Fire Arrow on 14/1/2024 at 00:28
Quote Posted by Kamlorn
Now that's what I call the CLAIM. Aside that boring subjectivity dispute. I am really interested from now on. Can you give some hints? Cause I don't know a single person who has managed to do this. No jokes. I am god damn serious.
I'm just glad someone else is interested. I'll do my best, but I'll probably come back and edit this when I'm less tired. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant talks about certain conditions that need to be in place in order for us to know the world. That is everything we know, we know through a perspective. This is transcendental subjectivity, or universal subjectivity. Now, you can disagree with Kant of course, but he believes there are certain universal conditions of subjectivity (e.g. we all have an ego). Although there is some disagreements in the interpretation of Kant (see Hans Sluga's book on Frege), I think German Idealism makes most sense if you reject the psychologistic interpretations of Kant (i.e. that Kant is doing a kind of psychology). Basically, if you get Frege's criticism of psychologism (Google Frege's puzzle about the Morning and Evening Star), a corollary of that is that the mind is something more than just any other phenomenon that you can investigate empirically. You need to have an account of the mind as something that has access to objective truth (not just sensation, or appearance). Transcendental idealism, as I understand it, is examining the mind as a general condition of knowing (as opposed to something that has access only to appearances). Then Hegel comes along later, and does the same kind of analysis for social phenomenon (i.e. as having a kind of definite subjective structure).
It's been a while, but I think I got this from Tom Rockmore's book "Kant and Phenomenology", but I leant it to a neighbour, so I can't check at the moment. Tom Rockmore is an underappreciated genius, in my opinion. No other philosopher has such a deep understanding of how the history of philosophy fits together.
I'd also recommend reading about Georg Cantor's philosophy of mathematics, Nikolay Lossky's book "Value and Existence" (amazingly accessible work), and Frege's criticism of Husserl's early work (as well as Husserl's response). Also Paul Natorp on the relationship between Kant and Plato. Generally anything on modern Platonism and its relation to Neo-Kantianism will get you relevant info, I think. Also, Gillian Rose for Hegel's metaphysics. But that's all I can say for now, I'm way too tired.
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Man, this TTLG thing never ceases to amaze me so far. Last time it was a little conversation about a 'jump mechanic' which ended with a discussion of Bertolt Brecht's understanding of art, 'interrogation of reality' and the Doomslayer as, God forgive me, a conscientious objector.
Nice to hear. I've been fond of this community for years before I joined. I glad its as thoughtful I would hope it to be.
Edit: I remembered where I learned this interpretation. Tom Rockmore's lecture "Truth in Philosophy means a Concept correspond to Reality". It's on YouTube, but the audio is rough.
Kamlorn on 14/1/2024 at 09:08
Quote Posted by Fire Arrow
... Basically, if you get Frege's criticism of psychologism (Google Frege's puzzle about the Morning and Evening Star),...
But I dont get it! I mean I understand the semantic problem that puzzle raises, but can't connect it to what you call 'criticizm of psychologism'. How that puzzle is supposed to do it?
Overall, I dont think it's possible to make sense of such a things, German idealism especially, in one reply on TTLG, but I really appreciate your ambition. I will start from the Tom Rockmore's one. You have sold it to me.
demagogue on 14/1/2024 at 10:41
It's interesting that s/he mentioned it because that's been a theme in the AI thread, whether "psychological" factors should be a part of modeling language and AI (like consciousness, drives, and cognitive biases), or if it's sufficient or even better to keep them as pure logic and symbol manipulation (formal set theory, predicate calculus, formal semantics, etc.), where those things are verboten.
