According to this idea that I will present, the best thing we can do in philosophy is to insightfully and clearly describe our life experiences and perceptions. Description itself can stand on its own, without the judgement yet. When judgement comes into play, things gain different meanings, moral values, and they either become objects or subjects. I posit that we can live without that, at least for a while, and in its purest form, the best we can do is just describe our perception. All perception is bound to a point, a point of view, a perspective. Judgement adds to data, and alters data. The purest data we have is our well mannered descriptions of life. Sometimes we need judgement, sometimes we can live without. Judge too soon or in the wrong way, and description looses its positive power, it is reduced to crap. Judge it right, and it becomes a wonderful utility.
Isn’t judgment a description of a state of mind? But maybe you’re saying it’s a description of a dissatisfied state of mind…
Agree. We are unique creations but because of certain rulings and decisions one can be ruined.
I took the distinction to me that a description lays out what was experienced, even including nouns (and thus tentative objects), whereas a judgment would mean that these same things (causal processes, objects, evaluations, whatever) are upgraded (or downgraded) to objective claims about what is and then also what is universal or should be. The same words might be used, even, but the intent is different. The former exploratory, perhaps even phenomenological, the latter presenting facts about the world.
You’re right of course, I was just exploring something. A judgment includes description of something that might go undescribed otherwise. Let’s say a person thinks it’s best not to judge - “lest ye be judged” or whatever. This is a reasonable ideal, as judging so often leads to unwanted consequences, both moral and practical. But if someone is overly scared of judging, he might prove to be a person less able to describe with accuracy. If a judgement necessarily includes description of one’s state of mind - “I don’t like the sight of that homeless person” - then a refusal to engage in judgment could result in an inability to describe the dissatisfied state of mind. Again, just exploring a little. It’s almost like we have to allow a little bit of judgement, in order to “insightfully and clearly describe our life experiences and perceptions”. Perhaps “judgment” needs to be broken down further, maybe into “discrimination” and “aggression”.
i’m not sure the distinction between judgment and description is really as sharp as you seem to suggest. What i mean is, simply by describing things one particular way rather than another particular way, or describing one particular thing rather than a different particular thing, we are making and using many judgments about whatever it is we are perceiving . i think you sort of allude to that when you say that all perception is bound to a point of view. If that is true, and i agree it is, then i don’t see how we can ever even begin to describe anything without also judging it, or at least putting our own unique spin on what we perceive, since having a point of view in the first place presumes that we filter all perception through a screen of perspectival limitations and prejudices.
oh i didn’t read this before i posted 
But i’m still not fully getting the distinction, intent seems bound to judgments as well, in this case judgments about the best way to use or present data. Data that we only percieve filtered through all kinds of personal biases.
Judgment can also arise out of a demand to look for something more interesting with your life. The present is compared to past experiences that delivered satisfying or distressful results. But the comparison activity does not have to equate to a problematic life where something has to change for you to be in a better state. You can change the way you think and feel which may work for a while but you revert back to what you basically are or what the past has conditioned you to be.
Coming to terms with all life around as it is means that judging is an assessment process that does not include demands that something other than what is be imposed neither on oneself nor others.
That’s interesting. I also think that judgement basically exists because of its utility. But, in perspectivism I think the ideal philosophy is to describe our state as best we can instead of claiming it is good, bad, true, false, etc., via judgement of perception. Our awareness is basically one of the best things that we have. Our senses. But senses alone don’t make meaning. Meaning has to do with time, and memory too. Judgement can be many things, but just to clarify, in the OP judgement means to moralize and objectify.
I don’t think we can live without judgement, but we can minimize it in favor of other things.
I have thought about the problematic aspects of judgement before, and also about how it is necessary to alter data.
In fact I suggest we alter data greatly when the time is right, because that is what life is all about.
But for perspectivist philosophy, I think it’s good to tell a story without saying it is true and good, or acting as if it is true and good. Instead we would say something like : “In my life i perceive these many things like this, in this order”, without saying “these things are true, good and bad, facts, which i learned.”
i agree.
a judgement, or perhaps a description to add: too many people pepper in too many judgements in their descriptions of things
This is complete nonsens, no one is really able to “clearly describe” one self or others, there’s always some bias, or compulsive distortion of the preception.
Only in very few aspects of one self at best. This is nothing but a delusion.
As a principle, as a guideline, it’s good. Striving for objectivity cannot be blamed in philosophy - it’s a sign of possible intellectual probity.
Yet coupling perspectivism and “purest data” seems odd… As a matter of fact, there are many descriptions available for a “same thing” - and there is not necessarily a reason not to consider all of them as equally unbiased, contrarily that would appear as some pre-judice…
One can try to give a honest account of the perspective one’s using, whether these “data” are gathered with a view to analyze them according to some point of view, and then explain which one, making assumptions explicit, even trying to deleverage expectation and aims. (Actually this habit would be also quite helpful to enhance the understanding of the reader).
But positing that it is possible to attain a “purest form” and “purest data” is a bit of a leap of faith - and it would pollute that “pureness”, IMHO. Even assuming that this complete absence of judgement is really possible - and not some form of hypocrisy - it is quite doubtful what would be the use of this description, as it would be crafted in order to be unfit for any perspectives.
