Justifying Hallucinations as "Reality"

[pogi]

Clark, thank you for your careful explanation about some of the different arguments of philosophical thought.  

Can you explain a little more about Pierce's ideas on "mediation"? 

11 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Peirce was a radical empiricist but part of what made him so radical was the focus on mediation as oppose to a simple consideration of empiricism as sense-states. Ultimately this has a profound implication - that there is no clear line of demarcation between the inside and outside. There's no place you can point to and say, "now we're in sensation" or "now we're in the human mind." Continuity is the name of the game. 

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Technically Peirce is an idealist but what makes him different is that he sees the whole universe as mind-like. This mind-like aspect is simply that the universe is perfused with signs. A sign is pretty much like what you imagine the world to mean. It's something that stands for some original object and determines an interpretation. As such it mediates between the object and thought. Peirce saw everything as signs rather than their just being something human minds do. So to him an ant colony was all sign-like activity. But so too was chemistry. Causation in physics was just sign-processes. The way he put it is that signs aren't in the human mind. The human mind is in signs. So he inverts the usual way of thinking about all this.

Are you saying that Pierce views the universe as as sort of unified consciousness?  A single continuity of mind?

Is it the universe that creates these "signs" according to Pierce, and if the purpose of these signs is to communicate meaning, who or what is the universe trying to communicate with...itself?

If I understand correctly, the "original object" is what is real, but what is real is hidden from the human mind behind the curtain of signs.  Am I understanding this right?  In other words, there is no way to verify if our interpretation of a sign is accurate, or if the sign is communicating the truth and not being deceptive.  There is no way for us to burst through the curtain of signs and have reality revealed to us as it is.  In essence, we are left to trust and have faith in these signs, with no way to test if the signs actually correspond with reality, right?  So, science can test the signs with no way of testing if it corresponds with anything in reality.  

Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand this new perspective.  Thanks!

 

[clarkgoble]

12 minutes ago, pogi said:

Can you explain a little more about Pierce's ideas on "mediation"? 

He thinks all knowledge is mediated (what he calls thirdness). Mediation is like how when I see the sun the sight of the sun is mediated with the light waves that then hits my eye which is a mediator which then travels up the optic nerves and so on. Peirce saw this as fairly continuous so for any mediation you could often break it down into further steps of mediation. So for example the light of the sun hits air molecules that absorb the light and reemit it. Our sight is preprocessed by our brain and so forth.

Fundamentally all of this is sign-process and indeed Peirce invented modern semiotics. So much of his work is on the details of how signs function. A good detailed explanation of Peirce's theory of signs can be found at the SEP. Basically a sign is just something that stands for an object and creates an interpretation. So I see the word "cat" and it acts as a sign representing the meaning of cat and produces in my mind the idea of a cat.

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Are you saying that Pierce views the universe as as sort of unified consciousness?  A single continuity of mind?

Mind-like in that he saw all sign-processes as mind like. Often he'd call them quasi-minds to help distinguish them from say human minds. A great movie that illustrates this is Christopher Nolan's Memento. I don't know if you ever saw it. The plot is about a guy who loses the ability to make new memories. He's trying to find the killer of his wife so he's tatooed all these messages on his body as that's the only way to keep knowledge. From a philosophical standpoint the question then becomes whether these external symbols are mind like. They are I think (this is a type of content externalism in philosophical jargon). It shows that while we frequently talk about mind given the place of brain where should we place the boundary of the mind. It's just chemical and electrical action and it seems wrong to limit it to the brain. But if you don't limit it to the brain do you limit it to the whole body? If so, then aren't these tattoos part of the mind? And if so, then aren't all the tools for thinking we use including writing mind-like?

This is a very different way of thinking as we tend to still hold to elements of Descartes conception of the mind where there's mind-substnace and physical-substance with an absolute division between the two. For Peirce everything is mind like and we can just talk about how close it is to human minds. So human minds are the obvious paradigm of mind. But most people would say primates have minds and typically other animals like dolphins. You can keep going down the scale in complexity to say insects. They might not have consciousness but they have brains and the brains function in mind-like fashions. What about bees? Bees have that insect like brain but the colony as a whole can function as a kind of single hive creature. (Thus the term hive like) Ditto for ants. Peirce went even further and noted the physics and chemistry of crystals had mind-like aspects. Again these are very limited. He's not arguing crystals have a human like mind. Ultimately what he concludes is that anything that involves signs is mind-like. Thus the universe is filled with signs. Matter is congealed mind in that it has such strong habits as to produce limited yet predictable actions. Mind is what he called effete matter. So matter and mind are the same thing just different degrees of difference.

Admittedly this is one of Peirce's more controversial positions, although once you realize what he's saying it's not actually that radical. 

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Is it the universe that creates these "signs" according to Pierce, and if the purpose of these signs is to communicate meaning, who or what is the universe trying to communicate with...itself?

