Burning Ghost:
I guess you're familiar with what Husserl says about the "univocal" then? Meaning when I say "the" or "or" or "five", I am using the very same term not some different item, such as when referring to a "dog" I am talking about "this or that dog" not a "universal dog".
So you've answered you're own question already. Math is not subject to refutation. You cannot refute than when I say "one" and you say "one" we mean different one's.
I don't follow. I agree that when we talk about doubting mathematical propositions, we run into our own rational intuitions, and there is no way to "get behind" these because you carry them with you into your attempt to find contradictions. See what I mean?: "refuting math"is a refutation that turns on the refuter because it places doubt not just on 1+1, but on the entire machinery of reason itself. Now, n the matter of Other's mathematical experiences and our ability to confirm what they are,ever since I took a course in the philosophy of language, I have been convinced that Quine notion of the indeterminacy of translation was somewhere near the truth, and here it has to do with the social basis of language acquisition: as an infant, we watch and learn sentence constructions and how they mak references to activities, things, other people, and so on. This is not an exercise in pure mathematics, and so my inferences about what others have "in mind" based on an internalized system of gestures, utterances and the rest is just that: a naturalized inference/familiarity. So when you and I agree to a mathematical idea, there is very good evidence that we are having the same thing in mind, but not certain at all; not certain like my own intuitive grasp of math.
Anyway, I am not sure how I answered my own question. Pls explain.
You may try and be a slippery person here and emphasis the "real" and "concrete" in what you say above. I think it is fair enough to say that we claim what is "real" and "concrete" is not open to opinion within its given context. Simple mathematical addition is not something we can argue over or base opinion on, with one person adhering to one answer and another a different answer. Such a thing is simply not possible. If we apply such ideal additions to The World then we may find room for opinion, but like I was careful to mention the mathematical context has then been overextended into the context of The World. All abstractions are true, concrete and real within their contexts.
I think we can argue about anything. But when i talk about what is intuitive, given, I am assuming you see the same kind f world as I see, and what thrusts itself upon me as undeniable is the same for you. It is in the interpretation that things get confusing. I say, along with Husserl, when we drop the tonnage of knowldge claims that are, if you will, always, already there (because that is the way we live and breathe spontaneously "in the world") and attend only to what is given, we find the rudimentary basis for religion: value in the world; and more pointedly, horrible suffering in the world. WHY are we born to suffer and die? That is the question, and it is not intended to be about "essence" talk. I prefer to keep the matter clean of language interferences.
If I was to say "remember the green of the drop drawn made it on of the and" we can appreciate the words and we know the functions these words can be used in. We should also all recognize that each word has limitations. I have quite clearly stretched the limitations of the words above beyond all common recognition. The context they are set in is a non-context. There is no meaning. That is not to say people will not try to glean something meaningful from the sequence of words I have set out. That is their folly not mine. It may not even be folly for them and perhaps they will stumble on some accidental fragment of understanding they can then share with others.
You want to get to the "essence" of religion. You assume there is "essence" then. This is perhaps precisely what you are looking for? Your seeking out is the very "essence" itself? If you mean this in a historical sense then there are numerous theories we can look to. It is in this sense that I said VERY early in this thread that we certainly are all "religious" in some way. Meaning that ideas of "God" and existence in general are dealt with by humans. In general we can refer to the idea of "God" as being something at the heart of every human existence, meaning we all have something we are about that constitutes our position, place and general meaning. To go prior to is an act of imagination. I cannot simply unlearn language and return to the state of a babe. We, as Husserl points out, carry around the sediments of life around with us.
Hmmmm. Not a noncontext in the above, because noncontexts are contextual in order to be determined as nontextual. This is not nonsense. A denial of any kind is a logical statement in the context other things that are in context. It is a matter of specifying. And i want the world 'god' stricken from our vocabulary, simply because it possesses metabulls**t. Start thinking of this kind of thing and you have made a straw person argument against religion as such.
When people generally refer to "religion" they always return to the idea of "faith" and/or "belief". I have found that the main differences between people who say they are "theist" or "atheist" is their views about, and claim over, "belief" in general. Many suffer from misunderstanding the principles of extending abstract structures into the world and forming scientific understandings form these extensions. Equally many take these extensions to be founded on unquestionable principles rather than abstract principles.
I'm with Heidegger on this: I don't give a fetid dingo's kidney about what people think when it comes to philosophy.
What is "logically prior to ..." logic? Surely you can figure out the lack of meaning here. You may very well have fooled yourself with your own words and are trying to make sense out of a question that makes literally no sense? That or you've simply not taken the time or dedication with which to frame the question intelligibly for the rest of us to understand fully (of course we can all guess at the intent of your question, but I am not inclined to offer up multiple answers to what appears to be an overtly obtuse question.)