I even used the term "raging anti-psychologism" which IIRC Anarchic Fox called out. Frege was the kind of German academic type that wouldn't rage about anything. But in my defense I was using that term kind of tongue-in-cheek for that reason but also meaning actually to talk about Fregism or logical positivism & its successors generally, the movements that spawned out of Russell's treatment of his ideas still 70+ years later, and I referred to Frege in a synadoche kind of way to stand in for the whole way of thinking. Some of his successors really were raging against psychologism, and there's still a legacy of that to this day, which you see in this thread and the AI thread, still also bordering on some raging. XD
Anyway, the reason why, or at least the way I'd myself explain why, the Morning and Evening Star example captures Frege's anti-psychologism is because it particularly dramatizes the difference between a formal treatment of referents in set theory and a psychological treatment. In a formal treatment, any property you assign to one object has to apply to the other because they're the same object, even if you don't know they're the same object. If A is green, and B=A, then B has to be green because it's A. That's the objective truth of the matter, and our experience of A & B are irrelevant.
In a psychological treatment, there are completely different attachments to these objects in experience and mythology as if they are different stars, and it's fine that they have different properties in our stories or, to phrase it more pejoratively to a logic-type, in our imaginations.
Today we might word it in terms of formal truth vs. emotional truth, and emotional truth is something logic-types wanted to kick out of any scientific treatment of logic. Of course these days, people increasingly want to logically model emotional truth too. You want AI to be able to understand what people are talking about when they're talking about spiritual or emotional things. But do they need all the psychological apparatuses of humans to do that? It's bringing back the whole debate in through the back door.
Saul Kripke kind of kicked off this new phase with his book Naming & Necessity, which gave us a way to distinguish "objective" and "subjective" truths in the old predicate calculus formalisms without really needing to introduce (m)any "psychological" factors, keeping Frege's anti-psychologism as much as he could. (I think a few of them leak in through the cracks.) That was a massive landmark in analytic philosophy for a while, and the morning & evening star was also one of his central go-to examples.
Fire Arrow on 14/1/2024 at 13:58
Quote Posted by Kamlorn
But I dont get it! I mean I understand the semantic problem that puzzle raises, but can't connect it to what you call 'criticizm of psychologism'. How that puzzle is supposed to do it?
Overall, I dont think it's possible to make sense of such a things, German idealism especially, in one reply on TTLG, but I really appreciate your ambition. I will start from the Tom Rockmore's one. You have sold it to me.
OK, I'll try to connect the dots, but my memory is a bit hazy (I'm actually trying not to think so much about philosophy at the moment, as I had a mental breakdown not that long ago from thinking about all this).
As far as I understand it, the puzzle has to do with the presence of truth in language. If the 'Morning star' is the 'Evening star', how is saying the 'Morning star' is the 'Evening star' different from saying the 'Morning star' is the 'Morning star', or the 'Evening star' is the 'Evening star'?
In order to know something, you are linking two referents together (could be senses, I get mixed up). So the mind isn't just a bundle of appearances, at some point it has to have connection with reality in order for the concepts of 'true' and 'false' to be meaningful.
This is called 'Platonism of meaning', and what separates Frege from Mill, for example. There was a Neo-Kantian, I don't recall the name of, who tried to read Kant as a kind of psychologist, linking concepts from the first Critique to the understanding they then had of the brain (if you read Hans Sluga's book on Frege, you'll find the name). Frege (whether you agree with him or not) is opposed to this kind of thinking.
I can't remember where I read it, but there was some article or book on Husserl (it could have been Mohanty's "Husserl and Frege"), where it was talking about Brentano's reaction to Frege's criticism of Husserl. Brentano asked Husserl whether the criticism had significance for his own views, and Husserl said it didn't. I think this was because Brentano was only distinguishing between mental and physical phenomenon, where as in his early work Husserl had tried to collapse knowledge into a psychological phenomenon.
Heidegger uses Husserl's Platonism without acknowledging it, so my mind-set is "back to Husserl" and reappraise Neo-Kantianism while we're at it. Although I have disagreements with him, I quite sympathetic to Leo Strauss's criticism of historicism. I think most phenomenology and reception of German Idealism, since Husserl, has been hampered by not taking 'Platonism of meaning' seriously. I read a very irritating comment under a video on Husserl once, that 'Transcendental Phenomenology' was arbitrary because everything is culturally/historically relative; in my view there's no point to phenomenology if you aren't going to take Platonism seriously.
