The Unprovable Liar

@fresco,

fresco wrote:

No. The difference is that you use 'reality' as though it were representational of some absolute state or set of states of 'being', rather than a word to denote agreement between interlocutors about what they hold 'is the case' for their common purpose.

Enter once more the celebrated philosopher Mick Dundee, in the attempted mugging scene in which the mugger pulls out a small stiletto.
GIRL: Watch out Mick...he's got a knife!
MICK: That's not a knife.....(produces his big bush knife)....That's a knife ! ....(mugger flees).

Forget about the naive neutral view that they were both 'knives' in the sense of 'cutting implements'. That's NOT how the word is contextually used here in which 'weapon' is implied. Note how the meaning of the word 'knife' is negotiated with respect to the communicative situation. By extrapolation, there are no human context independent words/concepts. There is NO 'state
of being a knife' separate from the behavioral contexts in which 'knife' sets up 'affordancies' (Merleau-Ponty) of behavioral expectation by language users. Concepts require conceptualizers and 'reality' is merely another concept.

...nothing is entirely separate of anything else. Never meant to imply that my realism states that a "knife" is not dependent on functional context. I see the whole of reality as interdependent. But I see no agency, no one governing the boat, and specially not any degree of freedom. That clarified, multi functionalism for any given object or concept is not enough of a big argument to de-construct a base premise concept as vast as Reality. I don't intend to state what are the matters of fact aside my own limited usage. But rather I exemplify with my limited usage that any concept can be questioned in all sorts of matters depending on context, depth, functionalism, except in regards to its co extensive unified existing with the whole of reality.
We agree that anything in a vacuum is very little without frames of reference that appeal to culture to context and to perception. But little is not nothingness. You on the other hand keep missing the point in the past 10 years or so that you are re edifying reality while trying to counter it. While I understand exactly what you are trying to mean you are the one who has a hard time seeing or admitting my point against your pseudo counter. You cannot counter without SUBSTANCE !

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You see I never would state that the Earth is not real because when seen from Pluto it is different from when seen from the Moon or the International Space Station. While you say they all are illusions dependent on context. I say they all are TRUE. They function for a reason and within a reason. They have different relational ratios at those different distances. That IS something not the negation of everything. By your token we would have to start by denying language itself and observer or even experiencing, and that's just nihilist bullshit !

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@Fil Albuquerque,

I don't know what you mean by 'substance' other than a 'foundational axiom' which of course is unobtainable (hence the OP). I am merely pursuing Wittgenstein's mission to dissipate so called 'philosophical problems' which he deemed to be epiphenomena of 'language games'.
I see you have added another post using the words 'reality'and 'illusion'. All you are saying is that there could be universal agreement about those words in the selective contexts you have chosen...but of course such contexts have been fabricated by you and are unlikely to arise in the praxis of living. More interesting perhaps is the classical case of 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' which later astronomical data indicated were 'both Venus'. The point being that the later 'reality' involved a different social context to the earlier ones which assumed separate phenomena.

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@fresco,

"I don't know what you mean by substance" is ALREADY a substant statement.
Either that or mute yourself and utter nothing.
Even your friend Joe Nobody gets that much.

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I would like to go deeper, way deeper on this subject even if this means I will have to be speaking with myself all along.

The whole subject can be ultra reduced to the problem of a finite set of functional operations to establish substances or to negate them all by an irrational infinite set of reversals. In sum an infinite regress of causes that de constructs anything standing in the way. Point being I am for rationalism as I see it all around, so I believe in a finite ratio no matter how freaking big and complex it is. Some around rather have irrationality even if that implies the very deconstruction of their own arguments.

...hence why I say "God" is reason.
One cannot deny the algorithm and logarithm of a final set of mingling substances to which we call "operational contextual phenomena", and that all together refer to REALITY.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

...you conveniently forgot the 'other than....etc'.....which I was care to contextually relate to the OP. If you are running another contextual agenda, like 'Maths is the Key', that's your problem !

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@fresco,

fresco wrote:

...you conveniently forgot the 'other than....etc'.....which I was care to contextually relate to the OP. If you are running another contextual agenda, like 'Maths is the Key', that's your problem !

