Count Lucanor wrote
Epistemology and ontology are branches of philosophy. Phenomenalists want to dismiss ontology in favor of the supremacy of epistemology (a particular part of it concerned with the noetic moment of apprehension), so they’ll say basically that philosophy is all about epistemology. So I took your statement and gave epistemology its proper place.
Look closer: ask, "what is ontology?" Can you, in good faith, say that what it means to be a thing at all can be disentangled from the very cognition that conceives it? I mean, it is pure folly to even suggest such a thing. There is no argument here, and analytic philosophers worth their ink already know this.
Phenomenologists, of course, do not want to dismiss ontology; Heidegger's whole thesis is about just this examination of what the question of ontology really means. But to actually be in good faith, one has to first make the move to an absolute simplicity. What is there is causality that makes for an epistemology? How do I know that I am at a rock bottom simplicity here? First, there is the simplicity of the analysis, which is absolutely authoritative: you simply cannot make a naturalistic epistemology work. Try it, sitting there, observing the computer, asking how it actually works. This is why Wittgenstein had to make it central to his Tractatus the transcendence of logic (and the world and value). Second, there is the more elaborate contexts of analysis of even the most famous analytic philosophers, like Quine. I am reading Christopher Hookway's Quine: Language, Experience and Reality, and you know, Quine is a naturalist all the way through, which simply means physics is the bottom line for him in making responsible knowledge claims, and Hookway confesses to recognizing "that the intentional content of my own psychological states is subject to indeterminacy: semantical and intentional phenomena cannot be incorporated within the science of nature." But most obviously, science itself BEGINS with just this semantical phenomena! There is no "outside" of the very semantics that conceives it, "thinks" about it, and so on.
No, the question is not a choice between what seems to be over there (the world with objects) or what is over here (the subject). It’s a false dilemma. The question is how can I guarantee from here, from my subjectivity, that what seems to be over there, is actually there.
Hmmm, you can unpack this just as well as I can. Guarantee?? You mean, confirm belief, which goes to justification, it asks about the terms of justification of S knows P. So the "false dilemma" refers to the lemma S and lemma P and you are assuming that to treat them as a proclematic is just false. How is this in any way more than simply saying, well, let's just not look at this because it doesn't make prima facie sense? Look, a brain here and a tree there relation is NOT an unreasonable basis for inquiry. It is glaringly present in its defiance of common sense. "In your face" as they say.
I so sympathize. But you cannot be ad hoc about this, just dismissing something because it is hard to think about. Quine himself had to admit the foundational indeterminacy of our existence, but I really don't think about Quine because he very articulately misses what this means. Like Heidegger or Husserl, great thinkers find themselves transfixed by their own genius.
big part of natural sciences finds quantitative relations that comprise deterministic systems. Another part of it, biology, is not satisfied with that, but with the level of complexity that emerges from quantitative relations. Evolution of organisms, ecological systems, human societies, they are not objects of science by purely quantitative measures. But even if they were, how does that eliminate metaphysics from our investigative tools? How does that give any supremacy to epistemology? The part of epistemology that phenomenology cares about doesn’t really get into the structures of our mind, it merely speculates with the possible consequences of mind acting as the sole structurer of reality.
But the idea you are responding to is not about differences between more and less deterministically grounded statements in science. The claim here is more broadly about the very nature of science itself, and this has to do with knowledge claims in general. Science deals with specific disciplines, each with their own language and insights. Phenomenology is just this: a "science" that deals with phenomena as the foundational basis for discussing human existence at the most basic level on inquiry. Just as a biological specialist might understand something like, "the increase in systemic or local amyloid deposition with age can lead to organ dysfunction. The deposited amyloid is a relatively insoluble beta-fibrillar protein with stable structures that need to be broken down"; so a contemporary phenomenologist would understand a post Heideggerian like Derrida in, "This affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace."
The point is that once one starts actually reading phenomenology, one begins to see what it is saying. What Derrida is saying in his Structure, Sign and Play is miles away from empirical science, and on the threshold of religion. Now, since this is philosophy, the biologist's jargon is, upon investigation into what is presupposed by its terms and ideas, going to end up, in a phenomenological reduction, facing Derrida. Not just disciplined science, but all thought period! has to deal with Derrida, who is not going address Alzheimer's disease, but the possibility of conceiving of this at all.
But you keep saying that such connectivity is only an epistemological problem, something about how thinking connects thinking and being, but actually it is also about what is connected and what there actually is that enables such connection, in other words, how being allows thinking.
