@Fido,
Quote:We can verify physical reality through our senses and extensions of our senses, but at the very moment that we conceive of reality, a portion of reality, we tell a lie, because no concept is exactly true to reality, and it is through our flawed forms that we relate to reality, in a flawed fashion, and not to the thing itself...
Fido, you are on an ostensibly promising track, but you are missing the fundamental point that "the senses" are themselves being "thinged" by our sociolinguistic conditioning and cannot be "directly observed". Indeed Husserl argued that the "noumenal world" was "not required", and we should stick to "phenomenology". My position, like that of Maturana ,is to refuse the dichotomy between "inner" and "outer" and reject terms like "sense data" since "data" are always predefined by observer requirements.
The observation of observation has also been investigated by systems theorists such as Von Forster who gave it the label "second order cybernetics". The mathematical model emerging implies a set of nested levels of "reality" starting at "the cell" and moving outwards through "organs", "bodies", "societies" and beyond. The status of any level of such reality takes into account aspects of levels "above it" as in the concept of
Gestalt. From this it follows that "reality" can never be accounted for by reductionist analysis, a conclusion in line with Wittgenstein's rejection of his
Tractatus with respect to its reliance on the "correspondence theory of truth".
