The Half-life of Facts.

The obviously illusory nature of the thingness of your blob has muddled yout thinking, JoefromtheGhetto . . . or . . . or, wait . . . is that MillerfromChicago? The shifting personalities here confuse me so. (And that's a "fact.")

OmsigTantafromNewYork

Isn't it wonderful, something for which to be eternally grateful?

Yes, and it had a very short half life. By my reckoning it became false at some point in the 80s.

^^

A truly profound observation . . .

I was agreeing with Oliver... hence the "^^". Should've used "^" instead.

I find reflexivity a great philosophical disinfectant... E.g. it's all you need to destroy the idea that human thoughts and reason are a worthless epiphenomenon of biology.

Those who want "facts" to be "things" are avoiding the constructivist issue that "things" are also constructions.
We can play this game forever. Either You commune with constructivism or you don't. The language game which focuses on language per se is going nowhere unless we are prepared to categorise it as mere "social dancing" between complex lifeforms.

Ah, finally, a point upon which we can both agree. As I mentioned before, your position suffers from a flaw akin to Moore's naturalistic fallacy. For every "fact" that you can state, one can always ask: "is that a 'fact?'" As long as you don't have anything that is undeniably a fact - rather than things that are merely constructed "facts" - you are left with nothing upon which to base any of your fact-like statements. In short, you're building your castles in mid-air, or, as I have pointed out many times before, you're like Baron Munchausen, pulling yourself up by your own pigtail.

Didn't Wittgenstein have something to say about that?

If he did, he stole it from me.

The scenario of (solid) castle building is one which signally lacks the dynamism of shifting communicative contexts and paradigms. Such dynamism IS reflected is the "half-life" argument and that bedfellow of structuralism called "functionalism".

You should try and slow down. Dynamism is over rated, especially in philosophy. Chi va piano va sano e lontanno. Joe is right that you are not building any durable and stable theory; you're just making noise.

Wittgenstein certainly said a lot about the inappropriateness of the term "theory" in philosophy.

I was never impressed by Wittgenstein. I think he was a fake and failed philosopher, basically. Popper always hated him and since I'm a big Popper fan, no doubt that he influenced me. I remember trying to make sense of the Tractatus, and concluding it was fake knowledge wrapped up in pretentious prose. Still wondering if this is a case of the emperor having no clothes on or if it just went way above my head.

The most interesting aspect of Wittgenstein, IMO, is that he rejected his own acclaimed Tractatus. He seems to have spotted the emperor's new clothes (of logical positivism) himself. Quite separately to W's language game analysis at the micro-level of discourse ,Thomas Kuhn seems to have developed the macro-idea of shifting paradigms in whole scientific communities. And separately to both of these, Piaget's "genetic epistemology" (assimilation/accommodation) had postulated the idea of dynamic cognitive "schemata" in psychological development in which what we call "knowledge" is a function of the progressive dynamic interaction between cognitive states and their segmentation of "the world". (NB Piaget aimed to account for "logical thought" and could not assume it in his analysis !)

Thus for me, constructivist approaches are justified by at least three separate domains of analysis (individual, social and cultural) originating from different sources. Quite frankly, those who might dismiss such approaches in favour of some version of traditional "logical analysis", have not understood them.

IMHO, 'constructivists' are by and large correct when it comes to explaining how opinions and ideologies etc are arrived at, are generated and 'traded' on the market place of ideas. Where I think they should not go is into essentialist philosophy and metaphysic. For instance, just because ideas about the universe get produced, tested and 'traded' imperfectly, in a very messy human way, doesn't mean that there isn't a 'real', 'positive' world, universe or reality out there totally independent of our imperfect apprehension of it... It's a non-sequitur, it requires a leap of faith to state so. And a nihilist one, too.

While Fresco natters on about constructivists, he continues to the dodge the entirely reasonable question of where the constructors come from. He wants to use this idea about what he is pleased to call facticity to underpin his eternal contention that there is no reality beyond the creations of language. He has never even made a stab at explaining how the the language-users, how the constructors got here. He never will.

So you all want a substrate do you from which to "argue logically" despite the point made above that "logic" wont do ?
Now lets see ...what shall we call it ?...
Fundamental particles ?......(how small shall we go ?)
A singularity ?.....God ?....Fundamental reality ?
Just some of the candidates waiting for a posthumous Godel to label as "an unverifiable assumption".

Play nice !

PS There IS a metalogical account of "languaging" based on a systems definition of "life". Those interested should refer to Maturana.

Persaonlly, i haven't asked for a logical substrate. I have asked a very simple question--if reality is a construct of language, where do the language users come from? Whence the constructors for this alleged constructivism. That is a question you've never attempted to answer. It is a question which has lead to make vicious personal attacks. It is a question which you will never answer, because it doesn't fit in your little reality box.