I would add only that who says we "religiosity" rose into existence? Religion is based on community as is language. In a way we could quite easily refer to "religion" as if it was "language", or "language" as if it was "religion". That seems to be kind of what you are pointing towards?
No, 'logically prior' is a standardized way to point to what lies beneath an assertion and is freighted along without knowing or caring. Science rests on assumptions about the relation between math and the universe that tell them when they are using math to, say, describe and trajectory or measure mass, they're actually talking "about" the a world beyond us; you know, "out there". But in the logical analysis of a scientist's claim, what comes first is the assumption, and for philosophy, these assumptions are called to inquiry; they are logically prior, because they come prior to the doing of science. If you will, all science is question begging.
-- Updated August 7th, 2017, 10:16 pm to add the following --
Gertie:
If we go with that, the question remains - how does it enable you to make ontological claims about anything but 'your own' mental states/experience?
Remember you kicked off saying morality is objective. Clarify please.
I think when we observe the world, we are bound to the dynamic of our own understanding, and this dynamic is essentially temporal and pragmatic. So when I say, "pass the salt" or "what a lovely day it is" my references to the world have their analyses in time structures, and this brings the matter of what something is to what occurs in time that makes the meaning of the utterance meaningful? The meaning of meaning rests with pragmatism, for an analysis of any occurent thing is actually an event-in-time. I can't even imagine something out of time or out of space, and this seems to say not that we are *in* these, but rather that we are these, that they are a dimension of our being; part of the analysis of a self is time. And where does this come from? The past, and the familiarity repeated pragmatic engagement brings. So "pass the salt" issues from a long enculturating process of watching and internalizing language, gestures, idiomatic behavior and so on as these are engaging in and defining the world. Pass the salt has a long and complicated personal history, as well as a history of social genesis we all participate in.
So, as to things other than my own mental states, the question goes to how a pragmatic epistemology can get beyond itself. This is a question that is pretty important, that is, how knowledge of other things and people is possible. Pragmatism as i see it does not allow for this; there is no getting out. This is tricky, and takes perhaps someone more clever than me to defend it, for I've read Heidegger, and have more to read, but i do get the problem and he really helped me see this: When I see salt, say, one way to give a thumbnail philosophical analysis of this is to follow Kant: there are sensory intuitions and concepts, and the former without the latter are blind, but the latter without the former are empty. Meaning lies between the two, or in the combination of the two.
My thoughts are simple but far fetched, you might say: When I acknowledge a thing before me, the pragmatic meaning is always there and it makes knowing, believing, doubting and so on possible. But there is that ineffable presence that is NOT pragmatic at all. How is it that we can even acknowledge this as it is as presence? As presence, I say twice, because this is what my thoughts on religion swing on. The most salient feature in this world of ours is value; it is the valuative dimension of "pass the salt," the wanting salt, the propriety of the language to fit into a pattern of normalcy because you *care*. This caring, and this desire and gratification is "in" presence, not in the concept. Concepts shape desires but these are not concepts. They are intuited, and the gratification is intuited. And the suffering is the same.
.....but he doesn't go to the giveness of value; doesn't make it an issue. Nor does science. It can tell you, as you say, why tings like tomatoes taste good, but it does not tell you what moral goodness IS. Why the taste is Good. Why the pain is Bad.
The thing is, it does. Once you accept the scientific model of the world, it makes sense of why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience life. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense, by learning how we work, we'll be able to avoid terrible pitfalls. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts and nurture the helpful. Imo it's irresponsible to ignore this new knowledge, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.
Hard to make this point, but see the above. I know what pain is. This is not at issue. The issue is what it means that pain is part of the original human condition? Consider two universes: One is identical to the other save for one thing, namely, there is no moral badness and goodness. There are still people coming and going, laughing and crying, but the badness of all of this is absent. Now, this is entirely logically possible, and the point of posting such a world is to bring to mind the primordiality of suffering and delight, and getting to the heart of the thing i am trying to explain. Scientists in both worlds would have identical theories, or theory possibilities: for observables are equal! The only difference is the *mattering* of things. In one, things, of course, matter, but the mattering is only in gesture and language. In the other, the mattering is very different, and suffering has this clear and ineffable quality: it is bad, in the moral sense.
You no doubt notice that drawing such a distinction is very odd. That is because badness is invisible to "observation." One cannot put moral badness under a microscope.
It is odd, I know, but this kind of thing is drastically and, to borrow term from Quine (though not to play off his thinking), radically under-determined. Most treat our world as if it were the other kind of world, the one in which there is no badness (I am painfully aware of the awkwardness of this locution); they apply standards of theorizing, paradigms, to use Kuhn, that are produced by empirical science and completely ignore moral badness (and goodness, of course). Evolution does not begin to broach this matter because it is simply not about the badness of suffering. It only wants to explain the genesis of pain; you know, it is the familiar: pain made its entrance at some point, when a gene sequence underwent accidental mutation in some stage of an organism's development, and this was conducive to survival and reproduction, etc. ,etc. But it does not ever inquire about the badness of it because this is simply not its business. This belongs to philosophy and religion.
