What is Metaphysics?

fresco wrote:

What argument ! The "naive realism rules O.K" argument ?

I'm not surprised you missed it the first time around. I'll number the points for your ease in addressing them:

1. If no two observers ever observe the same object, how can we explain the concurrence of any two or more observers' views of what they take to be a single "object?"

2. In what way is your position an epistemological one?

3. Why would you worry about falling into an infinite regress when you don't accept the law of non-contradiction?

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I would not presume that different observers do not have the same experience; but it does seem to be a perennial epistemological problem of philosophy (the Problem of Other Minds?) that we cannot know with certainty that they do just because they use the same terms to "match" their experiences (what the anthropologist, Anthony Wallace described as "equivalency structures").

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The unit of "sameness" is the mutual communication situation, not the "object" or "the observers". The questions posed by Joe dissipate as a result of such a paradigmatic axiom.

From a transcendent observation domain we speculatively might see two "organisms" (like bees or bloodcells) unconsciously engaged in the "maintenance of social structure" (synonym = the body or the hive). The individual organisms communicate within a common medium by mutually interacting with "focal features" of it (bees communicating the location of flowers). For humans some of these focal features are held "in common" as reflections of accommodations of common physiology, but many have local social significance due to idiolect and parochial focus. "Languaging" is part of the "communicative act" and its persistence for humans is a central part of social "structure" by allowing for repetition or pseudo-repetition of intricate behaviours, including the "replaying of events in the mind" and the stimulation of "forward planning" by internal dialogue.

Piaget considers a child communicating with an adult who produces a round toy and simultaneously utters "ball". At this stage the child connects the utterance with the whole production scenario not the adult concept of "a round object". If the adult were to successively utter "ball" on production of a doll, rattle, etc the child would eventually map "ball" to the concept "toy production" ! However, the utterance "ball" eventually gets surrounded by other speech events associated with a child's "action schemas" like "get the ball" "where's the ball"etc from which (according to Chomsky) the child automatically (by universal hardwired programming ?) abstracts "ball" as a persistent "object" ("grammatical" and "external") . As JLN has implied in the past, our mutual concepts of "external reality" may be an epiphenomenon of the evolution of "universal grammar".

Obviously I am merely scratching the surface of human "object perception" and its relationship to the significantly long dependency period of the human child on its carers during which language is acquired. But the implication for philosophers is that they cannot assume the independent "reality of objects" the adult concept of which is forged within a socialization and language acquisition process. Nor (according to Piaget) can they assume the adult use of "logic" to be independent of such processes. Traditional views of "language" and "logic" seem to be merely species specific projections onto local scenarios which ignore the dynamics of communication and social functionality. Metaphysical considerations of "reality" seem to demand we go further than this even if we are reluctant to stomach the "bees in the hive" analogy.

So the dissipation involves "sameness" as "common functionality"....Epistemology as "expectancies subject to assimiltion and accommodation (state transitions)" .....and "infinite regress" as a fruitless search for a non-transcendent vantage point ("state transitions" having taken care of any spurious "logical" issues involving static "set menbership" )

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Fresco, don't you think your posts essentially boil down to "non-dualism rules OK!"? You don't deal with the objections to your position, you just occasionally make irrelevant criticisms of your opponents (not of your opponents' arguments). You don't seem willing to respect and consider the views of people who disagree with you, nor to subject your ideas to scrutiny. You seem like a very lazy philosopher.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe, buried beneath all that jargon and overuse of quotation marks, you're making something that resembles an argument, and which actually considers alternative theories and objections to your theory. Trouble is, I don't think anybody has the time to dig it up.

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fresco wrote:

The unit of "sameness" is the mutual communication situation, not the "object" or "the observers". The questions posed by Joe dissipate as a result of such a paradigmatic axiom.

From a transcendent observation domain we speculatively might see two "organisms" (like bees or bloodcells) unconsciously engaged in the "maintenance of social structure" (synonym = the body or the hive). The individual organisms communicate within a common medium by mutually interacting with "focal features" of it (bees communicating the location of flowers). For humans some of these focal features are held "in common" as reflections of accommodations of common physiology, but many have local social significance due to idiolect and parochial focus. "Languaging" is part of the "communicative act" and its persistence for humans is a central part of social "structure" by allowing for repetition or pseudo-repetition of intricate behaviours, including the "replaying of events in the mind" and the stimulation of "forward planning" by internal dialogue.

