposes that it might. So, I don’t think it’s correct to describe this as a mere projection – it’s a condition for the possibility of inquiry itself. Would you agree?
With regard to the possibility of being wrong — you said we can cash this out in terms of our individual appropriations of the norms governing rationality. OK, but what is the content of these norms? I’ve been arguing that these norms depend on the distinction between the “for-me/us” and the “in-itself”, and that this distinction is best understood as a non-negotiable, constitutive precondition rather than a convenient projection (lest we undermine rationality itself). So your appeal to the norms of rationality here doesn’t settle the matter.
You say that the world “happens to us”, and I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t see how this undermines any of what’s been said above. Yes, our belief is in constant collision with perception, but it is this very structure that affords the possibility of truth. The contradiction of belief by perception results in confusion. Out of confusion, a question arises. And as we saw above, the asking of a question presupposes the possibility of a determinate answer.
You say that many who believe in “truthmakers” take the world to be crystalline and determinate, but this is setting up a false dichotomy — “either the world is completely static and determinate or else there is no truth”. But that just doesn’t follow. Do you agree?
Finally, with regard to the interpretation of Peirce — you say that his propensity to speak of Truth is a regression from his stronger moments. I disagree. It’s the lynchpin of his entire project. To see this we need to distinguish the psychological motives of inquiry from the normative aim of inquiry. Doubt is the motive. Belief is the psychological settlement. But the Real is the regulative ideal around which inquiry itself is organized. In any event, the interpretation of Peirce is a deep topic that deserves careful handling. And since it’s not entirely germane, I’ll leave it at that.
I agree with you that when it comes to the elaborate, instrument augmented observations of science, the hypotheses that purport to explain what is observed, and the reporting of experimental results testing the predictions of those hypotheses, the lone ranger will not suffice.
If you ( personally ) believed that injury leads to anxiety, then you’d be expressing your belief, would you not ? Your personal belief might be more warranted, in your own judgment and perhaps in mine, than the beliefs of others on the issue.
Right. And I basically agree with Mach that the appearance-reality distinction is “merely” practical. Monopoly money is what I want when I play Monopoly. Otherwise I want what we call “real” money, because it’s usually what we want. A crooked stick looks straight when you pull it out of the water.
This is a rich issue.
If I’m trying to remember where I left my keys, then I demand a determinate-enough answer. I want to get those keys in my hand so I can get to work so I can get paid so I can pay my rent so…
Perhaps you can rephrase this. Do you mean an explanation in terms of accuracy ? People guess at the number of jellybeans in the jar, and then they count them to see whose guess was closest. What is ( rationally) presupposed here is indeed the “univocity” of the “physical” state of affairs, which says “the same enough thing” through various theory-laden observations. If Joe says that he saw some of the jellybeans evaporate during the counting, we would probably think he was joking or insane.
To me this constant collision affords the endless revision of belief, which is equivalent to the endless movement of world-from-POV. I “live” in my “beliefs” as “what is the case.” With more self-consciousness, I describe this as “what is the case ( over here, from my POV).”
We agree that confusion arises, at least if the surprise or collision is painful. You say “a question arises.” Sometimes, yes. But I might just put out my hands to break my fall, because I tripped on something that “shouldn’t be there” in the dark. I may go on to speculate how that thing got there, but my immediate response is visceral. Where I agree with Peirce is that we stop when we are satisfied.Sometimes a determinate answer, like the product of two large integers, is what we need. But in philosophy, for instance, the problem often enough is the question. Our cognitive dissonance is reduced by dissolving the question, perhaps by foregrounding a metaphor we took as necessary but now is refreshingly optional, and perhaps discarded.
I agree. Perhaps I was careless. I think you already get this, but I wouldn’t phrase it as “there is no truth.” I am expressing what looks to me like a relatively coherent theory of knowledge that circumvents defining or relying on truth altogether. Of course, to be coherent, I am not pretending to offer the “truth” about knowledge, as if knowledge already is what it “really” is, and I am throwing darts at a fixed target.
This explication is obviously appealing, and it works well enough in many situations. But I’d stress that belief is not just and not even primarily “thought” or speech acts. We adjust our behavior to make the pain stop. In social situations, we often need to negotiate a plan for cooperation. This often involves the development of consensus on how things are, but it need not. Perhaps Bob and Alice agree on the same action for their own differing reasons, expecting different results.
Actually I am grateful to dwell on this example, because it’s the kind of example that I initially dwelt on. Popper would call this a basic statement.