Signs happen. He ends up with a certain cosmology to explain all this but that's more controversial and I'm not sure I buy his views there. However since the universe is evolving he thinks by way of analogy that one could view the whole universe as an argument working itself out. So it's not communicating with someone so much as creating new interpretations in itself. (Where interpretations here are just the physical states the universe produces at each step of its evolution -- think of say a computer program modeling some physical phenomena. Each step through the loop is a new state. Producing that state is the interpretant of a sign.)

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If I understand correctly, the "original object" is what is real, but what is real is hidden from the human mind behind the curtain of signs.

We never have unfiltered, unmediated access it's true. But what's key to Peirce's position is that it isn't hidden but is unveiled. So I can know I'm typing on a keyboard right now for instance. It's not hidden from me. That is Peirce rejects the very notion of a thing-in-itself that Kant uses - the thing forever hidden away from phenomena. Instead Peirce thinks that sign-processes can unveil all objects given enough time and investigation. (It's at this point infinity and continuity come into his logic - he invented many aspects of modern logic and also was heavily involved in the development of infinity even though his approach was different from Cantor's and Dedekind's)

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There is no way for us to burst through the curtain of signs and have reality revealed to us as it is.  In essence, we are left to trust and have faith in these signs, with no way to test if the signs actually correspond with reality, right?  So, science can test the signs with no way of testing if it corresponds with anything in reality.  

Yeah that's what he rejects. He thinks we can have reality revealed to us it's just that we can also be mistaken. Going back to Descartes the idea was that knowledge had to be infallible to be knowledge. Peirce rejected that and most contemporary philosophy has as well. So this idea of reality being kept from us depends logically upon certain assumptions about fallibilism Peirce just doesn't hold.

[Ahab]

11 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Hardness exists independent of humans forming the concept and measuring it?

Uh, yeah. 

Come on now. Can't you understand that?

I think maybe I am a realist and tend to want language to be precise even though I am not always precise in the way I use language myself.

Like when saying the sky is blue, for example. I should probably be saying only that the sky appears to be blue, sometimes, when it doesn't appear to be some other color. Parts of the sky during horizons and sunsets appear to be other colors, like red or orange, and during storms the sky sometimes appears to be gray or even white. But the sky itself isn't really blue, is it? And when it does appear to be blue, what should we call that appearance? An illusion, or a hallucination, or only how the truth of something appears to us in our minds through our eyes and our perceptions of color?

The hardness of something like a diamond is not complicated to understand, though. It is hard and it's hardness exists independent of humans forming the concept and measuring that it is hard because it isn't us that make a diamond hard. Cubic zirconium, though, well, maybe you might have a point there.

Edited April 21, 2017 by Ahab

[clarkgoble]

25 minutes ago, Ahab said:

Come on now. Can't you understand that?

I'm pretty sure he understands it but just disagrees with it.

 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

Well the nature of philosophical arguments is that the arguments for a particular position are always weak and often circumstantial. There are fads in philosophy and demonstrations arguments are bad. But positions rarely go away.

Gosh I guess I cannot help but bite on any philosophical point even though I try.  My fingers have a will of their own.  It's too much fun I guess.  It is my version of addiction I guess.

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Yes, but if mediation between the mind and the object measured counts as senses then the whole universe is our sense. It's all mediated unless one believes in something like direct intuition like many platonists did.

Oh gosh I can't let you get away with that! MAN! talk about metanarratives.  If the whole universe is taken to be "our sense" it makes you more solipsist than I am! And that sounds more Platonic than anything - "It's all Forms".

And you still have "objects" being "measured" out there in the "universe" where presumably there are no people.  Peirce was around before analytical philosophy- I can see that!!  I could tolerate the religious idea that God's intelligence comprehends the universe, as perhaps we comprehend our immediate surroundings- this room I am sitting in etc.  Whenever I hear "It's all this" I have trouble with it.  "It's turtles all the way down" doesn't explain much!

Analytical philosophy exists because of Hume largely who recognized the importance of language in.... guess what?  DISCOURSE!  Like discourse IS language?  And maybe philosophy is all language?  Analytical philosophers see that all there is to discuss is discussion itself, and not metaphysical things pointing to other things all of which are invisible and clearly human concepts made up by humans.  The whole notion of "signs" is a human notion in language- it is a theory, a way of seeing things written in language by Peirce.

Rorty sees language as all we have for communication and eschews metanarratives, and this kind of talk about Peirce makes it sound like a metanarrative

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Metanarrative

an overarching account or interpretation of events and circumstances that provides a pattern or structure for people’s beliefs and gives meaning to their experiences.

"Traditional religions provide stories that deliver a metanarrative about how we should live our lives"

 

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Ah. OK. I caught that part but thought you were asserting something a bit stronger. Sorry about that.

Truth is a matter of possibility not actuality. Possible sentences aren't human sentences. The whole argument is just the distinction between the actual and the possible. I even gave Peirce's example of why this would be - a diamond is hard regardless of whether anyone measures that particular diamond.