Piaget considers a child communicating with an adult who produces a round toy and simultaneously utters "ball". At this stage the child connects the utterance with the whole production scenario not the adult concept of "a round object". If the adult were to successively utter "ball" on production of a doll, rattle, etc the child would eventually map "ball" to the concept "toy production" ! However, the utterance "ball" eventually gets surrounded by other speech events associated with a child's "action schemas" like "get the ball" "where's the ball"etc from which (according to Chomsky) the child automatically (by universal hardwired programming ?) abstracts "ball" as a persistent "object" ("grammatical" and "external") . As JLN has implied in the past, our mutual concepts of "external reality" may be an epiphenomenon of the evolution of "universal grammar".

Obviously I am merely scratching the surface of human "object perception" and its relationship to the significantly long dependency period of the human child on its carers during which language is acquired. But the implication for philosophers is that they cannot assume the independent "reality of objects" the adult concept of which is forged within a socialization and language acquisition process. Nor (according to Piaget) can they assume the adult use of "logic" to be independent of such processes. Traditional views of "language" and "logic" seem to be merely species specific projections onto local scenarios which ignore the dynamics of communication and social functionality. Metaphysical considerations of "reality" seem to demand we go further than this even if we are reluctant to stomach the "bees in the hive" analogy.

So the dissipation involves "sameness" as "common functionality"....Epistemology as "expectancies subject to assimiltion and accommodation (state transitions)" .....and "infinite regress" as a fruitless search for a non-transcendent vantage point ("state transitions" having taken care of any spurious "logical" issues involving static "set menbership" )

Well, that's all very interesting. Now how about answering my questions. Here they are again:

1. If no two observers ever observe the same object, how can we explain the concurrence of any two or more observers' views of what they take to be a single "object?"

2. In what way is your position an epistemological one?

3. Why would you worry about falling into an infinite regress when you don't accept the law of non-contradiction?

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yeah, but non-dualism does rule.

and yet somehow i doubt that really summarizes his position...

non-dualism rocks my socks off... on... offon... onoffon...

whatever Smile

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Agrote,

No, I think you simply don't understand what I'm talking about.

I have answered Joe's questions as best I can, in good faith, despite the fact that he has ignored my "empirical evidence for active perception reference", and taken his usual sanctimonious tone regarding ad hominem statements which he himself tends to intitiate by put his own lttle jibes into every paragraph to myself or JLN. I note that you seem to be following in his footsteps.

I am perfectly aware that that material is difficult and controversial. Many students can't handle Piaget's genetic epistemology or Chomsky's non-prescriptive generative grammar. Both require an element of mathematical abstraction in order to appreciate them. And it is also the case that (even) many physicists resist the philosophical implications arising from some of their own counter-intuitive findings (like non-locality). But we are struggling to describe the essence of "reality" here Exclamation

and we are not going to make any progress by resorting to simplistic "logical" argument, especially given that this has made little headway to date.

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Joe,

You've had your answers. If you don't understand them, tough !

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fresco wrote:

No, I think you simply don't understand what I'm talking about.

And I suppose you think that's because "the material is difficult", and I am a lowly student. I actually think it's because you can't write clearly. I'm not making an ad hominem point here... I'm not attacking you, I'm attacking what I suspect is your assumption that we disagree with or fail to understand what you say because it is complicated, or because we are thick.

It's not that, it's the way you write. Too many speech marks, no commas, buckets of jargon. I'm not asking you to simplify your theories, I'm asking you to explain them coherently. You don't need to use specialist terms that none of us are familiar with. If you can't rephrase what you're saying, then you don't understand it. It's as simple as that.

What is the logic behind your use of quotation marks? Do you realise how unusual and confusing it is?

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fresco wrote:

You've had your answers. If you don't understand them, tough !

If he didn't understand them, that may very well be your fault.

Would it hurt to number your answers (as joe did with his questions) and rephrase them so that they can be easily read and understood?

How do we know that you even understand the answers you gave? If you can't re-word them, that might be because you've copied and pasted them from a book which you don't understand.

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fresco wrote:

Joe,

You've had your answers. If you don't understand them, tough !

I assure you, the fact that you can't articulate your position in a comprehensible manner is certainly not a problem for me.

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Agrote and Joe,

You two really are priceless ! I've trawled my bag of pedagogical tricks (and believe me I know a few !)... from the use of coloured chalk to the insertion of dialogue and humour.... in an effort to get some of this stuff across, and you still moan like a pair of bolshie teenagers. As I've said before, nobody can do the reading for you and the potential range to which I refer is vast. Adopting a "shoot the messenger" attitude will ensure your philosophical development stalls exactly where it is (or isn't).

