there is a fundamental reality

then turn around and find a different path to take.

Who is talking about "doubt" ?

I am talking about the reasons why the term "fundamental reality" is no clearer than the term "God". The adjective "fundamental" adds nothing to the scientific quest to explore the boundaries of what that authoritative subset of humans agree to be "reality" as far as they understand it at this point in human history.

Fundamental realists are the secular cousins of fundamental religionists.

Just to rephrase that last comment...

Ontological fundamentalists are the secular cousins of religious fundamentalists.

I guess you fall under the wrong impression you are not a fundamentalist, how ironic... ...you remind me of those left wing guys who honestly believe they are the only ones with good intentions at the parliament...70's style at its best !
(the typical pretension of some sort of moral or intellectual superiority)
...your doubts against the existence (not the knowledge) of a fundamental reality was cased by you several times now...not getting away without replying on what grounds you can assume any doubt upon the existence of a fundamental reality when the very doubt itself at the very least must be assumed to be real to have any bearer of meaning whatsoever for the purpose you intended...still waiting here !

...as for "religionisms", well...nothing resembles more a "religionism" as having Consciousness at the very centre of what makes reality ! That cry´s for the idea of a God except that it makes no sense whatsoever...you have a very poor very limited and constrained idea on what relationship means...there´s nothing "mental" on mind more then there is anything "material" on matter...

...you are indeed beyond culture...not behind but transcendently beyond it !...I amaze myself that you can write at all...

...no, you see plural JL, plural !... with "us" (ourselves included) I meant the world..."minds" is in the "world" J...in the World !

..."non fundamental" intends to mean against "fundamental" as much as "fundamental" intends to mean against "non fundamental"...yet it results always in a positive assertion !
...one thing you all "old lady´s" ought to remember in philosophy is that there is no such thing as positing a "non"...

...in fact it is ever more my strong impression that if people were to truly understand anything at all on relativism they would n´t touch it...relativism is something that eats itself up...relativise relativism...

I'm in an interesting position here. I frequently use the phrase (from Aldous Huxley) of "The Ground of [all] Being"--as a secular substitute for God (the Eternal Creator of all things temporal). Yet I call myself an anti-foundationalist (following the likes of Rorty). Philosophically I think there IS a Reality, but that is ALL I can say about it. As Frank Apriso has argued, all we can say is that (Ultimate) Reality simply IS. Its symbol cannot be more than a large X or question mark. I do not accept the idea of an absolute ontological foundation only because it is philosophically useless for the process of cognitive exploration. And I think this because I believe we are too limited neurophysiologically to EVER be able to grasp a universal foundation of everything, any more, I repeat, than can an ant understand our conversation, no matter how intelligent he is compared to his peers.* Moreover, I do believe that all scientific and philosophical truth is provisional. However, for mystical realization "truth" is irrelevant. This "realization" is simply an immediate and concrete sense/experience of one's unity with the so-called objects of his experience--and by extension the Unity of all).
SO, I suppose I am a "philosophical" anti-foundationalist but a "religious" (or metaphysical) foundationalist. I prefer "foundationalist" to "fundamentalist" because of the latter's THEISTIC connotation.
I am, therefore, in agreement with Fresco assertion that "fundamental reality" is no clearer than the term "God". It clearly adds nothing to the process of scientific inquiry since it is essentially a metaphysical or religious notion. But I feel no loss there because "Science" does not have a monopoly on methodology (it is only more efficient) or truth (enlightenment can be at logical odds with rationality).

* As an aside--not to be taken seriously--I can't imagine what Einstein was thinking in his effort to develop a useful theory of everything: it seems he pursued A truth (valid or useful theory) rather than THE metaphysical truth of everything ).

I understand your dilemma, and one suggestion to you perhaps is to read Derrida. If I am reading him correctly (and he is notoriously obscure), all linguistic polarities evoke each other. It is not therefore simply a question of ontologocally deciding between say "absolutism" or "relativism", but understanding that the choice of those terms can never be divorced from a particular communicative event ( a reply...a question...a statement etc) where one polarity is being set against the other either overtly or covertly. As Derrida put it, "there is nothing beyond the (con) text". And what we understand between ourselves when we use the term "ineffability" should perhaps encompass that transcendent metalinguistic point in addition to any experiental vantage point on "reality " we may be claiming.

A second, more cynical suggestion, is of course, to redefine our communications as (merely) "languaging behaviour" ( as per Maturana). This would deflate the significance of so-called "philosophical discourse" to something approaching "social dancing". (...."reality discussions" being equivalent to variations on the rumba ?....)Wittgenstein's phrase "language games" evokes some of the flavour of this.