Well, you sound like Heidegger. You should realize that ontology are essentially the same thing, and this explains why it is impossible to make a claim in ontology without justification. A claim is inherently justificatory. This doesn't mean we can't talk about them separately at all; of course, what it means to think at all is be categorical and world. I go on about this epistemic "distance" between observer and observed because it is the most accessible and irresistible way to make the idea clear because it isn't some long, discursive argument. Straight forward and intuitive it is, that this relation is epistemically impossible. Being, therefore, has to be conceived accordingly.
How being allows thinking. Begs the question: what do you mean by being?
One simply does not abandon science and moves on to philosophy, or vice versa. When one engages with the relationship between thinking and being, one cannot ignore a discipline that is committed to one stance on that relationship, not without despising it altogether. Science has a philosophical foundation, both ontological and epistemological, so you’re stuck with it when you start getting into the big inquiries. The problem with idealist phenomenology is its strict focus on what it assumes is the only thing we have access to: the correlation, not the terms of it. This gives a distorted view, both of thinking and being.
Causality might be a way humans reconstruct conceptually the key relationships between objects, in that sense it could be considered a way in which reality conforms to mind, but the properties themselves are, if the realism of science is not rejected, mind-independent, objective.
Abandon science? No more than one abandons biology to do computer science. They are just thematically very different. Science asks what is this anomaly in oceanic currents, say; phenomenology asks about what it means to have a thought about a thing at all. Of course, to ask such a thing, one has to look at thoughts and what they are, and this means looking at the contextual nature of thoughts as they address particular issues, so science is not ignored, but recontextualized in a different inquiry, just as to speak as a physicist does is not to dismiss what a car salesperson does. It just looks at what is presupposed when one sells cars, asking about the nature of the material existence of a car or a salesperson in terms of its more basic dynamics. Such questions are presupposed when we talk about what they are in the usual way. Phenomenology (philosophy) asks of the physicist, what is presupposed in your knowledge claims? And THIS leads to discussions about epistemology and ontology. This is why physics has qua physics little to say about philosophy. Apples and oranges.
Of course, nothing is this easy as analytic philosophy moves into speculative physics, and there is justification in this, I know. What does one do, after all, with quantum theory's claim that observing an object modifies the object in the perceptual encounter? But this can only go one place: deeper into an examination of the subjective contribution. One finds phenomenology staring back at one, for the entire observational field is reducible to phenomena, and this is simply not in dispute. To know something to be true in physics is to experience it, so all eyes are on experience and its phenomena. To talk about things that are outside of experience is just bad metaphysics.
Frankly, I don't even know what mind-independent COULD mean. Perhaps you could tell me how this works, but not to forget, the telling itself is not an event that is mind independent.
I don’t see where is such “reductive attempt”. To say that religion is a social phenomenon implies inserting it on a broader domain, the human domain. That is not a reductive operation, just the reaffirmation of the concrete conditions of existence of religion, from which it cannot be separated. It is a cultural practice, and as such, with all its contingencies, a dimension of the belief system. The concept of religion is, however, one that generalizes the common properties of certain practices in human communities. Undoubtedly, the social always sends us to the actual lives of the humans that constitute it and to the determining factors of their behavior, including biology, psychology and the environment, all of which can be summed up with the label of “the human condition”. So, we don’t move in or out of the social analysis to move in or out of the existential one: they intertwine. There’s a place in the analysis of religion for human suffering, an important one, Marx acknowledges it in his famous statement, but it does not refer to universal, unchanging, non-historical essences, unaffected by social conditions.
Look at it like this: when you think at all, you are being "reductive" which simply means that
the totality of what could be said is reduced to what is thematically allowed. You can't talk about plate tectonics and scuba diving at the same time, UNLESS, that is, you choose to do so in which case you would entering a special zone of associated meanings with new boundaries of relevance, but the idea is that when you think of anything in particular you are in an implcit reduction. We do this all the time, constantly, really. The phenomenological reduction is the same thing, so the question is, what is being reduced? The totality is everything in the potentiality of possibilities, so here, we bracket off what does not belong to the phenomenon qua phenomenon, dismiss what is not the phenomenon, and acknowledge the existential residua. Of course, there is no escaping the totality entirely (a point that goes directly to the essence of religion, but for now....), and this totality is all inherently phenomenological to begin with, for what isn't? What isn't? Our thinking there really are such things as taxes! That is what isn't. Or General Motors, or snow mobiles. Look, we live in a body of complex nomenclature and pragmatics, and we take all this very seriously, but analysis shows that this body of affairs (what Kierkegaard calls inheritance of the race), this culture of dealings with the world, is a construct. Phenomenology seeks the underlying foundation for this which is beyond aporia, or Cartesian doubt.
Any way, to to speak at all is a reductive operation. And there is no doubt religion is a cultural practice, but here we seek what is not a cultural practice; we seek what is really there that cultural practices ignore.