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fresco wrote:

Agrote and Joe,

You two really are priceless ! I've trawled my bag of pedagogical tricks (and believe me I know a few !)... from the use of coloured chalk to the insertion of dialogue and humour.... in an effort to get some of this stuff across, and you still moan like a pair of bolshie teenagers. As I've said before, nobody can do the reading for you and the potential range to which I refer is vast. Adopting a "shoot the messenger" attitude will ensure your philosophical development stalls exactly where it is (or isn't).

I've done a fair bit of teaching myself, but I was never so arrogant as to think that the failure to get my point across was invariably the fault of my students.

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Quote:

I've done a fair bit of teaching myself, but I was never so arrogant as to think that the failure to get my point across was invariably the fault of my students.

....what nobility ! You blamed yourself for students who refused to read essential texts !....I'm impressed !

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fresco wrote:

Quote:
I've done a fair bit of teaching myself, but I was never so arrogant as to think that the failure to get my point across was invariably the fault of my students.

....what nobility ! You blamed yourself for students who refused to read essential texts !....I'm impressed !

I was able to explain Ayer to Shapeless and wandeljw to their evident satisfaction, even though they had never read his book. And it really wasn't all that difficult. But then Ayer was an excellent writer who didn't lard his text with impenetrable jargon and precious nonsense. In that respect, I guess I was just luckier than you to have those kind of materials to work with.

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Gasp! How can you say, Agrote, that Fresco is lazy. If anything I am lazy to express only thoughts as they occur to me and almost never as relevant literature organized for the benefit of others, IF they should take the trouble to look it up for study. Fresco is pointing the way and you seem to want him to breast feed you.
I generally find his language clear but the material he presents is often beyond my level of preparation--that's MY fault, not HIS.

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JLN,

I'm trying to work out which I prefer least, spoon feeding or breast feeding ! Smile

Interestingly, Wittgenstein is reputed never to have read anything, but then again Maynard Keynes is said to have remarked of him "I met God on the 5.15 train"..... mere mortals might note !

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fresco wrote:

You two really are priceless ! I've trawled my bag of pedagogical tricks (and believe me I know a few !)... from the use of coloured chalk to the insertion of dialogue and humour.... in an effort to get some of this stuff across, and you still moan like a pair of bolshie teenagers.

I'm not going to get through to you. I can't compete with your arrogance.

Quote:

As I've said before, nobody can do the reading for you and the potential range to which I refer is vast.

You're not my teacher and this is not a seminar.

Quote:

Adopting a "shoot the messenger" attitude will ensure your philosophical development stalls exactly where it is (or isn't).

Shooting the messenger is criticising someone for words which are not his own. I am criticising you for your words. Your inability to articulate the theories which you support does not suggest to me that those theories are no good. I am agnostic about your theories, but I believe strongly in your inability to articulate them.

JLN wrote:

Fresco is pointing the way and you seem to want him to breast feed you.

I'm not an infant! And Fresco is not pointing the way. He's putting forward some ideas in an incredibly convoluted way, when he really doesn't need to. Complex ideas can be expressed using words which can be understood without doing tons of reading. It might take longer, but it's worth doing if he wants us to shut up about his prose style and engage with his philosophy. I don't see why it's up to us to do "the reading". I'm not taking a module in fresconian non-dualism.

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You say, Agrote, that you are "not taking a module in fresconian non-dualism." No need to. It's offered--and at some pains I must say--and you (and I) can take it or leave it.

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Quote:

Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.

Wittgenstein.

On page 14, I gave an illustrated example of the "state transition mathematics" which forms a conceptual link between Chomskyian "transformational generative grammar", Piagetian "active perception" and "epistemology".

Quote:

To understand how this relates to the concept of "active perception" we might consider the significance of the event of "rolling a six" in a game of monopoly. Obviously the significance (reality) of this event depends on both the state of the board and the dice value. This will cause a transition of that state to a new one such that the significance of subsequent "six" has a different "reality". and so on. If we consider the rules of the game as the wired in (biological)"generative developmental programme" and allow the possibility of an unbounded game length we have a viable model for "cognitive progression". At the macro level Kuhn's paradigmatic progression for science mirrors "cognitive progression" for the individual

.

I would re-emphasise that "sameness" or "concurrence of views" is embodied biologically in Chomsky's concept of "linguistic universals", and Piaget's "developmental stages" and sociologically in common language and common functionality.

If anybody here requires further expansion of these points I will try to satisfy them. What I will NOT do is deal with summary dismissals of these concepts on the grounds that they do not directly satisfy simplistic questions of the type "Do you see the same thing as I see ?". At the level implied by Wittgenstein, you, I see, and same are all subject to reconstructive analysis.

Also, if anybody can explain Wittgenstein's comment on metaphysics in another way, lets see it.

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