Yes, the frequency of those sorts of responses is just an indication of their ubiquity in the training data, even when it is keying of articles in academic philosophy.
Yes, exactly. If one denies intelligibility as a property of being per se then it needs to either be added later, through some sort of “strong emergence,” reduced to the unintelligible (which seems impossible) or else dismissed as mere appearances (e.g., as cognitive illusion, as mere linguistic artifact, etc.)
Yes, good point about ‘strong emergence’. I forgot about that. However, as you note strong emergence seems just a denial of intelligibility, so another way to say that intelligibility is an illusion.
As usual, Count, your post is thought-provoking and resonates with me substantially; however, I am still left perplexed at how a noetic faculty would work ontologically.
I do believe, for similar reasons to this OP, that reason is facilitated by an immaterial faculty (of which I would say is proper to the soul); but it seems to me that we can never properly account for reason (with a robust theory) either way: we can just know reasonably that it can’t be through material processes.
What are you thoughts on this?
Thinkers like Hegel and Kuhn locate a transcultural basis for defining the transition from Newton to Relativity as a progress.
Kuhn lists criteria of progress that scientists recurrently invoke when comparing theories, such as accuracy, consistency (internal and external), scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness. While these are not rules that mechanically determine choice, they are not invented afresh in each paradigm. They recur with remarkable stability across scientific cultures, because they are anchored in shared features of human inquiry and of the world itself.
Progress for Hegel isn’t voluntaristic because it is rationally necessitated. A form of thought contains implicit criteria of adequacy. When it fails to meet them, it undermines itself. The move to relativity is not simply that “we changed assertability conditions,” but that the earlier conceptual scheme generated problems it could not resolve without transforming its own core categories. The later stage preserves the earlier one as a sublated moment Newtonian mechanics remains valid as a limiting case at low velocities. Thus the development is neither arbitrary nor externally judged; it is immanent. Thought becomes “more adequate to being” because its own structures become more coherent and comprehensive.
So Kuhn and Hegel dont reject a faculty of receptive reason, they relocate it from a static metaphysical source beyond the world to our actual engagement with the world itself. The infinite regress is blocked because reason does not need an external meta-standard. It encounters failure in practice. Receptivity lies in the stubbornness of the world as encountered within practice.
Hegel and Kuhn offer a receptive moment without returning to a pre-critical metaphysics of static correspondence. Hegel locates receptivity in the self-negating movement of experience; Kuhn locates it in the empirical resistance that generates crisis. In both cases, thought is not sealed within its own norms. It is answerable to what undoes it.
Your regress assumes that unless we posit a timeless faculty passively conforming to being, progress cannot be intelligible. Hegel and Kuhn would reply that receptivity need not be timeless or external to history. It can be immanent.
Can you explain this? I don’t think I’ve said anything about “timelessness,” nor about immanence, only about the need for a distinction between reality and appearances and some ground for truth and normativity. It could easily be immanent, as it is in Aristotle, Neo-Confucian thought, Hegel (as you point out, at least on many readings), etc. Even in Scholastic, Patristic, or Islamic thought, intelligibility is immanent, it just isn’t exhausted by finite being and finite being is not its own ultimate principle.
As for the rest, I don’t see why you think a criticism of Kripkenstein should apply to Hegel and Kuhn.
I agree with you on Hegel, but I think that is an excessively rationalist and realist reading of Kuhn that is, at the very least, at odds with how he is normally interpreted. His model for science is more akin to neo-Darwinian accounts of evolution, involving development from not progress towards.
Very nice, OP. I’m in broad agreement with what you’ve written here. The dilemma itself is well-framed — if reason is purely discursive, you either deny noetic content (self-refuting) or you invoke a mysterious “emergence” that defaults on the claim. I think that’s right, and it maps nicely onto the point that rule-following alone can’t generate understanding. No disagreement there.
The only thing I’d gently push back on is the phrase “receptive noetic faculty”. Not that there’s anything wrong with it per se, but the danger is that “receptive” slides toward a kind of intellectual intuition where content is simply given to the mind ready-made — forms just landing in the intellect, fully dressed. I don’t know if this is what you are intending but, if so, I think it runs into a problem of its own. Understanding isn’t passive reception; its an act — specifically the act of grasping intelligibility in presented data. There’s a real receptive dimension (you discover intelligible structure, you don’t fabricate it), but it’s inseparable from the activity of inquiry, questioning, puzzling over what you’re looking at. Without that active component, I’d say you’re back to something like the myth of the Given, just dressed up in noetic language.