Fire Arrow on 14/1/2024 at 14:25
Quote Posted by demagogue
It's interesting that s/he mentioned it because that's been a theme in the AI thread, whether "psychological" factors should be a part of modeling language and AI (like consciousness, drives, and cognitive biases), or if it's sufficient or even better to keep them as pure logic and symbol manipulation (formal set theory, predicate calculus, formal semantics, etc.), where those things are verboten.
I would side towards pure logic. Yes, the subject is embodied, but without the possibility of true knowledge, you miss something crucial about the human mind: the ability to learn. I think you have to combine Platonism with embodiment, so the only way forward is really Husserl and gestalt psychology (with Spinoza as a possible a third source).
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I even used the term "raging anti-psychologism" which IIRC Anarchic Fox called out. Frege was the kind of German academic type that wouldn't rage about anything. But in my defense I was using that term kind of tongue-in-cheek for that reason but also meaning actually to talk about Fregism or logical positivism & its successors generally, the movements that spawned out of Russell's treatment of his ideas still 70+ years later, and I referred to Frege in a synadoche kind of way to stand in for the whole way of thinking. Some of his successors really were raging against psychologism, and there's still a legacy of that to this day, which you see in this thread and the AI thread, still also bordering on some raging. XD
It's worth pointing out that logical positivism isn't the only philosophical view to adopt Fregean anti-psychologism, it's also true of Husserl/transcendental phenomenology, and of the followers of Leo Strauss. (Also Alasdair MacIntyre is getting at the same thing when he talks about "emotivist culture" in After Virtue)
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Anyway, the reason why, or at least the way I'd myself explain why, the Morning and Evening Star example captures Frege's anti-psychologism is because it particularly dramatizes the difference between a formal treatment of referents in set theory and a psychological treatment. In a formal treatment, any property you assign to one object has to apply to the other because they're the same object, even if you don't know they're the same object. If A is green, and B=A, then B has to be green because it's A. That's the objective truth of the matter, and our experience of A & B are irrelevant.
In a psychological treatment, there are completely different attachments to these objects in experience and mythology as if they are different stars, and it's fine that they have different properties in our stories or, to phrase it more pejoratively to a logic-type, in our imaginations.
This a better summary than I'd be able to do.
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Today we might word it in terms of formal truth vs. emotional truth, and emotional truth is something logic-types wanted to kick out of any scientific treatment of logic. Of course these days, people increasingly want to logically model emotional truth too. You want AI to be able to understand what people are talking about when they're talking about spiritual or emotional things. But do they need all the psychological apparatuses of humans to do that? It's bringing back the whole debate in through the back door.
I think this is the mistake people make. I think there really is objective morality, but it's very difficult to persuade people whose main concern is trying to get rid of metaphysics (e.g. people who would follow Daniel Dennett). I see clues towards a theory of objective morality in the Frege-Geach problem, in Meinong's value theory, and in Sraffa's economics. But it would involve a kind of quasi-religious socialist perspective, which really isn't popular among most educated people.
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Saul Kripke kind of kicked off this new phase with his book Naming & Necessity, which gave us a way to distinguish "objective" and "subjective" truths in the old predicate calculus formalisms without really needing to introduce (m)any "psychological" factors, keeping Frege's anti-psychologism as much as he could. (I think a few of them leak in through the cracks.) That was a massive landmark in analytic philosophy for a while, and the morning & evening star was also one of his central go-to examples.
I've been meaning to study Kripke. But I still feel that the main thing philosophy needs to account for is some sort of 'embodied epistemology'; the process of learning isn't studied in philosophy with sufficient attention in my opinion.
Kamlorn on 14/1/2024 at 16:59
Quote Posted by demagogue
Anyway, the reason why, or at least the way I'd myself explain why, the Morning and Evening Star example captures Frege's anti-psychologism is because it particularly dramatizes the difference between a formal treatment of referents in set theory and a psychological treatment. In a formal treatment, any property you assign to one object has to apply to the other because they're the same object, even if you don't know they're the same object. If A is green, and B=A, then B has to be green because it's A. That's the objective truth of the matter, and our experience of A & B are irrelevant.
In a psychological treatment, there are completely different attachments to these objects in experience and mythology as if they are different stars, and it's fine that they have different properties in our stories or, to phrase it more pejoratively to a logic-type, in our imaginations.