This assertion involves theory-laden sense perception. Joe claims that the thermometer read 40 F at 3 AM. What I object to is the failure of some philosophers of science to even notice that this thermometer is “qualitatively” physical. I can’t see the thermometer through Joe’s eyes, nor he through mine. This has of course tempted philosophers to invent “internal” entities like qualia that “mediate” the “real” thermometer.
But this “projection” of the real thermometer “behind” its sensory manifestation loses the empirical object as empirical. A model is judged against or held responsible to observations — or rather articulations of observations (basic statements), because inferences involve theory-laden claims and not “raw perception.”
Big picture is that empirical science is “built on” perceptions which are always “from-a-point-of-view” or “owned.” We tend to “leap over” this, and move from “Bill claims P” to “P.” This is harmless in practical terms, but it does lead to what I’d call pseudo-problems ( like that of “the external world” ) and the invention of needless metaphysical entities like “qualia.”
I chew on the problem of “truth as the omniscient narrator’s belief” because it’s a stumblingblock to appropriating the discordant ontological perspectivism that seems like a better explication of how we imperfectly share the world and cooperate within it. Instead of an awkward dualism that has nothing to do with how we live, we can rethink our explication of the physical or empirical object, so basic for empirical science. But this has already been done, by J. S. Mill for instance.
So I like the move to hard examples, but to me chess skills are pretty “objectively” measurable.
A soft example may be worth mentioning here though. I had a friend who just hated jazz, while I loved Coltrane. I believe that we were both judging A Love Supreme. I believe that he was honestly expressing the disvalue of this music as it manifested itself to him. But of course I didn’t stop loving Coltrane. Even this soft example is worth something, because I agree with the tendency to see value as “painted on.” Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. The eye of the beholder is in the beauty. But things have many “faces.” We tend to theorize about a “core” of the thing that is then “painted.” But what counts as the core is a pragmatic matter. Locke was stuck in the age of impulse physics, so color for him was painted on or secondary.
I hear you. But we could translate this as “X, maybe.” Brandom writes of a “seems” operator. “Seems like X to me.” To me it’s not a serious issue to account for varying intensity of belief.
Yes, but the justification for the assertion need not be personal opinion. Redundancy theory doesn’t rule out that people may make assertions based on objective data.
It also doesn’t rule out that there is some fact of the matter regarding propositions that have never been asserted: for instance, the temperature of the oceans on some exoplanet.
Redundancy is just a deflationary approach to truth, which just means it jettisons all the traditional concerns about the nature of truth. It says truth is just a word people use in communication, usually to emphasize something.
“Objective data” means to me something like data without disqualifying bias. A sufficiently “objective” juror still has a life-history and their own sense organs and moral intuitions.
But I object, pun intended, to the vague notion of “objective reality” as “what is actually the case, as if in the eyes of God.” I object not because I wallow in irrationalism, but because I care about the “empirical” in empirical science.
On a hazy practical level, I get what you are saying. As in I inherit the same, sane “common sense.” But I find thinkers like Bridgman compelling.
Before Einstein, the concept of simultaneity was defined in terms of properties. It was a property of two events, when described with respect to their relation in time, that one event was either before the other, or after it, or simultaneous with it. Simultaneity was a property of the two events alone and nothing else; either two events were simultaneous or they were not. The justification for using this term in this way was that it seemed to describe the behavior of actual things. But of course experience then was restricted to a narrow range. When the range of experience was broadened, as by going to high velocities, it was found that the concepts no longer applied, because there was no counterpart in experience for this absolute relation between two events. Einstein now subjected the concept of simultaneity to a critique, which consisted essentially in showing that the operations which enable two events to be described as simultaneous involve measurements on the two events made by an observer, so that “simultaneity” is, therefore, not an absolute property of the two events and nothing else, but must also involve the relation of the events to the observer. Until therefore we have experimental proof to the contrary, we must be prepared to find that the simultaneity of two events depends on their relation to the observer, and in particular on their velocity. Einstein, in thus analyzing what is involved in making a judgment of simultaneity, and in seizing on the act of the observer as the essence of the situation, is actually adopting a new point of view as to what the concepts of physics should be, namely, the operational view.