The only other thing I’d point out is that in your concluding paragraph the claim that charges of “spookiness” are just “indoctrinated bias and aesthetic taste” is a little too quick. It risks mirroring exactly the dismissiveness it’s criticizing. Some of those charges do rest on genuine philosophical concerns (e.g., how does a form existing “in” a thing also come to exist “in” a mind? what’s the ontological status of that shared structure?). Those concerns deserve answers, not just a genealogical debunking. The genealogy shows the concerns aren’t metaphysically innocent, but it doesn’t show they’re empty.
Kuhn denies “progress toward reality as it is in itself,” but he does not deny progress simpliciter. Scientific development is not mere change from one state to another; it is cumulative improvement in the capacity to solve puzzles generated by engagement with the world.
Imagine an evolutionary tree representing the development of the modern scientific specialties from their common origins in, say, primitive natural philosophy and the crafts. A line drawn up that tree, never doubling back, from the trunk to the tip of some branch would trace a succession of theories related by descent. Considering any two such theories, chosen from points not too near their origin, it should be easy to design a list of criteria that would enable an uncommitted observer to distinguish the earlier from the more recent theory time after time. Among the most useful would be: accuracy of prediction, particularly of quantitative prediction; the balance between esoteric and everyday subject matter; and the number of different problems solved.
Less useful for this purpose, though also important determinants of scientific life, would be such values as simplicity, scope, and compatibility with other specialties. Those lists are not yet the ones required, but I have no doubt that they can be completed. If they can, then scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. Compared with the notion of progress most prevalent among both philosophers of science and laymen, however, this position lacks an essential element.
A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.
Right, that’s an excellent question. There is also a lot of diversity in answers here across traditions, although I think we can also identify some strong isomorphisms between them.
A difficulty here is that the contemporary reception of these has been hamstrung by the fact that most philosophical pedagogy (including many popular survey texts, such as Durant’s) simply skip straight from Aristotle to Descartes. Yet Aristotle himself only provides a basic outline for what would become the distinction between the discursive faculty of dianoia (ratio) and the receptive faculty of noesis (intellectus), which isn’t given a fully fleshed out phenomenological grounding until the Middle Platonists.
Anyhow, it’s worth keeping in mind that on the discursive-only picture:
-chains of justification must terminate,
-inference presupposes validity,
-rules presuppose correctness conditions.
Thus, such accounts will always rely on something non-discursively grounded, even if these are said to be “just what we do,” or are grounded in voluntarism, brute fact, etc. The question, then, is whether that ground is:
intelligible and normatively binding, or;
brute, voluntaristic, or merely habitual
The demand for discursive justification of noesis assumes that only discursive justification counts. Yet discursive reason itself depends on a prior grasp of principles, unities, and necessities.
With that in mind, we have to consider that an elucidation of noesis/intellectus (or something like it) is not going to be able to work according to the presuppositions of dyadic mechanism. I think modern philosophy has picked over this issue quiet enough to show that if you reduce causality to temporally ordered mechanism, it becomes mere brute patterning (something Hume saw so well).
So, what is needed is something of a metaphysics of knowledge, which will involve an explication of causality. That’s a tall order for a single post (but I’ll share two examples I like below). For now, I’ll just focus on the most common concern, which is that noesis must reduce to “you just know.”
I think this misconception comes out of misreadings of Aristotle in the lends of modern fondationalism. Noesis doesn’t preclude error, not least because our grasp of the actuality of even finite beings is not absolute in any of these traditions. As Saint Thomas puts it, all the efforts of the human intellect will never exhaust the essence of a single fly (Saint Theresa of Avila makes a similar case with water, and Eriugena opens the Periphyseon with this point). To know a thing exhaustively is to know its entire context, and to know its causes and principles, which brings you out on an ascending chain of principles and a horizontal chain of contexts—presumably to a First Principle. But this sort of knowledge was considered impossible for man.
Hence, a grasp of form/actuality/Li/logoi, etc. need not rule out error.
However , crucially, truth is distinguished from error not by further discursive derivation, but by whether or not what is grasped really does function as a principle—an intelligible “one” that governs the many (e.g., the way the principle of lift explains flight in airplanes, insects, birds, etc.).
Once dianoia and noesis are seen as complementary rather than rival faculties, the standard objections re error lose their force. Discerning truth from error and wisdom from folly involves both.
For instance, understanding the principles of arithmetic is not simply predicting how one will go on, nor forming a hypothesis about future behavior,nor encoding a decision procedure, but rather grasping the form that governs the many.