I am claiming religion's essence is twofold: ethics/value/aesthetics---all the same thing, says Wittgenstein. Why? Because they are reducible to value, the broad term encompassing a dimension of our existence that includes the good and bad of experiences and the right and wrong of actions at the basic level of analysis. Value is, if you will, the engine that "runs" ethics and aesthetics. Wittgenstein held that value is transcendental: it is in the givenness of the world, and is a nonsense word (see his Lecture on Ethics) because one cannot speak the world. One cannot speak existence qua existence for it has no contextual Archimedean point to "leverage" meaningful discussion, so to speak. It is, in Kierkegaard's words, it own presupposition. Proof lies in the pudding: examine a painful event you are having. What is the pain? It is like asking what the color yellow is. It is just "there" and this is really the plain spoken way to approach phenomenology.
The other side of religion is our foundational indeterminacy, placing our ethical concerns in radical indeterminacy, and this is why I start with epistemology, which is evidenced in the complete, unqualified failure to draw up epistemic accounts of any kind that isn't absurdly question begging. To be honest, this is so clear, I can't see the basis for resistance. The world almost literally wears it on its sleeve. Just look: there is the observer, there is the cat. What makes for epistemic possibility?
Einstein didn’t just get away with unfalsifiable speculations, as phenomenalists do. Things do not “transpose into a mind”, minds are actually brains, which are things, too, so there’s nothing mysterious or mystical about our senses and minds connecting with the world.
A metaphysics needs not to be inferred from science, but it can be supported by science. Materialism is the ontological base of science. Science without materialism becomes nonsense and ontological materialism without science becomes a merely speculative endeavor.
Yes, good Count, but you have to do more than SAY it is unfalsifiable speculation. I mean, first, this is self contradictory. But never mind. Explain this. I won't do all your work for you. Just tell me. No reason to keep this a secret. How does a simple knowledge relationship work according to philosophical materialist assumptions? In good faith! Not just throwing stones.
What you call the epistemic problem is merely the attempt to close the door to ontology, but the rejection of ontology on the basis of lacking direct access to being, is an ontological problem, even if it were an epistemological problem, too. When you only had metaphysics, all answers remained speculative, when science came along, it was a whole new game. It was no longer the objects before me, but the ones that I can’t even see. What is my epistemic connectivity with the electron, with magnetic fields or genetic drift? Their “aboutness” is explained and the answer only lies on solving the problem of being.
But what are you calling ontology? No one rejects ontology, which is absurd. What is rejected is a non phenomenological ontology. Never been witnessed, such a thing. It would be like claiming you could step outside of experience and affirm reality non-experientially. What does this mean? The notion of direct access to being? But you already have this, IN the phenomenological presence of the things around you. What separates you is the interpretative error that steps in when you try to speak its presence. This is essentially what Wittgenstein's Tractatus is saying. Phenomenologists, including myself, claim that if one does this, practice this method, the entire horizon of what lies before one undergoes a novel restructuring.
Science DID come along, yes. And new game, but science's game is not philosophy's. The latter is about the presuppositions of the former. If not this, then nothing at all.
Electrons? Talk like this is pre-analytical. But it is, as you say, the "aboutness" that is in question. And the problem of being. See Heidegger. He write a book on being: Being and Time.
I will not keep in mind something that is not true, not even generally accepted without dispute. One can affirm what’s behind phenomena once you begin to recognize the deeper relational structures between phenomena and attest their independence from the subjects. One might give a pass to phenomenological constraints from raw, first hand experience, but we can control experience systematically, we call it science, and it would be useless if objects did not conform to objects independently of our subjective experience.
Now there is a LOT in that. Paragraphs to respond. But I'm tired. I said, "Keep in mind that all one has ever and can ever affirm is phenomena," and you said, that's not true. This is hard to see, I'll grant you, but really just awfully hard if you don't do the reading. The statement I made was meant to be simple. True ontology: all one can possibly witness is the phenomenon. To move beyond the phenomenon behind it, you would have move beyond the language gives words like "behind" meaning; you would have to move beyond meaning, for meanings are what WE do and make. There are no meanings, in the materialist setting, "out there" and it is materialism that tells me this! You do see this, don't you? Materialism has. no. epistemic. features. at all. No surprise, really, because no one has ever seen "material" in this sense. It is not observable, and by this I am making the very strong claim: it is impossible to make an observation like this.
I know you want to say when science makes observational discovery, and names its objects and their behavior, we thereby have an intimacy with their true nature. But this process in done IN a matrix of a phenomenological setting, and this condition is
prior to anything science can say. Phenomenonology studies this setting. It doesn't deny anything science at all! It simply talks about something else, something more basic.
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