If we talk of the temperature of an exoplanatery ocean, then I suggest we are implicitly talking about conditional experiences. If John Smith, after a long cryosleep, pops down in a shuttle and dips a thermometer in that ocean, then that thermometer will read between 63 C and 67 C. Of course it mostly doesn’t matter whether it’s John Smith or Jane Doe. The “point” of empirical objects is precisely that they are reliably available to all. But, as I see it, this leads us to neglect actual singular perceptions altogether, as if insignificant. And yet empirical science is only empirical through the sufficient consensus of many individual perceivers. And perceptions are expressed as “basic statements,” which I’d call statements of belief. “Yes, the thermometer read 63.4 C.”
As you say, “truth is just a word people use in communication.” Well, I more specifically suggest that it’s best understood as an indicator of belief. Moreover, I suggest that belief and not truth is the fundamental concept. Belief is the horse. Truth is the unicorn (the mystification of belief).
I get your skepticism, but you’re still using the idea of objectivity to provide the meaning of subjective experiences. Subjectivity is like a story from one POV. To even conceive of this, you have to place the experiencer on a stage of time and space, in the midst of events that can be viewed differently.
In other words, the two always go hand in hand, one conjuring the other.
I wouldn’t refer to “objective reality”, though, but rather to objective data, for instance, the patient felt cold, but she had a fever. It’s there for all to see that she’s febrile. We don’t know she feels cold unless we ask her.
For me it’s not skepticism, though. Instead I see philosophy as something like the art of getting a better grip on fundamental concepts.
I don’t know how much of my other posts you have seen, but I’m trying to synthesize “the forum” and “perspectival perception” in a proposed explication of knowledge. The question is whether “the forum” (the framework presupposed by rational discussion) “needs” the concept of “truth” as “the way things are from no perspective.” I grant that it does need the assumption that we share and discuss the world. Does it need the assumption that the world has a “true face” ? Many philosophers hide this supposed “true face” behind a plurality of masks, where the masks are “internal images” of an “external world.” To me this is bad way to try to spell things out, however taken for granted. It can “get away” with being bad because people don’t act on it. The virtue of my own approach, as I see it, is that it holds to our sense of experiencing objects themselves, as opposed to living among internal phantoms.
The sloppy way to say what I want to say might be “the world is only a bunch of masks.” But this stinks of subjective idealism, and just wallows in the phantoms as a “profound and sophisticated” gesture. You can find an industry of this gee-whiz stuff out there. It’s the sci-fi stuff the kids eat up.
The better approach is to grant the world many faces. Likewise every object is many-faced. This does not mean that we treat every reported perception or belief equally. In practical terms, nothing changes. I “believe the science” in the usual boring way.
If I “tell it like I see it,” then I am expressing belief as the ways things are “from over here.” I need not assume that the world shows the same face to others. What I’ll grant is that sharing beliefs tends to involve the hope that they will be appreciated. But we need not think of that we are handing more or less accurate “maps” to one another. I like the more general idea of talking apes trading life-hacks. “Did you ever try to peel a banana this way ? I like this way better, because to me…”
In this context, it’s worth mentioning that accuracy makes sense precisely in the perceptual context. We don’t usually argue about how many pennies there are in someone’s hand. This, I suggest, gives “sense” to the concept of a “fact.” I assume that you also see the “redness” of the balloon, yet I don’t see that redness through your eyes. And you will surprise me if you insist that it is blue, especially if you say that blood and ripe tomatoes are red.
I can agree that “the two” always conjure one another or are entangled in the sense that belief is “theory-laden.” I understand the fire hydrant to be conditionally there for others also, in its “sensory quality.” I am talking about that fire hydrant which is logically “between us.” It is no more mine than yours, but I can only report what it shows to me.
“We don’t know she feels cold unless we ask her.” Basically I agree. Because “feels” invokes this “POV” that we can only get at indirectly.
But “it’s there for all to see” is not so trivial. “Did you see her shivering ?” “No, she looked fine to me.” In practice, things tend to work out. I readily grant that. The notion of facts looks to depend on it. This is why I suggest that “seeing is believing” gets “inflated” to “truth as correspondence.” I can check your empirical claim with my own eyes. My own belief might thereby be solidified. But Joey over there thinks we are both airheads, and he doesn’t care that I say that what you said is “true.”
This is a deep point which I agree with completely. I quoted Husserl above, but for convenience.
