I agree that my experience in the present of the colour red has a greater vivacity than my memory of the colour red in the past.
But it still does not follow that because my experience in the present has a vivacity I am experiencing something outside the mind.
Otherwise you could argue that my headache, which also has a vivacity, exists outside the mind.
But you cannot see your headache outside of your mind, can you?
I must admit that I was wrong here. Despite using the language of postmodernism and enactivism our friend here is not even a bad stereotype of a postmodernist but rather a solipsist, for whom there is no external world but only sensory apprehensions.
Frankly, I donāt know why anyone has any time for people who deny the existence of a shared reality.
I read Brandom and Gadamer in such a way that while I appreciate the considerable overlap between their thinking, I imagine that each would launch a substantial critique of the other. Brandon would fault Gadamerās for not given diffident attention to rational accountability. Authority must be answerable to justificatory practices. For his part Gadamer would argue that language isnt primarily a structure of assertions and inferential commitments. It is the medium in which world-disclosure occurs prior to reflective justification.
We do not first stand outside language and then undertake normative scorekeeping practices within it; rather, language already carries historically sedimented meanings, prejudices, traditions, tonalities, and possibilities of disclosure that exceed explicit inferential articulation. Understanding is not fundamentally an achievement of rational bookkeeping but participation in an event of meaning. Where do you stand in this debate? Are you more partial to one side over the other, or would you split the difference?
I side with Gadamer, and find Rouse quite useful here. He inserts himself into the debates among Brandom, McDowell, Dreyfus and Rorty, revealing the limitations of their thinking with respect to Gadamer , Barad, Merleau-Ponty and Foucault.
Actually, I think conceiving of the 4+1=3 world is much harder than these examples (except possibly that the world was flat ā physics, again), but no matter. We clearly have different things in mind when we talk about conceiving a world. You say the physics of Additive Rock World are āincoherent within our world,ā but if there is a world in which this happens to obtain, they are not incoherent. Well, if there could be such a world, I suppose that would be true, but according to me, and what I mean by āconceive a world,ā this is a meaningless posit, since we canāt give it any content.
The more subtle point is simply to take into account the role of the mind (consciousness, cognitive facilities) in the construction of what we think of as the external world. That world does not exist in a completely mind-independent way, or rather, to the extent that it does, we know nothing about it. But the world we experience is one we share with others in more than just a physical or objective sense. it is also a world of shared meanings, culture and language. About this point, postmodern philosophers are right on the money. How it is interpreted, though, is another matter.
Oh, I agree, as you can see from my responses to @RussellA . But I love it because, if you can just suspend disbelief long enough to entertain the idea, it gives you a sense of what it might mean to separate laws of logic from the behavior of items in the world. Unphilosophically, we just take it for granted that theyāre mirror images. That can get in the way of understanding why the question āTo what does āAā refer?ā has bite.
To me solipsism is actually opposed to postmodernism, despite the superficial similarities between the two. Postmodernism is about social construction, about how things arise from our shared reality as human beings ā whereas solipsism is about denying shared reality and saying that no one exists outside of ourselves.
@Banno coming back to Davidson for a bit. This may be a bit broad and sprawling. How does he account for the laws of logic? Heās not really a traditional metaphysical realist is he? Donald Davidson seems to hold that language and our grasp of reality arise together through shared interaction with one common world, making communication and mutual understanding possible. Not sure how that works. Do analytic philosophers explain just how it is that we have intelligibility? Weāre all familiar with the position of people like CS Lewis that intelligibility cannot be explained by physicalism.
Not one and the same, but kind of intended for each other. The key fits the keyhole because it was designed that way, and vice versa. This would be a lovely way of resolving the question posed by the OP, if there were any chance of providing an argument for it. As it stands, I think it just represents a kind of desirable endpoint, a way of hoping. Many share this hope.
Iāll take this as directed impersonally to all of us.
Yes, I often get weary of doing philosophy, which by its nature involves rehashing the same old questions.
Does any of it matter? [. . . imagine an emoji depicting serene indifference to the question . . . ]
Iām almost completely uninterested in advocating for my own beliefs, if āadvocatingā means trying to get people to adopt them.
What propels my interest in the subject? Itās a clue to the exit.
Nice and happy for anyone to answer. Over the years I see the same argument played out endlessly (which may well be how it works) but it is curious that people seem to expect different outcomes each time. Whenever I have spoken to philosophers or have followed discussions, it very much looks like people have strong emotional reasons for holding a view and what follows are post hoc justifications of varying levels of sophistication or depth.
āItās a clue to the exitā is an amusing line. Do you mean once you are satisfied you have enough knowledge youāre done, or are you talking more existentially?
for what itās worth, Iāve learned a ton of stuff from my fifteen years of forums. The whole subject of biosemiotics from Apokrisis, much about contintental philosophy from Joshs, analytical from Banno and others. But then I do go back and read up the background on what theyāve said. My own attitudes and what I do and donāt post has also been considerably impacted by all that.
In particular, thatās Lewisā āargument from reasonā, which has a pretty big set of documentation around it. Iām an advocate for it, but not for using it in service of Christian apologetics.
Yes, I get it. Me too. I want the best of each domain (for want of a better term): the best of theism or Platonism, analytic philosophy, and postmodernism. For me, this is more a survey of philosophical themes and approaches than a search for answers. And all the while Iām wrestling with my own dispositions, laziness, and prejudices. Iām most interested in how this shapes peopleās individual responses to living, rather than which chapter in which book to focus on.
