Gertie wrote
I claim my own experience exists. I claim to know this actual state of affairs for certain.
There is also an actual state of affairs re whether an 'external world' exists. It does or doesn't. (This isn't a language issue.) .
I claim this is unknowable. It requires a leap of faith.
I claim that if I take this leap of faith, and assume my experience refers to a real world 'out there', I can know things about that world - in a flawed and limited way.
First I would not call it a leap of faith (not some Kierkegaardian leap out of principled ethical thinking) but more an entirely justified and well grounded belief. I believe this to be true as does everyone else. But this has not yet begun to be ontological; merely ontic, to use Heidegger's language. Ontology, for him, is another order of thinking entirely. It doesn't look at how reliable empirical science is at all. It looks at the very form of exprience itself that is presupposed by empirical science. Make an observation about the sun's composition or axonal networks of the brain, and you assume a foundation of what is means to BE. This needs to analyzed. Empirical science simply ignores this, and this makes it philosophically/ontologically preanalytic. This is philosophy's job, to go deeper to unrecognized (or willfully ignored) underpinnings of things. It is not,. for example, an analysis of Trump's rise to power and the tension and friction it causes, but an examination of what the legitimacy of government is at all. The point is to stand back from the empirical events that fills out lives, and analyze at the most fundamental level to get to something that is not reducible to something else (which is not possible; or is it?. So: you say, "I can know things about that world," and I ask, "what do you mean by knowing, that world, flawed and limited?? Up until these questions are posited, I am in full agreement with you.
How can anything NOT be a language issue when you use language, thought and logic to think what a thing is? All meaningful terms have their meaning in their analysis. What is a banker? If no one has anything to say, then I assume the term without meaning. Actuality? Existence? State of affairs? These are all terms with serious questions; I mean, how can one inquire about ontology, and then just assume what the term existence is? Patently question begging.
One of the things I can then know about the world is that I share it with other people, much like me. And we can then compare notes and create a working model of the world we share - this is the basis for the scientific model of the world. Which is inevitably flawed and incomplete, because within that shared world of shared notes, the ability of humans to know things seems to be flawed and incomplete (we have an evolved-for-utility first person pov, not a perfect god's eye pov)
Just as with the above, there are other people, other things, but then there is the
ontology of other people and other things. Obviously there are other people. But what is this otherness? Other than what? Myself? What is a self, and what is it such that others can be other than me? to ignore such questions, I say to almost everyone in this forum, is just perverse. This is not how responsible thinking goes. We do not simply ignore quantum physics because it is at present counterintuitive, disruptive. Evidence requires a paradigm shift, to use Kuhn's words (a Kantian, btw).
So my claim is that the only thing I know for certain is my experience.
And terms like ''we experience...'' only relate to the assumed external world the contents of my experience refer to, where other people exist. There is a distinct epistemological jump from certain experience, to an assumed external world. And once I make that jump, I can start building a working model of that world with other people. Recognising the model isn't perfect and doesn't answer all questions. Including the nature of the relationship between experience and material stuff.
The same as above. I am entirely in your corner. That is, until questions of ontology step in. Then, I do not leave your corner at all. I do stop playing this game and move on to another, but when I come back to this game, I am still in your corner.
Ontological questions: what IS material stuff? I mean, define it. Look at what you said: "we have an evolved-for-utility first person pov, not a perfect god's eye povat." Now you are closing in on Heidegger, though talk about evolution lies elsewhere. Utility? Are you saying our language has its essence in utility, and that to know something is to know how it works, and only in the contexts of what works and does not, and, perhaps the knowledge we assume to have of the meaning of terms like existence and actuality is really an underlying "sense" of the utility of language and pragmatics that is there, waiting when you approach a hammer, a telescope, a social situation; perhaps what reality IS, is this body of successful anticipations that has emerged out of a lifetime problems solved, and ontologies of substance, material, physicality, God's creation, are all just the way language has been set up in various cultural and scientific contexts such that these contexts have dictated the value and meaning of these terms. So when you insist the world is substance, you are really working within a context of language use established by an historical/pragmatic settings, that are handed to you in THIS setting. When you come into the world, whether it is ancient Rome or a19th Zulu tribe, the terms of what IS are handed to you and you simply absorb them. This absorption is the foundation for your life, and every thought you have will be always already an issue of this.