And there are certainly those who think moral badness is a fiction. They are wrong on this point. See John Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.
Now the more difficult point you raise is why should we extrapolate from our own personal, lets call it 'conscious experience', to believe the scientific model of stuff 'out there' and laws and so on is true, real? Well I'd say I can't know for sure, there is no 'bridge of certainty' from my experience to world of stuff 'out there'. Idealism in that sense is irrefutable. But I roughly accept my mental model of the world because it works. And if I ignore it, it doesn't work. That in itself is evidence that my experience is roughly telling me things about the world.
No bridge of certainty, but bridges nonetheless. For me, it comes down to the manner in which the world appears to us, and the big quesion is, how is it that we can "think" ontologically at all? For me, this goes to the presence of things. i think that IN the presence of perceptual objects, recollections, mathematical and so on, there is Being that is not part of the dynamics of pragmatic thought, and my it is what Being is. There is only one way we can step beyond the hermeneutical clutch of pragmatism, and that is to affirm transcendental Ego. When i behold an object it is infused with existence, so to speak. Like the brief analysis above of badness and goodness, Being-as-such is not observable, and yet, it is not reducible, as Heidegger would have it, to an ontology of language and culture (ready to hand). Being as such is Our contribution to the perceptual object, adn we can acknowledge Being in things not because they are, but because we are. We project our being onto the world in perceptual acts. And that is how we "get out" of interpretative fixity.
You're spot on that it's flawed and limited - and the the science part of the model itself tells me it will be. That we evolved for utility, to experience tables as solid, because that's a useful way to model them if I want to navigate the world and survive. So when science tells me a table's solidity is my mental construction, it makes sense within the model. It tells me that colour is a mental construction, and so on. That my perceptions are limited and at least partly constructing my model of the world and myself, it makes sense within the model (snake eating its tail time!) and tallies with the nature of my experiences to a point you can't ignore. And as you say, language plays a part too in how I formulate my model, a further abstracted symbolic construction upon a representational construction. I agree with you on all that.
But still, I can perceive something I call a pencil, and ask you if you see it too, and we'll agree. We'll agree something we call 'gravity' makes it fall. We can share observations and analysis of our shared model, and in that sense we can call these things objectively true. And once you accept this shared scientific model of the world, that it has things to say we can agree are real in the limited and constructed way we experience reality, we can agree we know stuff.
For example, we can say we know there was a time no experiencing subjects existed, and why tomatoes taste nice and pain is unpleasant. It's remarkable to have discovered this, and that its findings tally so well with the way we experience existence. This makes it good evidence that it has something real to tell us. And if we have any sense learning why we work the way we do will help us avoid terrible pitfalls we're prone to. Once we understand the mechanisms behind how we value things, why we desire things, we can hopefully ameliorate the harmful parts. Imo it's irresponsible folly to ignore this new knowledge we're beginning to map out, it could practically help us 'redeem ourselves' to use your language.
There is a progression here of what subjects can roughly and limitedly agree is real and true within our shared model, once it's assumed a world beyond us exists. There needs to be a justification for accepting some parts but not other, which you haven't given as far as I can tell.
But I don't disagree with most of this. See the above for my response. I do argue that we do not know things that are independent of experiencing agents. Tree falls int he forest, no one around: no tree, no forest, no sound, no falling, and so on. I do not argue that there is nothing out there, but when I say this, I don't know what i am talking about, not really. I do acknowledge Being-in-things, in this cup on the table, and this is the one way out: as I said, it is in the Being-as-such that I project Being onto the world, and in this projection, there is noting that even comes close to Value-in-Being, i.e., joy and suffering. Not only are these Real, they are more Real than anything else; by far more Real than the clunking materialist's (think Hobbes and others) fiction of the world.
However, we can say Value is an inherent feature of how consciousness evolved in humans, and it makes sense in terms of survival, if we accept evolution is a feature of the real world, which you say you do.
I say evolution is a theory, as respectable as theories about plate tectonics and star composition. But they are reams of inference away from the immediacy of the "badness" of this flame scorching my flesh.
-- Updated August 7th, 2017, 11:47 pm to add the following --
Fooloso4:
Transcendental does not mean ineffible, it means the condition for the possibility of something. Such conditions are something Kant and others talk quite a bit about.
I'll read about it. But as I see it, I said "utterly transcendental, or ineffable, and you can't talk about it. It's like god: pure ineffability!" and I don't think I conflated the two. But you do raise the mother of all interesting issues in epistemolgy: If the world is in some way a presentation of some unknown X, and if in our experiences there is an intimation of what x is (as there must be given the premise of "presentation") then where does presentation end and intimation begin?