Intelligibility is immanent to the object of understanding. Noesis receives it. Dianoia articulates and applies it. But the articulation is contentless unless the terms are understood. Error can occur under the aspect of reception because terms can be clear or unclear, which is why knowing “all snakes are reptiles” is true is not knowledge of the sentences content if one does not understand what a snake or reptile is (the terms, which are not of themselves true or false).
Here is one example from Nathan Lyon’s Signs in the Dust. Robert Sokolowski’s The Phenomenology of the Human Person also does a really good job on this question and brings in a lot of helpful insights from contemporary phenomenology and philosophy of language.
The particular expression of intentional existence—intentional species [i.e., form] existing in a material medium between cogniser and cognised thing— will be our focus…
In order to retrieve this aspect of Aquinas’ thought today we must reformulate his medieval understanding of species transmission and reception in the terms of modern physics and physiology.11 On the modern picture organisms receive information from the environment in the form of what we can describe roughly as energy and chemical patterns. 12 These patterns are detected by particular senses: electromagnetic radiation = vision, mechanical energy = touch, sound waves = hearing, olfactory and gustatory chemicals = smell and taste.13 When they impinge on an appropriate sensory organ, these patterns are transformed (‘transduced’ is the technical term) into signals (neuronal ‘action potentials’) in the nervous system, and then delivered to the brain and processed. To illustrate, suppose you walk into a clearing in the bush and see a eucalyptus tree on the far side. Your perception of the eucalypt is effected by means of ambient light—that is, ambient electromagnetic energy—in the environment bouncing off the tree and taking on a new pattern of organisation. The different chemical structure of the leaves, the bark, and the sap reflect certain wavelengths of light and not others; this selective reflection modifies the structure of the energy as it bounces off the tree, and this patterned structure is perceived by your eye and brain as colour…
These energy and chemical patterns revealed by modern empirical science are the place that we should locate Aquinas’ sensory species today.14 The patterns are physical structures in physical media, but they are also the locus of intentional species, because their structure is determined by the structure of the real things that cause them. The patterns thus have a representational character in the sense that they disperse a representative form of the thing into the surrounding media. In Thomistic perception, therefore, the form of the tree does not ‘teleport’ into your mind; it is communicated through normal physical mechanisms as a pattern of physical matter and energy.
The interpretation of intentions in the medium I am suggesting here is in keeping with a number of recent readers of Aquinas who construe his notion of extra-mental species as information communicated by physical means.18 Eleonore Stump notes that ‘what Aquinas refers to as the spiritual reception of an immaterial form . . . is what we are more likely to call encoded information’, as when a street map represents a city or DNA represents a protein. 19… Gyula Klima argues that ‘for Aquinas, intentionality or aboutness is the property of any form of information carried by anything about anything’, so that ‘ordinary causal processes, besides producing their ordinary physical effects according to the ordinary laws of nature, at the same time serve to transfer information about the causes of these processes in a natural system of encoding’.22
The upshot of this reading of Aquinas is that intentional being is in play even in situations where there is not a thinking, perceiving, or even sensing subject present. The phenomenon of representation which is characteristic of knowledge can thus occur in any physical media and between any existing thing, including inanimate things, because for Aquinas the domain of the intentional is not limited to mind or even to life, but includes to some degree even inanimate corporeality.
This interpretation of intentions in the medium in terms of information can be reformulated in terms of the semiotics we have retrieved from Aquinas, Cusa, and Poinsot to produce an account of signs in the medium. On this analysis, Aquinas’ intentions in the medium, which are embeded chemical patterns diffused through environments, are signs. More precisely, these patterns are sign-vehicles that refer to signifieds, namely the real things (like eucalyptus trees) that have patterned the sign-vehicles in ways that reflect their physical form.24 It is through these semiotic patterns that the form of real things is communicated intentionally through inanimate media. This is the way that we can understand, for example, Cusa’s observation that if sensation is to occur ‘between the perceptible object and the senses there must be a medium through which the object can replicate a form [speciem] of itself, or a sign [signum] of itself ’ (Comp. 4.8). This process of sensory semiosis proceeds on my analysis through the intentional replication of real things in energy and chemical sign-patterns, which are dispersed around the inanimate media of physical environments.
Forgot to add in my second reply that intelligibility seems to require the potential existence of reason/noetic faculty. In other words, in other to make sense of any possibility of explanation you need intelligibility which seems to require the potential existence of reason as a faculty that can understand what is intelligible. This is quite inconsistent with a view that tries to explain reason in a reductionist way.
Good points, I was going to use “contemplative” rather than “receptive” but I figured that would be more confusing.
There is of course a sense in which knowing is both receptive, a penetration, and a form of ecstasis. “Everything is received in the manner of the receiver” precisely because reception is according to the actuality (activity) of the receiver.
