A personal mélange of sense and language

(and maybe some nonsense)

Certainty and Whatchamacallit

Basic Background●Existential phenomenology●Critical theory

○Critical pedagogy○Semiotics○Deconstruction

●Constructivism●Instrumentalism

○(scientific anti-realism)

●Wittgensteinian fideism○“language games”

Husserl

Heidegger

Marx

Freire

Althusser

Derrida

Habermas

Dewey

Wittgenstein

Philosophers

Interests●Existential and phenomenological Thomism●Nominalism●Coherence theory of truth●“Foundherentism”

○compromise between Foundationalism and Coherentism

●Computational theory of mind

Gilson

Maritain

Schumacher

Haack

Putnam

Searle

Dennett

Philosophers

While I have problems with many notions of justified true belief, I am also skeptical of skepticism.

Truth is an essence or invariant structure which reality discloses through careful observation. This truth is objective - even if non-public - in the sense that it can be shared with others through a sharing of perspective or “fusion of horizons”.

You can go to sleep now...

Spoiler alert: my answer

Justified True Belief

Justified True Belief

?

Knowledge as True Belief

“Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus”

“Truth is the equation of things and intellect.”

St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

One can say “He believes it, but it isn’t so”, but not “He knows it, but it isn’t so”. Does this stem from the difference between the mental states of belief and knowledge? No.—One may for example call “mental state” what is expressed by tone of voice in speaking, by gestures etc. It would thus be possible to speak of a mental state of conviction, and that may be the same whether it is knowledge or false belief.

What sort of proposition is this: “We cannot have miscalculated in 12×12=144”? ...doesn’t it come to the same, as the statement 12×12=144?

If you demand a rule from which it follows that there can’t have been a miscalculation here, the answer is that we did not learn this through a rule, but by learning to calculate.

We got to know the nature of calculating by learning to calculate.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Structure of Consciousness

Or how we know anything at all

Object

● Sensations

● Ideas

● Rationality

Instead of..Subject

● Universal man on a

sunny day

● Brain in a vat

● Dreamer● Philosopher

hoodwinked by evil genies

...there’s thisNoesis

The mode of experience

Noema

The phenomenon being experienced

Phenomenological twist

Intentionality - the correlation of experience and mode of experience.

Consciousness is always directed, always consciousness of something.

Perception is an activityand situated in a context

Another look...

The visual field is

structured like

many other senses,

other noematic

fields.

The “I” is known

only reflexively,

abstracted from the

experience, and

revealing the noetic

structure - the

keyhole opening to

the world.

The horizon again...Detail clustered around

the core, tapering off

until fading from

awareness.

Foreground/background

structure is common and

essential in noematic

fields.

To exist comes from the

Latin existere - “to step

out, stand forth,

emerge”

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude…

Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.

The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.

Historical and cultural situatedness also provides a horizon, a context against which meaning is created.

episteme or “condition of possibility”

No abstract minds and objects, but beings engaged in activity and situated in a world, providing the background from which they can stand out.

Perception is an activity

● Activity performed before “believe”○ no doubt without prior practice and prior

belief

● Unthematic awareness is still concretely situated

● Thematic activity rooted in cultural traditions○ purpose and values○ honed by trial and error at achieving ends

Thoughts and feelings

Or mediation gone wild

Relativity in perception mirrors linguistic relativity

Hermeneutics and Reduction

Method in a nutshell

To the things themselves

❏ Epoché - bracket all judgments of reality

❏ Phenomenological reduction - describe phenomenon in detail, peeling meaning away until you are left with the experience

❏ Horizontalization - flatten all data so it is of equal importance

❏ Cluster - organize data into themes

❏ Free variation - imagining data from different perspectives

❏ Composite description - revealing essential and invariant structures

To the things themselves

Parts and wholes

Person and theory

Person and theory

Wittgenstein on Certainty

language is not metaphysics

● Inspired by G.E. Moore’s lecture on skepticism○ Moore - unreasonable to doubt

○ Wittgenstein - beyond doubt and belief ● Meaning of language is use

○ in context of a game and rules

○ sense comes from conformity of use● Local skepticism is possible, but global

skepticism is not○ Wittgenstein doubts the skeptic’s doubt

Here is a hand...

● “Here is a hand” resembles a logical proposition○ not metaphysical or epistemological

○ means “this is an example of a hand”● “Here is a hand” means nothing itself

○ may gain meaning in context of anatomy class or parent teaching child to speak

○ when in context, doubts as to meaning vanish● Global skepticism rips propositions from

contexts, demanding justification from the parts○ this is not how language works○ not correct or incorrect - just nonsense

Here is a hand...

?

Go make some knowledge!