External perception is a constant pretension to accomplish something that, by its very nature, it is not in a position to accomplish. Thus, it harbors an essential contradiction, as it were. My meaning will soon become clear to you once you intuitively grasp how the objective sense exhibits itself as a unity in the unending manifolds of possible appearances; and seen upon closer inspection, how the continual synthesis, as a unity of coinciding, allows the same sense to appear, and how a consciousness of ever new possibilities of appearance constantly persists over against the factual, limited courses of appearance, transcending them.”
“Let us begin by noting that the aspect, the perspectival adumbration through which every spatial object invariably appears, only manifests the spatial object from one side. No matter how completely we may perceive a thing, it is never given in perception with the characteristics that qualify it and make it up as a sensible thing from all sides at once. We cannot avoid speaking of such and such sides of the object that are actually perceived. Every aspect, every continuity of single adumbrations, regardless how far this continuity may extend, offers us only sides. And to our mind this is not just a statement of fact: it is inconceivable that external perception would exhaust the sensible-material content of its perceived object; it is inconceivable that a perceptual object could be given in the entirety of its sensibly intuitive features, literally, from all sides at once in a self-contained perception.
What we can add to this is a sense that the object offers its differing faces not only to me at different times, but also to many others in the same varying way. We can all step in the same river twice.
I also recently discovered Bakhtin:
Any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere. The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects. Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account. After all, as regards a given question, in a given matter, and so forth, the utterance occupies a par- ticular definite position in a given sphere of communication. It is impossible to determine its position without correlating it with other positions. Therefore, each utterance is filled with various kinds of responsive reactions to other utterances of the given sphere of speech communication. These reactions take various forms: others’ utterances can be introduced directly into the context of the utterance, or one may introduce only individual words or sentences, which then act as representatives of the whole utterance. Both whole utterances and individual words can retain their alien expression, but they can also be re- accentuated (ironically, indignantly, reverently, and so forth). Others’ utter- ances can be repeated with varying degrees of reinterpretation. They can be referred to as though the interlocutor were already well aware of them; they can be silently presupposed; or one’s responsive reaction to them can be reflected only in the expression of one’s own speech - in the selection of lan- guage means and intonations that are determined not by the topic of one’s own speech but by the other’s utterances concerning the same topic. Here is an important and typical case: very frequently the expression of our utterance is determined not only - and sometimes not so much - by the referentially semantic content of this utterance, but also by others’ utterances on the same topic to which we are responding or with which we are polemicizing. They also determine our emphasis on certain elements, repetition, our selection of harsher (or, conversely, milder) expressions, a contentious (or, conversely, conciliatory) tone, and so forth. The expression of an utterance can never be fully understood or explained if its thematic content is all that is taken into account. The expression of an utterance always responds to a greater or lesser degree, that is, it expresses the speaker’s attitude toward others’ utterances and not just his attitude toward the object of his utterance.
In short, I am not “me” unless you are “you,” and so on. Selfhood presupposes community.
Your posts are packed with interesting stuff, but this part from Husserl is really interesting to me:
We could imagine that we have the mathematical concept of a circle because we’re synthesizing previous experiences, but if none of the circles we’ve seen actually measured up to the perfection of the mathematical version, then how can we say the concept is a synthesis of the manifold?
Where is the concept, which “persists over against the factual” actually coming from then?
Thank you for your kind words ! That Husserl quote ( and others like it ) set my mind on fire.
The way I’d unfold this is to insist that objects are “ajar” or “unfinished.” Note that J. S. Mill understood objects as the continuing interpersonal possibilities of ( further ) perceptions. The tree outside is a physical object because it’s “waiting around” to “show itself” to “whoever.” So it’s not only what the tree has shown so far but especially, for future-oriented beings like ourselves, what it might show. For Mill, these “perceptions” were not “in people’s heads.” The point was to explicate what we already tacitly mean by “physical object” — as opposed the usual otherworldly speculation, which tends to be an accidental parody of empirical science.
An updated version should probably avoid loaded terms like “sensation” and “perception” and speak instead of “aspects” or “adumbrations.” Above I used “faces,” as in the object is the logical-temporal-interpersonal synthesis or “system” of its “faces.” Anyway, Husserl definitely read Mill and Berkeley as a young man. And he and Heidegger both read James, which is clear from their lectures.
Now for circles ! Not everyone will define “perfect circle” in the same way, but I have a sense that most of us “vaguely agree.” Any line drawn from the center to perimeter must have the “exact” same length. But all measurement is of finite precision, so this ideal, geometric concept of length is not “operational.” This gets us into rational numbers, which “feel exact,” and irrational numbers that “generate exact rational numbers endlessly,” with none of those rational numbers being the irrational number. And yet that stream of rational numbers, sometimes with the “law” of their generation, is “all we get.” Crucially, that stream is inexhaustible, not unlike the adumbrations that a spatial object may yet show.