Today we might word it in terms of formal truth vs. emotional truth, and emotional truth is something logic-types wanted to kick out of any scientific treatment of logic. Of course these days, people increasingly want to logically model emotional truth too. You want AI to be able to understand what people are talking about when they're talking about spiritual or emotional things. But do they need all the psychological apparatuses of humans to do that? It's bringing back the whole debate in through the back door.
Yeah, now I got it.
Yet, I have a strange feeling that the more I read here the lesser I understand, in general. No! How MUCH I dont understand! That sounds better. Maybe I am not a person who know a lot of things, but there are certainly not so many people on the planet who dont know as much things as I do.
And what is surprising to me here - I like this feeling so far. Quite strange.
Subjectivity, German idealism, Frege, formal/psychological, 'Platonism of meaning', phenomenology, 'embodied epistemology'. Just a note in the margins. Impressive how far we are from the first topic already. Maybe that's the whole point of the discourse? To escape. To break the consistency? But we are still somewhere nearby.
Fire Arrow on 14/1/2024 at 18:59
Quote Posted by Kamlorn
Subjectivity, German idealism, Frege, formal/psychological, 'Platonism of meaning', phenomenology, 'embodied epistemology'. Just a note in the margins. Impressive how far we are from the first topic already. Maybe that's the whole point of the discourse? To escape. To break the consistency? But we are still somewhere nearby.
I'll try to summarize and add some additional information on how I see it fitting together.
1. The original context was discussing Freud and therapy. My view is that 'subjectivity' is misused in the English language, leading to missing the point of the 'continental rationalists' (i.e. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz). The significance of 'subjectivity' is found in Einstein (see his comparison of Leibniz and Newton), and in Bohr (see the interpretation of Bohr as a Kantian/transcendental idealist). However, this sophisticated view of subjectivity has failed to filter into therapy, and also into English language science more generally (leading to stagnation in my view).
2. German idealism is a continuation of the rationalist tradition of philosophy (Leibniz -> Christian Wolff -> Kant). This means the Cartesian concern with 'clear and distinct ideas' is the impetus of German idealism. As a result German idealism is concerned with 'transcendental subjectivity' or the universal preconditions of knowledge, more commonly know as the 'a priori'.
3. In the century following Kant, there are competing interpretations of his 'critical philosophy', but according to Hans Sluga, Frege is the one to develop what is distinctive in Kant, i.e. 'transcendental subjectivity' as distinct from psychology. (This is probably the most controversial point I'm making).
4. Frege's criticism of Husserl's psychologism leads Husserl to develop 'embedded Platonism'. Leo Strauss takes up a political interpretation of this in his criticism of historicism via Jacob Klein.
5. Further down the line, Hubert Dreyfus criticises cognitive science via a reading Heidegger. However, Dieter Münch suggests that one can reach the same conclusions via Husserl rather than Heidegger. This is compelling from my perspective because Heidegger is in a state of contradiction, using Platonism while trying to argue for historicism.
6. In my view, the question of when we 'know that we know', or the learning process has epistemological significance. So while we can reach a very sophisticated level in the abstract, until epistemology is connected with how we actually know, it is incomplete. At this point psychology has to be raised into philosophy, as the mind isn't just any other phenomenon, but the thing through which we know all phenomenon.
Kamlorn on 14/1/2024 at 19:56
Quote Posted by Fire Arrow
(I'm actually trying not to think so much about philosophy at the moment, as I had a mental breakdown not that long ago from thinking about all this)
Let's stop right now. I am starting to understand you and it scares me.
Fire Arrow on 14/1/2024 at 20:20
Quote Posted by Kamlorn
Let's stop right now. I am starting to understand you and it scares me.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't have info dumped. If it's any consolation, now I care more about my connection to my family and friends than about knowledge. Also it's lead me to reappraise religion. I've concluded love and friendship is more important than knowledge. If the problem still bothers you as it did me, I'm happy to offer advice based off of my experience.
But I won't add any more information, I'm here to create fan missions; not to discuss philosophy.