And that was not the point...again Fresco you uttered something with that statement. And you meant it as fundamentally true which is a contradiction in terms. You see uttering X is not a crime and uttering existence or Reality is non descriptive other then stating something is happening. There is no significant qualification so you can counter it without uttering the same mistake on the very act of countering. That is to mean, when you counter something is happening by the happening of your counter you just reified the same thing you tried to counter. The problem is you miss the level of abstraction to understand and grasp the point being made ! (and that is not my problem)

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@Fil Albuquerque,

What you call 'level of abstraction', I call 'level of mystical obfuscation'. Unlike you, I anchor my points in the literature or with credible scenarios, the result in your case being unfortunately that nobody knows what you are talking about. I have researched 'the status of mathematical models' for my local philosophy group, and unless they be tied to operational procedures which can encompass and possible advance scientific investigation, they remain esoteric abstractions.

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@fresco,

In the above mentioned post I didn't present you with any model I've made a criticism to the internal consistency of your model, to which you did not reply a single word and that is obfuscation.
By the way the only thing I state in my so called model in other ocasions with any degree of confidence is far more modest and involves far less conceptual bagadge. I said I believe in a rational world, not even tried to describe it unlike you that have the fixation of talking about humans without ever knowing what "humans" are besides common use. You are one arrogant bastard but you lack the intellect to deserve it.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Hmm...every time I take you out of 'ignore' to give you a chance to communicate you end up throwing a hissifit. I suggest you have a look at that childish reaction to you being told you are incomprehensible. Your chronic 'get fresco' fixation is rather an insult to your level of intelligence. If you want to discuss any of my references I will be pleased to do so, otherwise you are merely displaying petulance that I refuse to be drawn by 'a definitions' game doomed from the outset in my opinion by a non-representationalist position with respect to language.

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@fresco,

Be my guest and ignore me every time you want to dodge a bullet. You better served avoiding my criticism. Anyone following the topic got my point anyway and those who didn't aren't worth a second thought. Point made. Au revoir mon cher !

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@Fil Albuquerque,

One of the problems with some philosophical people (actually any people) that is perhaps engendered or better, reflected by their interest in the topic, is a lack of humour about their subject.

I fall under this category sometimes as well, where I am more interested in making a point than I am in an actual discussion. Grinding my axe as it were in the vacuum of working out some personal or intellectual problem. That can take the form of extreme vitriol or arrogance. Especially my projected arrogance when I tell people they are arrogant and then follow that up with telling others that they aren't worth a second thought, completely unaware of the irony or, if aware, not caring about my hypocrisy.

Lighten up Francis!

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@catbeasy,

No. Those who know me personally always made the distinction between I being stuborn but not arrogant. On the contrary I react very poorly to academic arrogance specially when I am absolutely sure I have a point. In the case such point was confronted with academic verbiage but not a single coherent shread of honest debate. Instead and as expected people call for references in an open debate intead of providing solid cogent arguments. Fresco criticizes language with more languaging and replaces frames of reference about states of affairs with more frames of reference all the while implying there is no frame of reference. In sum his school and train of thought is a mess.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

My comments weren't directed about your being correct or incorrect or 'having a solid point'. Or whether your 'opponent' was correct or not or had solid grounding for their beliefs. In fact, they weren't directed at all towards philosophy.

They were directed towards a subjectively perceived 'tone' and one objective comment about people who do not understand you not being "..worth a second thought". Why aren't people who don't get you worth a second thought? That goes to their valuation as a human being, I don't see it as having anything to do with the validity or non-validity of a point.

Maybe you meant it in some other way, you are right, I don't know you well enough to brush that off. But it sure comes across as being arrogant, dismissive and intolerant of others' views, regardless of whether you consider they have a good argument. This isn't about 'whose right'. Its about the tone you express in making that argument. And I only say this because I have a bit of that. In fact it was recently pointed out to me on this board. I think we all have a bit of that and its probably good to be reminded that the (perceived!) power of our argument ought to have nothing to do with how we value each other..

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Quote:

