Felix - there is a radical contingency, yes - lack of ground, to to contrary. If anything this grounds us to a context where things can be known as they are useful to us.
And is that not what in the end is important? This is affirming the bias, letting go the ideal of knowing everything because of the realization that we are not put constituted in a wat to make that plausible. Basic modesty: the world is too many sided to objectively know.
It is possible to us however to know (determine!) what we are, which means to know what we (can) value as ourselves. This is all we need right now, if the aim is good life, instead of brutal extremities.
Pragmatism is always there as a fall-back position. I think William James metaphysical pragmatism was largely a response to Kant’s metaphysical skepticism.
How about this? The realization of the loss of the object in the sense of direct knowledge of the thing itself came through the understanding of the mechanics of perception. Those very mechanics imply a sensible subject. Sensibility itself requires a capacity for being affected. Affectivity includes the possibility of openness. Affectedness by and openness to what? An exteriority, an outside or an other. Thus, subjectivity necessarily involves a relationship with an other. That at least gets us out of solipsism.
I just know James as a psychologist - what did his metaphysical pragmatism entail? How was it metaphysical?
Indeed, though only by implication, but this is good enough.
What is actually identified as the “object” here are the senses, the apparatus of translation of energy to consciousness. I say this because it is through this apparatus that the (what will become known as) objects limitations are first determined. The senses select what is registered of reality and how, and then move this data deeper into subjectivity to the brain to interpret it, where it is established definitively as an object.
I still maintain that this objectification occurs only by virtue of the minds subjectivity, meaning-to-itself, which predicates that the world is to be understood in terms of objects so as to be able to work with it, navigate it in the way that has led so far to survival and selection.
What is unchanged is that where there is no conscious subject, there is no possibility of an object.
I mentioned him here because, I think his pragmatic test of truth was conceived in response to the scepticism of Kant and Hume about the possibility of metaphysical knowledge. To James a grand narrative that was therapeutic met the pragmatic test of truth even if the real object, be it a world or a god, was in a positive sense unknowable.
Right. Subjectivity is defined in terms of its opposite, even if the opposite is only an inference. This, by itself leave open the possibility of conceiving of our existential situation as an I-It or I-Thou relationship as did Martin Buber.
I don’t think so. One spontaneously takes sensation to be about something. Sensations are held to be about something…they include intentionality. Those that are recognized to be “objectless” are identified as hallucinations.
Yes.
Yes.
I agree with this in so far as “object” refers to what we create spontaneously in the process of cognitively structuring sensations. But, I still believe in a world that is independent of our minds.
Important point. Global producer/consumer Capitalism (as a grand narrative) passes the pragmatic truth test to those that benefit from it to the extent that it seems to work -that is even though the full effects are unknowable to any one subjective individual at any subjective point in space and time.
I mean I’m quite sure that the Calvinistic perspective is quite therapeutic to anyone who, by Calvin’s tenants, is favored in God’s eyes by virtue of their prosperity, that is while they equally suffer from a great deal of anxiety about their ability to sustain that prosperity.
But then I’m working from the sense that global producer/consumer Capitalism( or I should say the invisible hand of the market is being presented to us as metaphysical.
The point is, felix, you’ve given me reason to take pause as far as the pragmatic truth test is concerned.
If true beliefs are defined only as those that prove useful to the believer, the argument is successful if it only convinces one person. That seems perfectly acceptable some of the time. But, without some common understanding of the truth, communication would be impossible. Rational communication involves some degree of consensus about what constitutes validity, don’t you think?
That’s how groups come into being.
What fits the interests of the group is called rational, reasonable, true, sensible.
Those who can experience it as such can join the group.
If “rational communication” is replaced with “communication”, I’d say this goes for species-forming in general.
I agree with you on this. But my main point is that we may be pointing to an abuse of the Pragmatic truth test rather than a reason to completely dismiss it.
It just seems to me that the pragmatic truth test should be looked at as a tool, much like that of correspondence and coherence (despite their gaps) -that is as compared to rules. I think they all 3 have their pittfalls. Nevertheless, I think they all 3 can be useful as long as we don’t entertain the bad faith of thinking we’ll find some kind of intellectual construct that will make everything work like some well oiled machine.
But you’re right about communication. Language, and everything rooted in it, is an agreement. If we all made our own rules about what that agreement was, we would be screwed. I seriously doubt civilization would have survived as long as it has if such were the case.
Ironically, that is exactly what this thread has produced.
And herein is the common agreement; we are at struggle, but all for the same thing. We do bot struggle against each other or to overcome each other but this often is a consequence of our need to fulfill our being, which takes much other being into it.
Life is mortal because it consumes.
Capitalism is a consequence of life — life turned to feed on itself in another convolution of natures consuming rift --the star of humanity collapses into capitalism, and a barren neutron star remains. That is the ultimate fate of unbridled capitalism.
But it is a matter of stepping back. Our collapsing star of Earth is simply the collapse of the hydrogen cloud in the mind of man, which will soon burn in fusion with its brothers. The internet has made us even more of a single organism than the word already had one. Ironically, our warring for independence asserted so much our commonalities (will to independence) that we formed a giant bubble of ‘interdependent independence’, which is a contradiction in terms and yet also the grand ideal of most humans on Earth. All want to be free – free to do what?
What if freedom would entail –
No, total freedom is out of the question. Paganism is personal, and the demand for freedom produces unfreedom. It’s as simple as that, the bureaucracy is the testament to the evil of trying to prevent evil.