If keeping our perspective pure and clear seems odd, I think you are not on the same page as me, and Drusuz is right out. He disagrees with almost everything he reads.
Well… OK, we are not on the same page. Is that really bad?
(As for Drusuz… I have nothing to say, it’s up to him).
Now, why would I think that there’s a “pure” perspective? Why should there be something like “purest” data, notably when coupled with the notion of perspective?
Would you explain that to me? What is “pure”?
In this case, what I mean by pure sense and pure awareness is when it comes into the mind with as little deformity and reformatting as possible.
I don’t think pure truth exists, maybe it shouldn’t exist. But I do believe in a somewhat pure sense. Animals also have pure sense, often moreso than humans, but they do not morph it into knowledge. Human judgement transforms sense into meaning, then meaning is transformed into knowledge, and knowledge is humanized truth, or human perspective.
I mean pure in this thread as something like pure water. Water free from toxins and disease causing micro organisms.
In this same way, pure sense is sense free from distortion and alterations.
We can’t make 100% pure senses, but we can try to retain pure sense by withholding judgement in some cases.
Apparently Wittgenstein once described his own philosophical writing as consisting of a series of:
“observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.”
Ok this
chronicle.com/article/Stanley-Ca … al/124830/
and bye!
This is pure nonsens, go read up on cognitive abilities, preception, learning etc, etc.
Read up on scientific things on how humans learn and precive things.
You first.
I am not about objecting to this attitude, but for exactly that: it is an attitude, there’s reasonably no guarantee of success (and why should there be?).
We strive for intellectual probity, that’s the most we can do.
So about mapping sense to meaning… I guess it’s a lot more complex than that.
I do not think that it is possible to withold judgement as easily as you seem to imply. You seem to presume that judgements are wholly conscious, that they may join perception at a later stage and remain detachable - and that judgements are the only possible agent of pollution. If that’s the way it is, then your point would be legitimate, though quite trivial.
But the problem here it is that it is not trivial at all in spite of appereances… (which is some uncanny word here).
The possibility of pure data (or pure perceptions - which sounds “safer”) and objective knowledge is at the crossroad of multiple long-standing debates on perception, knowledge, mind, consciousness.
Also the idea of animals capable of holding pure perception with no judgment is far from proven and one can have quite opposite views on that. The simple fact that there is consciuousness could mean the loss of all purity.
It is conceivable that knowledge is a tricky business for the living. If there are (hardwired?) perspectives in the living, as it must necessarily reduce its perception to information worth using, then not only the quest for purity is doomed, but it would be also a mistake.
So, even assuming that animals have no judgment (which I contend), it’s not really likely that animals can live on pure perceptions, dissociated from feelings, anticipations, memories… Or we can think of pure perceptions as the simple inputs of sense organs, but what of this remains in knowledge can hardly be determined. Actually it makes more sense to think that these data trigger the knowledge process, but they are not knowledge per se. Personally, I tend to believe that as something becomes conscious, then its original sense-data are lost forever: the process is not reversible.
Attacking the question from a specular side, assessing purity of perception means, after all, a form of judgment.
What purity of data can be assessed without that pure mind (to use a platonic expression) that can only be the outcome of conscious labour? How to tell the purity of perception without the (attempted) hosting of someone else’s point of view through conscience?
Moreover, the possibility of severing judgment from perception presumes a theory of knowledge according to which this mix is simply the outcome of bad habits and that it can be corrected. Research suggests that indeed it never works in that way…
Probably the notion of conscience - as subject, and maybe even will - is simply a remainder of what used to be called soul. It seems nevertheless necessary to make use of this concept, until a new one more fit becomes available. But what conscience is and how it works, how it plays interacting with perception (you maybe would say how it releases toxins) and where judgment comes from, they are all puzzling issues for which the traditional (mechanicistic) philosophical doctrines (with no concept of feedback) seem no longer plausible.
Finally, related to this, I can’t help noticing the deformity induced in representations by language. My guess is that eventually we believe that what we perceive is what we can say, and what we can say is not even the outcome of our conscience, or not entirely, but more of the way a language is used around us.
Regardless what is above, the interesting question becomes why objective knowledge, why “knowing”? What’s the use of this knowledge and why we (and I mean mostly philosophers) do that. Needless to say that many do not really see that as a problem, they consider knowledge (knowledge of truth, of course) as a moral duty and a great benefit to… mankind, or something like that.
As I see it, this position is very naïve, thou still popular. Yet, people with some philosophical leaning cannot really consider the alternative, cannot immagine that one should not know. And not only one has to know, but one has to know the “real things”, in their purest form - even once it is acknowledge that this represents a most uncertain task. (Actually science yields results that lead to think it is useful and beneficial to nurture such a belief. Yet, philosophically, that does not means that scientific knowledge is to be taken at its face value).
Why’s that? There can be competing answers, maybe not mutually exclusive.
It seems to me that without this quest for objectivity, for this non-subjective point of view, one can hardly conceive philosophy. At the end of the day, even when supporting radical relativistic views, one has to argue as some objective take, some way of representing things exactly as they stand, it’s possible - as a fiction, if nothing else.
I wonder if, ultimately, this is the philosopher’s instinct of self-preservation.