Yes, for me philosophy seems to come down to two primary concerns (this is a my personal reaction, I guess) what is intelligibility and how do we justify forms of moral realism.
My own interest in philosophy (which I am admittedly a novice at) comes down in particular to questions about reality and existence and their structures, about what is most basic versus what supervenes/is emergent upon another element of reality.
Iāll try a slightly different approach.
There is a common background presumption, usually unstated, that we can picture all language use as a kind of imitation of what is going on in the world; that what we say is always distinct from what is the case in a way analogous to a map being distinct from the territory.
It is a picture of a gap between what is said and how things are. Hence that picture brings with it a dualism between word and world. But it will not do for a general picture of how language as a whole functions.
Such a picture has its uses. There is often a difference between what we say and how things are. But not always. Sometimes - hopefully often - what we say is true.
Here we must differentiate between what is true and what is believed, and note that while some of the things we believe are not true, some of the things we believe are indeed true.
If the cat is on the mat, then the sentence āthe cat is on the matā is true; and in this case there is no distinction between the sentence and the truth. That the cat is on the mat is not mediated.
Thereās a but here that needs to be carefully considered. There is a difference between the sentence āThe cat is on the matā and the cat being on the mat, and there is some mediation between āthe cat is on the matā and the catās being on the mat - that the sentence āthe cat is on the matā is about the cat and the mat is indeed dependent on various features of our use of language. This is not being denied.
Rather, given that language use, if the sentence āthe cat is on the matā is true, then the cat is on the mat. There is no further separation to be accounted.
This is Davidsonās famous rejection of the āthird dogma of empiricismā, the dualism of scheme and content, the picture that we have on one side a conceptual scheme that sets out how things are, and on the other side a way things are to be matched against that scheme.
If we reject that dualism of scheme and content, as I think we must, then we have Davidsonās unmediated touch with the cat being on the mat.
Notice the careful use of quotes here. There can be explanations as to why āthe cat is on the matā - those words - are about cats and mats. But there need be no explanation as to the catās being on the mat being about cats and mats.
We are lead into a dualism between scheme and content by not noticing the difference between belief and truth. Sometimes what we believe is not true, yet sometimes we mistake the one for the other, and forget that we are talking about the world.
It might sound paradoxical at first reading, especially for someone who is enthralled by the dualism being exorcised; but our true beliefs are how the world is.
Your opening post, in asking about a supposed relationship between logic and reality, inadvertently presumes the distinction between scheme - logic - and content - reality.
As do Timās replies.
@ j_j Good stuff!
You put these two statements in opposition, but what would it mean for logic to āmap onto the worldā if not in the sense of āembodied sense-makingā? How else do you see this mapping?
I would say that logic as a theory and a discipline comes about when we turn that sense-making activity onto our discourse, where we discern and codify certain patterns. That may make it sound like dispassionate science, but of course itās more than that. There is always this descriptive/prescriptive duality in logic. We donāt just want to note that we discourse thus and thus, we want to know kind of discourse makes for good reasoning. That, and not just any way people happen to think and talk, is what we have traditionally been referring to as logic.
But how do we know what good reasoning is in the first place? Arenāt we prejudiced? Well, of course we are, which I take it to be a point that @ j_j was making. I would only add, in view of what I said above, that in logic we donāt just obtain knowledge of ourselves: there is also an active, motivating aspect to it.
Thatās pretty natural on the internet, when you are talking with people who are often bored and killing time. I donāt think true philosophers are those who have a chip on their shoulder and keep rehashing the same issue over and over again. Much to the contrary. I didnāt really understand Wittgensteinās claim that philosophy is meant to lead the fly out of the bottle until I came to TPF. I hadnāt encountered so many flies.
One of the difficulties I have with TPF is that it is dominated by those who monotonously beat the drum of the linguistic turn and of nominalism, and because of this all of the conversations end up in the same placeāa place which is relatively boring, and which the drum-beaters have little interest in examining with care. The new iteration of the forum seems to thwart that to one extent or another, and this is promising to see. But it is still the same cast of characters saying the exact same things, and such an environment will be uninteresting to those who are interested in philosophy in the classical sense. As someone who is interested in a much broader understanding of philosophy, I found myself pulled into the role of the anti-drum-beater, and this was just another facet of the same problem.
But consider the fact that we can identify post hoc rationalization, and that we find it problematic or at least uninteresting. What this means is that there is another way. Rather than merely justifying the positions which have become bound up with the affirmation of our identity, we can think through issues with the aim of coming to understand what is true, regardless of whether it affirms our current identity. But the key is that the love for the truth (or whatever one may wish to substitute in its place) must be stronger than the love of oneās current identity. If it isnāt then post hoc rationalization will inevitably win out, as it usually does.
(Note that this does relate to the grounding of logic, because logic can be used for different things. It can be used quite effectively for post hoc rationalization, and the one who uses it in this way will approach the question of the OP rather differently.)
Intelligibility. Thereās a reification for you.
Are you so sure the posts here are intelligible? What could that mean - as in, how does that pay out? In more posts being added, more questions asked?
There simply isnāt such a thing as a shared language in the traditional sense, no one thing that makes a post intelligible. Instead we are constructing more posts, more questions, more words.
Itās not a thing, itās a process.
Logic sets out what it is to be coherent. Of course, folk donāt have to be coherent.
Davidson is not a realist, nor an idealist, but like Wittgenstein, rejects the picture on which that juxtaposition stands. I suspect most analytic philosophers would go along with something along these lines.