Again- sounds totally quasi-platonic speaking of "Possibility" as some kind of entity and "Actuality"- one must have a concept of "actuality" to even understand this.  There are plans people make- which might or might not fail.  I suppose some plans are therefore "possible" until they become "actual"- fine.  But "Truth is a matter of possibility"? 

I suppose the sentence "The moon will crash into the earth" is a possibility that might be "true" someday but that still is saying that truth is about sentences and propositions, and is a description of a possible state of affairs, but it is still a description in human language of a possible experience humans may have- the thing we call the "moon" colliding with the thing we call "earth".  The assertion that " a diamond is hard regardless of whether anyone measures that particular diamond." is totally unintelligible to me frankly.

The assertion "There are no soft diamonds" on the other hand makes perfect sense- if it were "soft" we would not call it a "diamond" when we find it.  Again- it is true a priori in the same way "All bachelors are unmarried" is.   Why on earth would one state "A bachelor is unmarried regardless of whether anyone questions the marital status of that particular bachelor"?  It goes without saying in the language that all bachelors are unmarried.  THAT is what those words MEAN in English.  James saw Peirce's version of the maxim as metaphysical.

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That's the whole point of the pragmatic maxim. Humans can pick the symbols used but their meaning is determined by the practical consequences and not human definition except for arbitrary terms where their essential meaning is tied to human decisions.

Who defines "practical consequences" if not humans?  Who else makes human decisions but humans?

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So hardness is a physical property the meaning of which is wrapped up in all the ways hardness can be measured. Anger is a human property the meaning of which is wrapped up in all the ways we'd discover if someone is angry.

 

 

 

Measured by whom???  HUMANS  - and who is angry and who discovers it??  HUMANS!  Who measures hardness- humans!  Who sees God as a human?  HUMANS!

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(I honestly can't recall if Rorty rejected the pragmatic maxim -- I assume so at least by his late phase but a quick google didn't show me a clear answer)

I think its ambiguity would have driven him nuts so he kept the spirit and rejected the formulation I would guess.  There are different versions of the maxim in Dewey and James.

Edited April 21, 2017 by mfbukowski

[Ahab]

39 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

The assertion that " a diamond is hard regardless of whether anyone measures that particular diamond." is totally unintelligible to me frankly.

No no no. I refuse to believe you are being serious when you say that. You understand what those words represent and you're about ready to show it in the very next statement you make:

39 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

The assertion "There are no soft diamonds" on the other hand makes perfect sense- if it were "soft" we would not call it a "diamond" when we find it.  

...because you and I both understand that diamonds are hard.

39 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Again- it is true a priori in the same way "All bachelors are unmarried" is.   Why on earth would one state "A bachelor is unmarried regardless of whether anyone questions the marital status of that particular bachelor"?  It goes without saying in the language that all bachelors are unmarried.  THAT is what those words MEAN in English.  

Just 2 ways of saying the same thing, mski. Picky, picky, picky, ain't ya? And you enjoy playing these language games with semantics, too, I think.

At some point I'm hoping to see you admit that language is just a tool we use to communicate our thoughts about what we perceive in reality and that reality exists even when we don't communicate with others about it using the tool we refer to as language.

Hoping in vain, maybe, but yes I am still hoping to see you admit that.

39 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

James saw Peirce's version of the maxim as metaphysical.

Who defines "practical consequences" if not humans?  Who else makes human decisions but humans?

Measured by whom???  HUMANS  - and who is angry and who discovers it??  HUMANS!  Who measures hardness- humans!  Who sees God as a human?  HUMANS!

I think its ambiguity would have driven him nuts so he kept the spirit and rejected the formulation I would guess.  There are different versions of the maxim in Dewey and James.

Uh, yeah, it is just us humans talking about what we are talking about but what we are talking about would still exist even if we were not talking about it.

[mfbukowski]

14 minutes ago, Ahab said:

Just 2 ways of saying the same thing, mski. Picky, picky, picky, ain't ya? And you enjoy playing these language games with semantics, too, I think.

At some point I'm hoping to see you admit that language is just a tool we use to communicate our thoughts about what we perceive in reality and that reality exists even when we don't communicate with others about it using the tool we refer to as language.

Uh, yeah, that is what I have been saying all along. They ARE two ways of saying the same thing- that is exactly what I said.  Read it carefully next time

 We communicate our THOUGHTS about what we perceive.  What we perceive is reality as we know it- or reality as it truly is if you want to put it that way since all we can know about what truly is is what we can perceive.

But words are not reality- they are words.

You just do not understand philosophese.

Edited April 21, 2017 by mfbukowski

[mfbukowski]

On 4/19/2017 at 4:23 PM, MiserereNobis said:

Someone tell him about ol' Descartes. 

That's putting de cart before de purse.

[mfbukowski]

16 hours ago, SmileyMcGee said:

+100! That's the message in a nutshell. It's beautifully poetic to me that my efforts to prove faith false led me to conclude that its all I have...interesting how things come full circle. 

I could quote this again and again.  It is the whole ball game.

[mfbukowski]

15 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

So if I say "the sky is blue" philosophers might debate over whether "blue" means the wavelength of light (and thereby outside the mind and real) or the experience of blueness to a human mind (and thereby in the mind and not real).

Or real because that is all we can know anyway and any other kind of talk is nonsense. 

 

[Ahab]

10 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

Uh, yeah, that is what I have been saying all along. They ARE two ways of saying the same thing- that is exactly what I said.  Read it carefully next time

I was talking about your assertion that "the assertion "a diamond is hard regardless of whether anyone measures that particular diamond." is totally unintelligible to me frankly."  It's not totally unintelligible to you. You know what that means and you agree with it even though your preference is to state the same thing in another way. That there are no soft diamonds.

Silly language games.

10 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

 We communicate our THOUGHTS about what we perceive.  What we perceive is reality as we know it- or reality as it truly is if you want to put it that way since all we can know about what truly is is what we can perceive.

But words are not reality- they are words.

...and our perceptions of reality are not necessarily a true or correct perception of reality, either. Our perceptions of reality are only our perceptions of reality and reality can be (possibly) different than we perceive it to be.

Not that I'm always right, or always wrong, but there is that possibility, either way.

10 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

You just do not understand philosophese.

I understand enough of it to know I am not 100% in favor of every philosophical argument there is or was or can be, possibly.

[Ahab]

15 minutes ago, mfbukowski said:

I could quote this again and again.  It is the whole ball game.

Yeah but is he right or is he wrong about what he believes and perceives by faith?

Or is there a mix of both true and false in his, or your, perceptions?

I can envision an almost endless list of possibities.

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

Oh gosh I can't let you get away with that! MAN! talk about metanarratives.  If the whole universe is taken to be "our sense" it makes you more solipsist than I am! And that sounds more Platonic than anything - "It's all Forms".

See, I knew just what to say to perk your interest.

Well there are different kinds of platonism. Peirce was a realist about possibilities. If you consider each set of possibilities for something a form then I guess that works. That's not how most platonists think of it though. You don't hear David Lewis being called a Platonist for instance. As an aside though this was a criticism many platonists made of Heidegger's and Derrida's critiques of platonism. That it only dealt with a certain kind of platonism whereas the other kinds were actually basically like the positions Heidegger and Derrida were taking.

All that said there are some similarities between some types of neoplatonists and Peirce. But they're not that extensive even though he himself did see some connection between forms and objects of possibility. But really his arguments come out of pretty common sensical ways of talking about properties. (Thus his referring to his system as critical common sensism)

In this case all he is saying is that mind-like properties are properties that are sign like. So he's not quite making a claim like Spinoza or the Stoics although again there are some similarities. That's why I said it sounds controversial at first until you stop and think about it. All the laws of physics can be written in a sign like fashion where matter changes state in a mediated fashion. (That's explicitly how Feynman Diagrams work for instance arising out of a Lagrangian formulation of Quantum Mechanics and particle physics) Peirce just takes this sign like functionality seriously. Causality is just one example of a sign function. So to say there is causality or evolution of the universe is just to make a semiotic claim about the universe.

Again this is just because he generalizes the case of signs rather than only considering them as conscious interpretations of signs.

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And you still have "objects" being "measured" out there in the "universe" where presumably there are no people.  Peirce was around before analytical philosophy- I can see that!!  I could tolerate the religious idea that God's intelligence comprehends the universe, as perhaps we comprehend our immediate surroundings- this room I am sitting in etc.  Whenever I hear "It's all this" I have trouble with it.  "It's turtles all the way down" doesn't explain much!

Again we have to distinguish between actual people doing actual things and the potential or possibility of something being done to a thing. Again hardness is the obvious example. It would be non-sensical to say that a rock is only hard when it is measured as such from a scientific perspective. It's hard because of the ways we could measure it.

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The whole notion of "signs" is a human notion in language- it is a theory, a way of seeing things written in language by Peirce.

It's not just a human notion though any more than the keyboard I am typing on is just a linguistic conception. We use language and more generally signs to refer to things that are not language.

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Analytical philosophers see that all there is to discuss is discussion itself, and not metaphysical things pointing to other things all of which are invisible and clearly human concepts made up by humans.

Well perhaps the mid 20th century analytic philosophers would have agreed with that. Certainly not the early ones. It's hard to think of Frege, Moore or Russell as avoiding metaphysics. It's more the dark days of positivism that made people look askance at metaphysics. I think there's quite a lot going on in contemporary analytic philosophy discussing metaphysical claims. Metaphysics simply has reemerged from the dark days of the mid-20th century to a place of respect. Largely due to the failure of positivist theories of meaning. It's hard to discuss analytic philosophy without discussing David Lewis, John Searle or others but their focus is on metaphysics. After all what is modal realism but a metaphysical claim? That's not to say there aren't people like Putnam still tilting against the windmills of metaphysics. But I don't think we can say they were successful given the place metaphysics has in the contemporary academy. You have whole robust fields like the free will and agency debate, questions of deserts, debates about A or B theories of time, the nature of abstract entities and so forth. The last few decades have been a true renaissance for metaphysics in analytic philosophy.