Anarchic Fox on 15/1/2024 at 09:06
Quote Posted by Fire Arrow
I think part of the problem is that in the English language, subjectivity is usually taken to mean arbitrary or random. So for example when someone says "taste is subjective" it's misleading, because although it varies from person to person, it has certain conditions of possibility. If you look at how subjectivity is treated in German language philosophy, you may be refreshed by how they think about it.
Ugh. Ugh ugh
ugh. :eww:
Kant is worthwhile, but introduces more terminology than anyone has the time for. Heidegger is Nazi bullshit. Hegel is proto-Nazi bullshit. Schopenhauer is bullshit, but at least it isn't Nazi bullshit. Nietzsche's good, at least... provided you ignore "The Will to Power," which his sister and her awful husband assembled into Nazi, you guessed it, bullshit.
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Also, I think the innovations in physics after Newton (i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics) were possible precisely because the Germans took subjectivity seriously (I know Bohr was Danish though). English language philosophy and science, while it has its achievements, has an irrational neglect of the subject.
Right. You're talking to some with a doctorate in physics and half a bachelor's degree in philosophy. Time for a lesson.
The theory of "early quantum mechanics," as it used to be called, was developed by Planck, Einstein (yes, really) and Bohr. The latter two were English. Edit: Bohr was Danish.
Quantum mechanics developed in Germany not because its physicists had some advantage in philosophy, but because de Broglie, a German, had the key insight, and his advisor Schopenhauer was able to give that insight a foundation. De Broglie and Schopenhauer were German, but like all the best physicists fled the country. I'm not going to credit Germany with anything conducive to the study of physics when its best physicists fled. (Heisenberg, the sole Nazi of the bunch, had a version of quantum mechanics strictly inferior to Schopenhauer's, and indeed one of the early advances in quantum mechanics was when Schopenhauer proved that his wave mechanics encompassed Heisenberg's matrix mechanics.)
The single greatest physicist of the era was Enrico Fermi, Italian. He was both a great theoretician
and a great experimentalist, a fact which is true of only a half-dozen physicists throughout history. And unlike them, he was also a great
engineer, from which follows most of the best Fermi stories. Meanwhile, among the advances of the next generation of physicists, on the theory side the two most important were the Dirac equation and Feynman's path integral formalism. They were English and American, respectively.
English language philosophy, which in this era is to say analytic philosophy, should be disregarded in its grandiose overarching theories, but is immensely valuable in its particulars. Like psychoanalysis. Russell was both a great mathematician and a great philosopher, and his emphasis on how disregarding quantification (in the logic sense) leads to error is invaluable... and he's about a sixth of analytic philosophy all by himself. Wittgenstein is another sixth, and he was an English immigrant. Austin, though neglected for decades, was another English sixth of analytic philosophy. (Carnap and his school, Austrian, were a sixth, and the final third were Quine and the Americans. I'm not weighing in latecomers like Kripke and Putnam.) Austin, in particular, does not neglect subjectivity.
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Not to go onto too much of a rant but in my experience, mental health professionals are usually more interested in showing that they've followed procedure than actually understanding and alleviating the problem.
That's going too far. There are good ones. It's rather that they, like most hospital MDs, are overburdened. In a mental hospital, each MD is expected to evaluate and diagnose
dozens of different people weekly, relying on reports from staff. It's not a reasonable burden.
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That sounds rough, you have my sympathy.
Have you come across the term "epistemic justice" before? Might be useful for framing part of the problem.
No, what does it mean?
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Hope you enjoy them! I tend to be more interested in reading philosophy than about therapy, so I can only really recommend things which are tangential. I've found Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue somewhat "therapeutic", but he might be too Aristotelian for people who don't come from a Catholic background. I always recommend After Virtue to everyone though; it's one of my favourite books!
The title raises my hackles, since my ethical system is a virtue one. (It's the Ultima influence.)
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Definitely CBT has its uses. Though for me psychodynamic therapy feels like it gets at the heart of the matter, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find a psychodynamic therapist anywhere near where I live, so I'm stuck finding substitutes.
What's psychodynamics, then? :angel: