phenomenology | Jay's Analysis

The Strangeloop, Metaphysical Models and Reality

November 9, 2012 2 Comments

“Round and round we go, where we stop, Godel only knows.”

By: Jay

We often hear from those dominated by the notion of “science” so-called that models of reality can never be a grand narrative again, as well as that the conceptual framework utilized to explain the world cannot be extrapolated onto the “external world” with certainty due to the “fact” that the explanatory models themselves are purely human conceptual frameworks. Explanatory models are not true, we are told, because they have explanatory power. Thus, Newtonian physics is no longer accurate because it breaks down at the subatomic level.

From Kant onwards, the West has adopted the mistaken notion that no mental framework can accurately and with firm certainty be predicated of external reality. This perceived wisdom dominates academia, particularly in scientific circles. Epistemology is a no man’s land because Kant has purportedly demonstrated that empirical knowledge can never penetrate the noumenal realm. But is this true?

This is all poppycock and hogwash, and every argument the so-called scientific establishment uses to foist this upon nubile, young college minds is utterly flawed bullshit. In fact, the claim that all conceptual models are only models is itself a foundational conceptual claim that purports to position its arrogant pontificator in a place of high epistemic privilege. “We just don’t know,” it spews forth, “whether the concepts in our minds match up to the actual facts of the external world.” However, following this flawed train, it also follows that we don’t know that our claims of a lack of knowledge are accurate. In other words, to say all models of reality are flawed because they cannot demonstrate that they obtain for the objects of perception is equally applicable to the universal claim that “all models of reality are flawed and cannot certainly obtain for the external world.”

In fact, the purveyor of this bad argument is generally unaware of basics of linguistic philosophy. Linguistic philosophy, in fact, points directly back to the reemergence of metaphysics. But metaphysics is what modernity doesn’t want to talk about, due to the still dominant Enlightenment phantom empiricism. Though enlightenment empiricism has been refuted a thousand times over, like bin Laden, it magically seems to emerge from the philosophical grave to wreak intellectual havoc. And now, a whole crop of “New Atheists” who harp all day about the outdated classical arguments for theism furiously slap away at keyboards resurrecting the outdated arguments for classical empiricism and materialism. So much for intellectual honesty.

One simple way to refute the above fallacy with linguistic philosophy is to show that the very symbols used by the so-called skeptic of models is that the usage of language itself requires a complex set of metaphysical preconditions which must obtain for the very possibility of language at all. I have written about this before, but it functions well here as a refutation of this common error.

Consider this claim: Read more of this post

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Jay’s Analysis – Kant & Wolfgang Pauli – Inner and Outer Worlds

July 10, 2012 Leave a comment

“A system of categories is a complete list of highest kinds or genera. Traditionally, following Aristotle, these have been thought of as highest genera of entities (in the widest sense of the term), so that a system of categories undertaken in this realist spirit would ideally provide an inventory of everything there is, thus answering the most basic of metaphysical questions: “What is there?” Skepticism about the possibilities for discerning the different categories of ‘reality itself’ has led others to approach category systems not with the aim of cataloging the highest kinds in the world itself, but rather with the aim of elucidating the categories of our conceptual system. Thus Kant makes the shift to a conceptualist approach by drawing out the categories that are a priori necessary for any possible cognition of objects. Since such categories are guaranteed to apply to any possible object of cognition, they retain a certain sort of ontological import, although this application is limited to phenomena, not the thing in itself. After Kant, it has been common to approach the project of categories in a neutral spirit that Brian Carr (1987, 7) calls “categorial descriptivism”, as describing the categorial structure that the world would have according to our thought, experience, or language, while refraining from making commitments about whether or not these categories are occupied. Edmund Husserl approaches categories in something like this way, since he begins by laying out categories of meanings, which may then be used to draw out ontological categories (categories of possible objects meant) as the correlates of the meaning categories, without concern for any empirical matter about whether or not there really are objects of the various ontological categories discerned. Read more of this post

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Husserl’s Rejection of Nominalistic Skepticism and Affirmation of Universals

July 6, 2011 24 Comments

Science presupposes logic.

By: Jay

It was common in Husserl’s era to encounter not only the skeptical relativism as espoused by the empircists, but also their concomitant nominalism. Husserl viewed nominalism as equally destructive to the project of pure logic as a foundation of the sciences, as he did the skepticism he so vehemently railed against. This is due to the fact that in order for science to operate coherently, it must have a pure, a priori foundation based upon ideal entities. In other words, logic itself, as grounding scientific discourse, must be grounded theoretically in an a prioristic theory of meanings and universals. The purpose of this paper is to present and defend Husserl’s arguments for universals and his critique of nominalism—which appear just as relevant today as did his critique of skeptical relativism.
Nominalism is the theory, arising in the Late Middle Ages, which opposed the ancient/traditional view that universals had some kind of “real” existence (whether mental or ontological). Nominalists posited instead that universals were merely names, arguing that only specific, individual things existed.1 Nominalism as an epistemic theory would achieve the upper hand following upon the Enlightenment and its philosophic notables Locke, Berkeley and Hume. By Husserl’s day (the early 20th century), nominalism was still the predominate view and, in Husserl’s estimation, called for a definitive refutation.

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Strawson’s Idea of Perception as Theory-Laden for the Philosopher, Alva Noe’s Action in Perception, and the Larger Transcendental Preconditions

November 25, 2010 21 Comments

Noe's "Action in Perception"

By: Jay

A.J. Ayer and other logical positivists have contended that the problem of perception is a central issue in modern epistemology and metaphysics. Ayer himself argued from a position of phenomenalism to what he termed “sophisticated realism.” Ayer represented more or less the end of the “psychologistic” approach to perception, even with later defenses of realism, and P.F. Strawson gives a biting critique of Ayer in his article “Perception and Its Objects.” Likewise, Alva Noe has argued for what he terms an “enactive approach” to perception, outlined in his Action in Perception. In this paper, I will compare the criticisms of both, in regard to the empiricist and psychologistic approach, as well as arguing that Strawson’s view of theory-laden approaches and common sense realism are also crucial for Noe’s thesis.

In order to understand Strawson’s criticisms of Ayer, it is necessary to first understand Locke’s view of perception and then move from this to the application of Strawson’s insights, to Noe, and then my argument for the necessity of a larger context as a precondition resulting from where both are correct. John Locke argued that human perception is akin to pictures of objects, received from sense impressions that in some form exist in the mind as concepts, or ideas. Locke is, of course, a seminal thinker, along with Hume and Berkeley, in British Empiricism. In this view, the human mind is conceived of as a tabula rasa, or blank slate, which passively receives impressions from the external world, which are then stamped upon the mind, as a kind of seal in wax, or picture in the mind. There are no innate ideas.

In this view, perception is thus not direct, but indirect, or mediated by sensuous qualities or “accidents” (in the classical terminology) we perceive of the object. Objects in the world possess primary and secondary qualities, and these qualities we receive as impressions through sensation are then the only data we pick up from experience. The mind is viewed here, though anachronistic, as a blank tape in a camcorder, which records the impressions. The self or subject then views them, as if there were a “little man,” or homunculus inside the mind of the subject. For Locke, the mind can never penetrate to the substratum, or reach beyond the veil of the senses. Hence, it is an indirect or mediated realism. The objects of the external world are indeed objects with a real ontological status; they have being. However, the mind of the subject can never penetrate to the world in itself, and this ends up being the chief problem for classical empiricism. The Lockian view, what Strawson calls “scientific realism,” ends up presenting us with systematic illusion.[1]

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Husserl on the “Horizon” of Objects

September 20, 2010 2 Comments

By: Jay

For Husserl, the perception of objects is necessarily inadequate due to what he and Merleau-Ponty describe as the “horizon.” This refers to the hiddenness of any object of perception due to a singular human vantage point and finitude. Any perception of an object can only be of a determined aspect or dimension of an object. If I perceive a table, the representational content given by the sensations will always contain an unknown. I cannot, even totaling up all the possible facts of an object and possible angles, perceive every aspect or relation within the object, as I always perceive from some determinate, singular perspective or vantage point.

It would, in fact, require omniscience to perceive an object in its totality. This being the case, Husserl speaks of the objects horizon, which is in fact ever-present and insurmountable. This is the reason, then why perception of things is always necessarily inadequate. That requirement of omniscience is what Husserl means when he speaks of adequate perception as an ideal: It is something we cannot in actuality achieve.

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Intentionality in Husserl

September 20, 2010 Leave a comment

By: Jay

In Thing and Space, part 4 (page 12), when Husserl explains that intentionality is the existential determinant, he is describing a feature of out perceptual constitution. He writes that we have pure givenness or pure intuition which relates us to phenomenal objects. Objects as presented to us directly are an essential feature that belongs indissolubly to perception. Indeed, for Husserl, this constitutes the essence of perception, in contrast to indirect realism or some mediated notion of the representational content of objects.

In this case, we are not looking for the ontological questions surrounding objects in the real world, but rather investigating what constitutes the intentional object itself. And not just what the descriptors are of these presentations, but what are the necessary conditions of perception of objects. Perception has, as Husserl explains, this peculiar character. It is, then, always the case that consciousness is consciousness of some object. We have at this point, bracketed our questions of the ontology of the house itself, but are here concerned with the philosophy of mental states, and for Husserl, this directedness is constitutional of perception universally. This is not to say the object has no status as an actual external object, but rather that we are after the essential elements of conscious perception itself.

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Merleau-Ponty Destroys Psychologism and Pure Empricism

September 13, 2010 2 Comments

Phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty

By: Jay

The first account Merleau-Ponty deals with in the selections from Phenomenology of Perception as found in Vision and Mind is the notion that sense-perception is identified with the object perceived. He believes that because of its presented immediacy, we mistakenly believe the two are the same, and they are not. One does not have the immediate sense impressions that do not have some context of prior meaning and experience which are bound up in the present experience. Such being the case, it is not “redness” that presents itself to me. There is no “pure sense impression.” We are seeking, then, meaning or essence.

Merleau-Ponty deals with psychologists and empiricists and notes many of the classical criticisms that have been given of these views. There are numerous things necessary for interpreting sense impressions not immediately given, such as identity of objects or self over time, and therefore a strict empirical answer to this cannot be adequate. Merleau-Ponty believes as well that psychology and the naïve psychologistic approach to perception cannot do without physiology (as well as philosophy), inasmuch as the body itself, as well as its spatio-temporal locale, is a key factor in the perception process. Experience is not a frozen dot of time that we can abstract from all prior experience and analyze as uninterpreted brute factuality presenting itself to us. Indeed, the human subject, his past experiences, the intentional object, hic locale and context, and the essence of the thing in question all contribute and are sufficient to refute bare empiricism, reductionism and psychologism.

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