2 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Rorty sees language as all we have for communication and eschews metanarratives, and this kind of talk about Peirce makes it sound like a metanarratives

To eschew a metanarrative requires a way to discuss the distinction between a metanarrative and narrative which would itself be a metanarrative and is thus self-refuting. But in any case I think what you probably want to address isn't metanarratives but the classic nominalist versus realist debate that goes back to the scholastics. In that Peirce most definitely was a realist. He was fixated on nominalism and saw it as the major place most philosophers went astray. 

For others reading the classic realist vs nominalist debate was largely a debate over abstract entities. Nominalism really gets going with William of Ockham and the big proponent of realism was Duns Scotus. Realists felt that claims about abstract entities like the laws of physics were true independent of talking about individual existing things. A nominalist might have different ideas about what constitutes a thing, but any true statement has to be translated into statements only about those individual things. So to talk about red a nominalist would have to talk about all red things. To a realist one could talk about redness independent of red things, much like physicists will talk about the laws of physics independent of matter being affected by such laws.

So by embracing realism Peirce is in that sense closer to platonism than most modern philosophy through analytic philosophy which is typically nominalistic. Although major analytic philosophers like Quine were more open to abstract entities like mathematics.

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Again- sounds totally quasi-platonic speaking of "Possibility" as some kind of entity and "Actuality"- one must have a concept of "actuality" to even understand this.  There are plans people make- which might or might not fail.  I suppose some plans are therefore "possible" until they become "actual"- fine.  But "Truth is a matter of possibility"? 

But I think most people understand the notions of actuality and possibility. Certainly criticizing modal realism (the idea that possibilities are truly possibilities independent of anyone thinking about them) is fair. However I think the pragmatic maxim offers quite a bit of explanatory power without falling into the traps the positivists fell into with their verification principle. That's why it's been so influential since Peirce proposed it.

The problem with truth not being a matter of possibility is that it makes common speech unintelligible. If I say to turn the light on in a room we don't want to say it only becomes true when it actually happens. That use of truth goes completely against how we use it. Again it seems non-sensical to say a rock is only hard when you hit it. Since you like appeals to language, what sense of language denies this use of language?

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Who defines "practical consequences" if not humans?  Who else makes human decisions but humans?

Practical consequences aren't defined but discovered. An important distinction. If they are discovered it makes sense linguistically to say they were there before anyone noticed. Did Neptune start existing only when telescopes became powerful enough to see it?

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Measured by whom???  HUMANS  - and who is angry and who discovers it??  HUMANS!  Who measures hardness- humans!  Who sees God as a human?  HUMANS!

Well you are contradicting yourself now. Earlier when I critiqued this reliance on the human you said, "Computers are programmed with languages- scientific equipment are extensions of the senses and have to be interpreted just like the senses are, and I am not just talking about human consciousness." Now you're back to just talking about humans. You don't think a dog can tell the difference between soft and hard even if they don't use the words? My dog certainly can.

Further again to repeat, it seems non-sensical to say a rock is only hard when measured. So while humans certainly give us language to talk about such things it seems quite odd to limit ourselves only to language. Language is about things that are outside of language. Again this seems pretty well accepted by everyone except certain philosophers. <grin> It takes advanced training to convince people that rocks are only hard when spoken of and that language is only about humans doing things. To the degree philosophy depends upon language we perhaps should make use of the way humans use language.

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We communicate our THOUGHTS about what we perceive.  What we perceive is reality as we know it- or reality as it truly is if you want to put it that way since all we can know about what truly is is what we can perceive.

What do we mean by thoughts? This is not a minor point. Are thoughts the words I'm conscious of speaking in my mind? Are thoughts all activities of my nervous system? It's a word that seems clear at first but gets rather complex when examined closely. In particular the very notion of a subconscious is the idea that what is going on in our brain but not before us consciously has mind like properties. That is they can be described as thoughts we don't perceive. You can quickly see where this is going. If reality is only about our perception but we act based upon what we don't always perceive how on earth can we say reality is only about perception.  Something is going on here.

Now one way to recover is just to make a break between thoughts and consciousness. That seems to work best but not everyone likes that choice. However it clearly will undermine the idea of reality as perception.

 

[mfbukowski]

2 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

See, I knew just what to say to perk your interest.

Well there are different kinds of platonism. Peirce was a realist about possibilities. If you consider each set of possibilities for something a form then I guess that works. That's not how most platonists think of it though. You don't hear David Lewis being called a Platonist for instance. As an aside though this was a criticism many platonists made of Heidegger's and Derrida's critiques of platonism. That it only dealt with a certain kind of platonism whereas the other kinds were actually basically like the positions Heidegger and Derrida were taking.