"Languaging", as Maturana occasionally explains, serves, among other things, to orient. By this he means directing the attention and, consequently, the individual experience of others, which is a way to foster the development of "consensual domains" which, in turn, are the prerequisite for the development of language. - Although the sentence (you might say, the languaging) with which I have here begun is at best a pale imitation of Maturana's style, it does perhaps represent one important aspect of Maturana's system: The circularity which, in one way or another, crops up again and again.
In my interpretation, it is absolutely indispensable that one diligently repeats to oneself, every time one notices circularity in Maturana's expositions, that this circularity is not the kind of slip it would be in most traditional systems of our Western philosophy. It is, on the contrary, a deliberately chosen fundamental condition that arises directly out of the autopoietic model. According to Maturana, the cognizing organism is informationally closed. Given that it can, nevertheless, produce descriptions; i.e., concepts, conceptual structures, theories, and eventually a picture of its world, it is clear that it can do this only by using building blocks which it has gleaned through some process of abstraction from the domain of its own experience. This insight, which Maturana expresses by saying that all cognitive domains arise exclusively as the result of operations of distinction which are made by the organism itself, was one of the points that attracted me to his work the very first time I came across it.
On the basis of considerations, far from those that induced Maturana to formulate the biological idea of autopoiesis, I had come to the same conclusion. My own path (some-what abbreviated and idealized) led from the early doubts of the Pre-Socratics via Montaigne, Berkeley, Vico, and Kant to pragmatism and eventually to Ceccato's "Operational School" and Piaget's "Genetic Epistemology". This might seem irrelevant here, but since Maturana's expositions hardly ever refer to traditional philosophy, it seems appropriate to mention that quite a few of his fundamental assertions can be substantiated by trains of thought which, from time to time, have cropped up in the conventional history of epistemology. Although these trains of thought have occasionally irritated the official discipline of philosophy, they never had a lasting effect and remained marginal curiosities. I would suggest, that the reason for this neglect is that throughout the occidental history of ideas and right down to our own days, two requisites have been considered fundamental in any epistemological venture. The first of these requisites demands that whatever we would like to call "true knowledge" has to be independent of the knowing subject. The second requisite is that knowledge is to be taken seriously only if it claims to represent a world of "things-in-themselves" in a more or less veridical fashion'
Although the sceptics of all ages explained with the help of logical arguments that both these requisites are unattainable, they limited themselves to observing that absolute knowledge was impossible. Only a few of them went a step further and tried to liberate the concept of knowledge from the impossible constraints so that it might be freely applied to what is attainable within the acting subject's experiential world. Those who took that step were branded outsiders and could therefore be disregarded by professional philosophers.

Von Glasersfeld

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@fresco,

The argument is circular hence why I often talked about an "Avatar" instead of a subject. If as you expose the subject cannot see the world as is, and to an extent its true, and the only way the subject has to see the world is through the filter of its own internal apparatus, then the observations of the subject itself about itself are necessarily false, for all that you know the "subject" might be the product of a machine, a simulated subject. There is no way to tell nothing about the source of what you are. What this entail is that any frame of reference for criticism of whatever system of knowledge we use is UNVERIFIABLE when seen from within. The very coinage "within" is arbitrary... The criticism is therefore vacuous. One thing is certain phenomena are happening and that is enough to assert Realism. Not the naive form of Realism, but the kind of Realism that asserts phenomena themselves as a valid part of Reality without establishing its rightful place in the network. After all as I usually point out, dreams even if only dreams, are TRUE dreams.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Despite your denial, naive realism is definitely the position you adopt with your notion 'world as it (really) is'. For the pragmatist, there are no unreported 'events' except through the eyes of a hypothetical meta-observer/deity. 'Events' are merely aspects of scenarios which matter to an observer. 'Happening' is merely the unfolding of those 'events' along that psychological construction we call 'time'. I suggest your reliance on mathematical abstraction as foundational is seriously inadequate if it does not encompass that basic point.
However, I have nothing more to add to the point about 'circularity' made above. If you simply don't understand it, that's fine.

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@fresco,

Quote:

..that psychological construction we call 'time'.

If time is psychological, then how or why does it change with speed/motion/velocity (however the physicists define it)?

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@fresco,

You don't have any way of knowing who or what is "observing" nor even if observing is a legitimate phenomena (being what it seems) less alone a construction of the subject who also has no way of knowing its own nature like an virtual 3D Avatar which is just representative of the actual thing behind him... the subject itself (if there is one) is hidden from itself through the filtering of the "mind" (again no one knows what mind is from the inside). In sum all attributes of laguaging from this Avatar who supposedly "constructs" the world fall just the same, and hence the all counter you try to provide falls on its face. There is no way of tracking any valid narrative from the inside not even the inside narrative...Again you seem to be the one who does not grasp the idea that without foundation of any kind you cannot construct a narrative to state what is "right" or "wrong" the way you just did. Not even a relativistic pragmatic one. No foundation and relativism or pragmatism themselves are vacuous words without any truth value or factual meaning. They don't have the capacity to form any cohesive intentional statement.

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@Fil Albuquerque,

Pragmatism is this American thing that quitters do when they fear facing Metaphysics or be confronted with the factual Human insignificance in the great scheme of things. Pragmatism is second league softball Starbucks philosophy and I rather not play it.

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The Unprovable Liar

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