In thinking like this, the measure of right, wrong, good, bad, is what works. But this by no means reduces all meaning to this pragmatic standard. Obviously, the world is also GIVEN. We invented ice cream, but we did not invent pleasure, nor anxiety, hate, love, pain, and so on. The separation of parts here, where the given ends and the utility begins in a knowledge encounter in the world is a very interesting issue in philosophy. See Caputo's Radical Hermeneutics (but read Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger first. I'm still working on Derrida. A tough go, but interesting. I know all this reading is off putting).
I can't get a handle on your ontological claims, it looks blurryover these types of questions - Do you claim experience exists for certain? Do you claim the external world that experience refers to exists? If so, what aspects of that world do you include in your ontology as reliably known? If you include other people's reported experience, do you include other people's (and your) bodies too? Trees and rocks and computers? Do you claim bodies, trees and rocks are made of the same stuff as experience? Or something different?
And where do you draw your lines of what's knowable in terms of the external world? And what criteria do you use?
It's an odd affair. For me, it is realizing the terms like "external" and the rest are do not put forth meaning that is about what is independent of the pragmatic structures of experience. As Rorty put it, there is no truth out there; truth is propositional, and propositions are not out there. Truth is made, not discovered, he writes. We make truth out of our experiential conditions, and to talk about what there would be independent of experience is like talking about what our sun would is without nuclear fusion: no fusion, no sun; no experience, no external, internal, or anything else. These terms' meanings are OF experience.
Does this mean there is nothing independent of experience? Wittgenstein (from the Tractatus), in his own words, would say such talk is nonsense. It is a performative contradiction to SAY there are things beyond the saying, for to posit such a thing requires the saying. Take away the saying, and there is nothing to, well, say. One has to respect this and have ability to entertain the idea that our experience only delivers understanding through logic and language.
But for me the game changer is ethics and value.
If other people are only recognised as existing as part of my experience/''interpretative field'', then their reported experience isn't something I can rely on in a way to slide from ''my interpretive field'' to broader ''we'' claims about the 'external world'. You either say you don't know, OR place them ontologically as part of the experience, OR as independantly existing fellow experiencers. If it's the latter, then you've made an assumption that an external world exists, independant of your experience, which you can know something about.
Or that externality appears before us and we have to analyze this phenomenologically. Here I am with my "I" and "mine" stamped on all that is my experience. A stone sits there before me: my knowledge of the stone is mine and the interpretative meanings that go out to it are what I give it. I say it is an igneous rock, I say it is heavy or not, and I note the irregular surface and all the rest. Not you, but me. You have your similar interpretative events (remembering that knowing something is an event, not some inertial thereness. One sees the stone, brings up recollections in waiting for "stone" encounters, like those geology courses you took, and applies them as the occasion allows) but they are not mine. We, as you say, share, agree, disagree; but are distinctly separate. This is simply evident in the structure of the relationship. Now, for me to talk of a stone as independent of me, no sharing (stones do not share),no agreeing or disagreeing, puts the stone itself entirely within my interpretative affairs. But consider: these affairs are inherently social for language, thought is social. Such a claim as this takes the matter further.
One has to resist the infamous theory of psychological egoism, that says egoic systems are epistemically closed. Such IS the conclusion only if one considers a human self as a biological system. Here, biology is only one of many interpretative systems. Dasein is no more biological than it is knitting. The other is rather taken up phenomenologically: the other appears before me and is to be analyzed in the conditions of their appearing. They are not like stones in that they seem to have an interiority like mine, hence all the agreeing, disagreeing and sharing. All this intra subjective activity is what makes language possible. But this is another matter.
What do you claim exists?
What do you think is knowable/unknowable? Where do you draw your lines?
And briefly the reasons why.
see the above.
- By Lagayscienza
- By Sy Borg
- By Count Lucanor