All that said there are some similarities between some types of neoplatonists and Peirce. But they're not that extensive even though he himself did see some connection between forms and objects of possibility. But really his arguments come out of pretty common sensical ways of talking about properties. (Thus his referring to his system as critical common sensism)

In this case all he is saying is that mind-like properties are properties that are sign like. So he's not quite making a claim like Spinoza or the Stoics although again there are some similarities. That's why I said it sounds controversial at first until you stop and think about it. All the laws of physics can be written in a sign like fashion where matter changes state in a mediated fashion. (That's explicitly how Feynman Diagrams work for instance arising out of a Lagrangian formulation of Quantum Mechanics and particle physics) Peirce just takes this sign like functionality seriously. Causality is just one example of a sign function. So to say there is causality or evolution of the universe is just to make a semiotic claim about the universe.

Again this is just because he generalizes the case of signs rather than only considering them as conscious interpretations of signs.

Again we have to distinguish between actual people doing actual things and the potential or possibility of something being done to a thing. Again hardness is the obvious example. It would be non-sensical to say that a rock is only hard when it is measured as such from a scientific perspective. It's hard because of the ways we could measure it.

It's not just a human notion though any more than the keyboard I am typing on is just a linguistic conception. We use language and more generally signs to refer to things that are not language.

Well perhaps the mid 20th century analytic philosophers would have agreed with that. Certainly not the early ones. It's hard to think of Frege, Moore or Russell as avoiding metaphysics. It's more the dark days of positivism that made people look askance at metaphysics. I think there's quite a lot going on in contemporary analytic philosophy discussing metaphysical claims. Metaphysics simply has reemerged from the dark days of the mid-20th century to a place of respect. Largely due to the failure of positivist theories of meaning. It's hard to discuss analytic philosophy without discussing David Lewis, John Searle or others but their focus is on metaphysics. After all what is modal realism but a metaphysical claim? That's not to say there aren't people like Putnam still tilting against the windmills of metaphysics. But I don't think we can say they were successful given the place metaphysics has in the contemporary academy. You have whole robust fields like the free will and agency debate, questions of deserts, debates about A or B theories of time, the nature of abstract entities and so forth. The last few decades have been a true renaissance for metaphysics in analytic philosophy.

To eschew a metanarrative requires a way to discuss the distinction between a metanarrative and narrative which would itself be a metanarrative and is thus self-refuting. But in any case I think what you probably want to address isn't metanarratives but the classic nominalist versus realist debate that goes back to the scholastics. In that Peirce most definitely was a realist. He was fixated on nominalism and saw it as the major place most philosophers went astray. 

For others reading the classic realist vs nominalist debate was largely a debate over abstract entities. Nominalism really gets going with William of Ockham and the big proponent of realism was Duns Scotus. Realists felt that claims about abstract entities like the laws of physics were true independent of talking about individual existing things. A nominalist might have different ideas about what constitutes a thing, but any true statement has to be translated into statements only about those individual things. So to talk about red a nominalist would have to talk about all red things. To a realist one could talk about redness independent of red things, much like physicists will talk about the laws of physics independent of matter being affected by such laws.

So by embracing realism Peirce is in that sense closer to platonism than most modern philosophy through analytic philosophy which is typically nominalistic. Although major analytic philosophers like Quine were more open to abstract entities like mathematics.

But I think most people understand the notions of actuality and possibility. Certainly criticizing modal realism (the idea that possibilities are truly possibilities independent of anyone thinking about them) is fair. However I think the pragmatic maxim offers quite a bit of explanatory power without falling into the traps the positivists fell into with their verification principle. That's why it's been so influential since Peirce proposed it.

The problem with truth not being a matter of possibility is that it makes common speech unintelligible. If I say to turn the light on in a room we don't want to say it only becomes true when it actually happens. That use of truth goes completely against how we use it. Again it seems non-sensical to say a rock is only hard when you hit it. Since you like appeals to language, what sense of language denies this use of language?

Practical consequences aren't defined but discovered. An important distinction. If they are discovered it makes sense linguistically to say they were there before anyone noticed. Did Neptune start existing only when telescopes became powerful enough to see it?

Well you are contradicting yourself now. Earlier when I critiqued this reliance on the human you said, "Computers are programmed with languages- scientific equipment are extensions of the senses and have to be interpreted just like the senses are, and I am not just talking about human consciousness." Now you're back to just talking about humans. You don't think a dog can tell the difference between soft and hard even if they don't use the words? My dog certainly can.

Further again to repeat, it seems non-sensical to say a rock is only hard when measured. So while humans certainly give us language to talk about such things it seems quite odd to limit ourselves only to language. Language is about things that are outside of language. Again this seems pretty well accepted by everyone except certain philosophers. <grin> It takes advanced training to convince people that rocks are only hard when spoken of and that language is only about humans doing things. To the degree philosophy depends upon language we perhaps should make use of the way humans use language.