As to genealogical debunking, I put it at the end because I agree, debunking arguments themselves prove little. At best they “loosen the soil” for tillage. However, I would say that, while valid criticisms or concerns might sometimes be paired with invocations of “magic,” or what have you, these terms themselves virtually never do anything in terms of actual argument.
This is adjacent to a more subtle problem, where terms that might be used in other contexts are also received through the lens of a particular set of implicit presuppositions. The best example of this I can think of is the idea that “transcendent” = modern notions of eternal abstract objects through the lens of a “view from nowhere.” Or it means “posited beyond all possible experience or verification (hence it is empty).” But this imports verificationist or pragmatist assumptions. A realism about formal structure or about the intellect’s genuine ordering to being isn’t “transcendent” in either sense. It’s not positing entities beyond experience. It is giving an account of what experience and knowledge actually require as their conditions.
Another similar example might be formulating “moral realism” and “metaphysical realism” as being defined by “mind-independent” or “stance-independent” facts. Depending on how those terms are understood, they might easily exclude most historical forms of moral and metaphysical realism.
I cannot see how we could begin to participate in an activity without understanding it at all. I was not suggesting by “understanding” that a whole activity would need to be comprehensively understood prior to beginning participation. Some sense of what the activity is about or for would seem to be necessary though in order to be able to recognize it, or in other words, make it stand out from everything else, as a gestalt. This sense cannot be a matter of rule-following on account of the infinite regressive that would involve I pointed out earlier.
So we do not need a complete understanding in order otherwise get started.
no longer works against
the degree to which we participate is the degree to which we understand. It remains that our understanding is our participation.
On the old forum, I started a thread to explore the “Noetic Sciences”*1, as presented in a fiction novel : Secret of Secrets, by Dan Brown. The Noetic notion of human consciousness, seemed to be that it is a signal from some cosmic intelligence. In a blog post*2, I summarized it as : “human consciousness, and its alter ego The Mind, is not generated by the brain, but is instead a signal from out-there somewhere.” So, their answer to your question is : we humans don’t compute our own ideas, but receive them, as instructions, from a central transmitter, presumably the Cosmic Mind. Do you accept that parapsychological explanation, or rule it out as pseudoscience? Or do you have a more reasonable solution to the Harder Problem? 
*1. Noetic science is a multidisciplinary field exploring the intersection of subjective consciousness and the physical world, investigating topics like telepathy, mind-matter interaction, and self-healing. Founded in 1973 by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, it combines scientific, objective tools with inner, subjective knowing to study human potential.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=noetic+science
Can we not also understand without participating, but by merely observing?
I don’t think the focus on qualia is misplaced. My view is that what you are calling “noetic content” is reducible to qualia: either it is qualia, or a compound with qualia as its elements. For instance understanding might be conceived of as verbal content alongside a visual depiction of the logic of the idea.
…all of which simply presumes the essentialism it seeks to demonstrate.
Well said. The point about “transcendent” getting filtered through verificationist assumptions is really important and I think under-appreciated. You end up in a situation where someone hears “formal structure is real” and immediately translates it into “you’re positing spooky abstract objects in a platonic heaven” — which is precisely not what’s being claimed. The whole argument is that intelligible structure is ingredient in experience, not hovering above it. But if your implicit framework only has two bins — “immanent natural process” and “transcendent posit beyond experience” — then any realism about form gets shoved into the second bin by default.
Same issue with “mind-independent.” If that’s your criterion for realism, you’ve already ruled out any position where mind and world share formal structure — which is most of the tradition.
How so?
That Kripke’s theory is self-refuting has nothing to do with essentialism. One could assume an austere nominalism and come to the same conclusion.
The charge of vacuity has nothing to do with essentialism, it has to do with there being no measure for what is “useful.”
The charge that he doesn’t seriously consider non-discursive alternatives is simply true.
These problems are all internal.
@Count_Timothy_von_Icarus - FYI: I think you may have replied to the wrong person (me). I wasn’t defending Kirpke. Maybe @Banno?
Interesting OP. I had started one on the old site about the difficulty of explaining intentionality through physicalism or naturalism, using David Bentley Hart’s formulation of this argument. There seem to be quite a few transcendental‑style arguments being discussed at the moment. Hard for the non-philosopher to get one’s head around.
In the end it seems (and correct me if I’m wrong) that these are all variations on attempts to explain consciousness. People tend to have a kind of confidence that consciousness is an emergent property of a particular type of complexity, and that one day this will be explained. But even the more straightforward question of intentionality seems a difficult enough riddle on its own (depending upon one’s metaphysical presuppositions.