Of course the charm of computable numbers is that “in theory” we could get to any fixed “adumbration” ( rational approximation ), if we ignore the cost of computation and the briefness of human life. Maybe this is a good analogy. The “perfect circle” is a “program” for constructing better and better circles. We talk of the real number system, and dazzle the folk with uncountable infinities of incomputable numbers, but it looks to boil down to techniques for handling rational numbers as we pragmatically cope with the fuzz of life. “I reckon that this circle is perfect enough.” If measurement is of limited precision to begin with, then we don’t exactly have the “now,” let alone the predicted future.
A person could say that “no one has ever seen a real circle.” But it’s weird to call the circles we have and know and depend on “unreal” while the impossible ones get the honorific “real.”
I agree with thinkers like Heidegger who emphasize the priority of the future. Even empirical claims about the past are ( arguably ) best analyzed as claims about possible future experiences, though I confess this is not so intuitive. But it’s relevant against some of the points in After Finitude that try to leap out of “correlationism” to an untainted “great outdoors.” The lust for “things in themselves” is a lust for a limit that’s not in the sequence. For instance, consider f(n) = 1/n, which is 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4,… The limit 0 is nowhere in the sequence, but it “leads” the sequence “toward” an absence of positivity that never arrives. This suggests the thirst for transcendence of perspective altogether toward no longer being a witness in a world at all, toward the utterly unwitnessed world, which “as truthmaker” is tacitly witnessed by “God” after all. But what can “world” mean in our mouths but something analogous to what we have witnessed ? Note that I say so, claiming it as my own speech as a particular witness. Maybe others will find no problem, even after I gesture toward what I find semantically deficient, beneath its familiarity.
Didn’t quite answer this one. If we think of signs as “blurry equivalence classes” of “qualitative lifeworld events,” then we don’t have the inherited dualism of vessel and content, so that concept refers to something “immaterial” in the sense of non-qualitative. I found something like this in both Sellars and Derrida, and it’s even a plausible projection, IMO, on Plato’s “unwritten doctrine.” Does this not go back to Heraclitus ? What is it to step in “same” river ? To say that we can’t is to “reduce” the river to its momentary rushing water. But that’s like reducing my cat to a single instant of her manifestation. My cat is the “unity” of many “moments,” many of them unwitnesed by me. I’m not saying that my cat is “just people’s internal images” of course. Better to reject the theory of “internal images” as nonsense, in my view, than reject the lifeworld “between-us” “social reality” of cats and rivers.
I might agree. The tricky thing with the “form of life,” is that it only shows up about five times IIRC.
I’ve seen it invoked to defend cognitive relativism, which is about the most radical form of relativism one can have (arguably bordering on solipsism, or a sort of racial/cultural solipsism in some forms), but also by Thomists, who claim all rational creatures (or at least non-angelic ones) share a “form of life.” I’ve seen Wittgenstein called in here to support Derrida, but also claims that Wittgenstein has ended up close to Saint Augustine.
Hence, my fear is that the concept is so underdeveloped as to lead to a lot of potential misunderstanding and equivocation.
Plus, I don’t think we need to be so vague. I think there are plenty of good arguments, transcendental, phenomenal, etc. lanes for securing the ordering of reason, etc.
At any rate, I think claims about our inability to access anything “outside” our “form of life,” are going to depend on prior metaphysical assumptions. For, the common objection that one must somehow “step outside” language, interpretations, appearances, etc. to say anything about what is prior to them already presupposes a particular metaphysics of language, appearances, etc.
I don’t think one has to step outside one’s humanity to say anything about prior principles because these are simply not absent from the human form of life. Even if we wanted to call them “transcendent” (a slippery word), what is transcendent is, by definition, not absent from what is transcended. If it was, it would simply be separate.
Interestingly, this same claim in the Metaphysics is developed into the Doctrine of Transcendentals. Of anything that is, it is true that it is. But rather than the deflationary conclusion that is drawn later, this is taken to disclose something about an aspect of being qua being.
I agree with you that when it comes to the elaborate, instrument augmented observations of science, the hypotheses that purport to explain what is observed, and the reporting of experimental results testing the predictions of those hypotheses, the lone ranger will not suffice.