What do we mean by thoughts? This is not a minor point. Are thoughts the words I'm conscious of speaking in my mind? Are thoughts all activities of my nervous system? It's a word that seems clear at first but gets rather complex when examined closely. In particular the very notion of a subconscious is the idea that what is going on in our brain but not before us consciously has mind like properties. That is they can be described as thoughts we don't perceive. You can quickly see where this is going. If reality is only about our perception but we act based upon what we don't always perceive how on earth can we say reality is only about perception.  Something is going on here.

Now one way to recover is just to make a break between thoughts and consciousness. That seems to work best but not everyone likes that choice. However it clearly will undermine the idea of reality as perception.

 

Thoughts are sentences.

It is perfectly sensible that rocks are not KNOWN to be "hard" until they are measured or of a type that has been measured.  Why else would one measure their hardness if it was known?  One takes two unknown substances and measures their hardness on a very precise scale for a specific purpose, like cutting diamonds or putting diamonds on 

Consciousness is what is left over after physical descriptions are exhausted.  It is the image of David Lewis at UCLA walking around the Social Welfare building which has been renamed. It is the color blue as we experience it, bereft of explanations including angstrom units which do not provide the Experience of the color blue.  The qualia.

I have never been a dog so I do not know what they experience- ask your dog to describe it.  That is the only way you will know if he" knows the difference between "hard" and "soft".  That is human language.  Yes he may prefer his bed to cold concrete to but there is nothing more to say about it.

Please, for at least the third time in this thread, read this if you have not.  http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

It seems you keep making the same sort of assertion in different ways, ignoring that I see it differently.  

And you keep going back to extensive explanations of the history of philosophy or quoting others without putting out your own opinions.  That is fine, but I know the history of philosophy and the subject of this thread is how we do or do not justify belief in visions.  You have said nothing at all in all these exchanges about the main topic at hand.

"Properties" are human classifications

Do you really think that I care that it takes advanced training to think clearly instead of using 2000 year old philosophy?  Are the stars holes in the sky that let light shine through?

I knew David Lewis when I was an undergrad at UCLA.  Sweetest guy ever but he was weird- no question.  Wore the same sweater every day, and here is a picture of him in the sweater.  There are others.  He also liked military style jackets when it got too chili for the sweater.   That is not to say anything about his philosophical acumen- he was obviously a genius.

Unless you are saying that Lewis might have been a Mormon or that WE might use his views to construct a world containing God, they are not really relevant to the thread imo.

Please stick to the op for this thread and show me why using Peirce's paradigm is better than Rorty's paradigm for Mormon theology and then we will have a discussion

Otherwise it is just a .......ing match

A quote from Lewis which applies perfectly, and his picture from the same site- IN the famous sweater.

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Quotations from David Lewis

One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or justify these pre-existing opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system. A metaphysician’s analysis of mind is an attempt at systematizing our opinions about mind. It succeeds to the extent that (1) it is systematic, and (2) it respects those of our pre-philosophical opinions to which we are firmly attached. Insofar as it does both better than any alternative we have thought of, we give it credence. There is some give-and-take, but not too much: some of us sometimes change our minds on some points of common opinion, if they conflict irremediably with a doctrine that commands our belief by its systematic beauty and its agreement with more important common opinions. Quoted in – Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Truth and its Deformities edited by Peter A. French, Howard Wettstein

 

[SmileyMcGee]

4 hours ago, Ahab said:

Yeah but is he right or is he wrong about what he believes and perceives by faith?

Or is there a mix of both true and false in his, or your, perceptions?

I can envision an almost endless list of possibities.

Those are good questions. How would you prove my beliefs right or wrong? What is a false perception? What is a true perception? How would I know that a belief or perception is true/false, right/wrong? What is right? What is wrong? 

[SmileyMcGee]

20 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

The alternative way to think about this is that the universe itself is sign like as is the mind. So to make statements about reality is just to make statements tied to mind - just not necessarily human minds. It's a different way of thinking yet once you buy into it many philosophical problems tend to dissipate. You no longer are having to coordinated what's inside the mind and essentially language like from what is outside the mind and essentially non-language like. Instead it's all just signs.

 

I'll have to study up on Peirce's ideas. I don't know that I understand what is meant by "it's all just signs" enough to provide a worthy response at this point. But you've given me something to study

Edited April 22, 2017 by SmileyMcGee

[Ahab]

1 hour ago, SmileyMcGee said:

Those are good questions. How would you prove my beliefs right or wrong? What is a false perception? What is a true perception? How would I know that a belief or perception is true/false, right/wrong? What is right? What is wrong? 

You're asking ME???

I'll tell you what our Father tells me, and from there you can govern your own self.

Okey dokey? What could be better than that?