...you keep on evoking the problem of knowledge as a refuge form for the extent of your wish full thinking claims but still the fact remains you don´t address the problem of Being regarding the ground of experience no matter how incomplete one may believe it to be...you cannot fully bring up such a divorce without falling into contradiction or rendering meaningless any coherent discourse attempt against a fundamental substance...
Plus (a tag you and your pals constantly fall in love with like teenagers)
...our so said "languaging games" regarding a description on reality are themselves conceptually subjected as the product of more "languaging games" according to your own belief system...what else needs to be said upon such circular arguments...

...it is awkward to witness that some people which I ought to believe have a genuine interest in knowledge (even if incomplete) rather prefer to fall in a web of circular arguments with infinite regressions then simply to plainly admit they were wrong and took it a step to far...

After reading it carefully it seams needed some clarification on what was intended in the above paragraph :
What is meant here is that such tag "language games" is itself the product of a language game such that according to Fresco´s beliefs the said statement means or addresses nothing once itself carry´s no foundational value whatsoever...as I said the problem with relativistic pseudo intellectual approaches is that they end eating themselves up...

Reasoning, an experience upon an experience, is not any particular special case of experience..."mind" does not operate any differently from any other system in the world, nor does it have any mystical odd property´s...

One thing that seams constantly needing to be reminded is that knowledge does not equal whatever it explains...for some the goal would be no less then that, but of course it makes no sense once explaining is adapting the "other" to "us" and to our needs and such adaptation itself a natural or normal process ongoing in the "world"...
When true, Knowledge is true because such adaptation fits the picture, that is, it functionally fits what was intended as object in meaning on the inquiry...one tends to think that questions are infinite that they don´t have size...but it can be said that if my asking is a "lower resolution question", a true object on itself, the answer provided only has to match the "dimensions" or the "field" on which such question was formulated to be true...when a cube fits a cube hole one does not say that the cube hole and the cube are the same thing, nor does one say that there are bigger holes to be fitted out there...knowledge itself is an experiential part of ongoing reality, its incompleteness as a process of relation, results of its very focusing own its very intention while focusing, or rather on the intention it carry´s from a real "subject", yet another real experiential object...what must be understood is that with or without minds the world will keep on being the world, larger and fitting any form of inquiry as being itself the condition for such inquiry(even when poorly formulated)...that is its objects are true because they happen, they experientially occur...whatever is the true case of their relational grounds they correspond always to the world and in the world, as "mind" is itself yet another object of such world...exact location seams to be the problem, a problem of either "there" or "here" but never a problem of not fitting any reality...

(Italics mine)


Experienced by whom or what ?... "God" ?
And is that where the must comes from ?

I've abstracted and juxtaposed those bits of your word salad to show you that I have succinctly covered that point with my adage "ontological fundamentalism is the cousin of religious fundamentalism".

I have nothing further to add.

You are very generous.

Fresco, you rightly emphasize the social nature of our symbolic universe, or our meaningful life. This complex life is structured and informed by more or less shared and negotiated understandings (e.g., norms, rules, definitions, meanings, presuppositions, and values (both overt/conscious and covert/ tacit.). As such, our experienced reality is a SOCIAL reality, constructed, perpetuated and revised as an on-going socio-historical process. It is also an "invented world", a world of ideational INVENTIONS-- what anthropology refers to as CULTURE, itself an invention.
For Derrida- as far as I understand him--this constructed world is best studied by the strategy of "deconstruction": illuminating ideas by taking them apart as does a child to see what makes a watch tick. Nietzsche does this by means of his "genealogical" tracing of things back to their sources* to see how and why they came about as they did. I think Nietzsche said that this is how we can best demystify the world, especially the world of values, by tracing them to their origins.
*(Foucault does something similar with his "archaeological" method)

man your incompetence defy's logic...who else but each of us is the experiencer ???

You wrote



followed by



..and you are calling me "incompetent" !

(You occasionally do make sense but such occasions seem to be becoming less frequent).

Yes. Deconstruction would indeed appear to be antithetical to any philosophical statements which can be made about "reality". And ironically, as Derrida himself pointed out, even my last statement is itself open to deconstruction ! That is why I always stress the need to examine actual (non-philosophical) usage of terms like "reality" in order to understand its shifting context specific meaning, and the observation that the adjective "fundamental" never seems to occur in such contexts is a salient point.