[clarkgoble]

On 4/21/2017 at 6:08 PM, mfbukowski said:

Thoughts are sentences.

So when you use the word though it refers just to sentences in my inner monologue? If I see ice cream and feel hungry I am not thinking until I verbalize in an inner way "I want ice cream?" Just trying to get your position clear as that is a relatively unusual position. I don't want to attribute to you a position you don't hold.

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It is perfectly sensible that rocks are not KNOWN to be "hard" until they are measured or of a type that has been measured.

Right, but the question is whether they are hard before being known as hard. Again this is pretty important in science since we have to explain phenomena from the past.

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Consciousness is what is left over after physical descriptions are exhausted.  It is the image of David Lewis at UCLA walking around the Social Welfare building which has been renamed. It is the color blue as we experience it, bereft of explanations including angstrom units which do not provide the Experience of the color blue.  The qualia.

That's interesting since that's a different position from Rorty who emphasized, especially in Mirrors of Nature, how they can overlap in key ways. Unless I'm still misunderstanding you. 

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I have never been a dog so I do not know what they experience- ask your dog to describe it.  That is the only way you will know if he" knows the difference between "hard" and "soft".  That is human language.  Yes he may prefer his bed to cold concrete to but there is nothing more to say about it.

But it seems to me that to the degree our words describe behaviors they can apply to others quite easily. If they can't then how can I apply them to other people. There's a certain problem here of multiple people using the same language but meaning different things by it. 

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Please, for at least the third time in this thread, read this if you have not.  http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

Oh, I'm very familiar with it. If anything I think I'm pushing Nagel farther than you do. At the end he mentions the relationship of being a bat and people with unique sensory situations like being blind. However I'd likely say, following Levinas and others, that the problem of other minds is the fundamental problem. That is everything Nagel says about bats applies to any other thing I could bring up.

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It seems you keep making the same sort of assertion in different ways, ignoring that I see it differently.  

Well I am speaking not just to you but the others in the thread. So please read my posts with that in mind. I'm not trying to be patronizing but rather am just trying to first situate my views and second give enough information for others to follow. I of course recognize you see things differently. But you asked for arguments and I can but give you limited ones that often involve reference to these other figures.

Fundamentally what I think is missing from your view which you don't see as a problem is this concern with the things themselves and their properties independent of me. That's always been the drive in realism - to move beyond a phenomenal description to the properties of things. There's no ultimate proof for that, which is why anti-realists and nominalists abound. There are I think practical consequences to such moves. It makes it very hard to explain physical laws for instance. (You can see this in say the tendency of positivists like Carnap to never say there are physical laws for instance) 

At a certain point all one can do is note that when you think those sorts of things don't matter it makes ones explanations much more complicated. That's why I constantly bring up the metaphor of when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail. One can always explain other things in terms of ones categories. Those who disagree can but point out what is being missed. But as I've said many times metaphysical arguments at best have weak evidence. Ultimately one can just point to how fruitful it is to be a realist.

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Please stick to the op for this thread and show me why using Peirce's paradigm is better than Rorty's paradigm for Mormon theology and then we will have a discussion

Again I think I already did it although you didn't really comment on that. 

Here's a brief reprise.

1. Peirce can explain how religious knowledge operates both by his logic of abduction but also his shift from viewing knowledge as akin to a mathematical proof made out of undeniable premises. Instead we have a process of inquiry and the stability of beliefs. Beliefs that persist as stable through continued inquiry are knowledge. This is very important since it first off explains knowledge of regular lay members but also explains how one can defend beliefs against critiques in a sophisticated fashion.

2. Peirce can explain how there can be moral truths without the Euthypro problem. 

3. Peirce can explain how to deal with all parts of a spiritual phenomena whereas if we deal only with sentences many parts of left unexplained.

4. Peirce can explain our focus on what is behind spiritual phenomena whereas your position deems that irrelevant. That is Mormonism assumes the origin matters whereas your more Jamesian approach does not. Peirce's approach thus can defend the traditional Mormon view of spiritual experiences.

There's others but that'll do for now.

[mfbukowski]

6 hours ago, clarkgoble said:

 Peirce's approach thus can defend the traditional Mormon view of spiritual experiences.

There's others but that'll do for now.

Ok.

Please show me how that works using quotes from Peirce, if you can.

There is a lot of misunderstanding between us because of the sequential nature of these posts, every unintentional misquote seems to get amplified  later.  "You said thus and so" when thus and so was a misunderstanding of a post long past.

All I care about is how Peirce would explain the reality of the first vision. I think it is not possible for Peirce to have been LDS,  but Rorty was very close. 

Was Peirce religious in any sense?

Rorty sees the need for "religion" in one sense, but not a personal God.

And honestly I know Rortys stuff very well.    I will refer you to "raw feels" which = qualia essentially. I have repeatedly defended pre-linguistic qualia, I cannot understand how you missed that. In fact I think visions are essentially pre-linguistic qualia.

[clarkgoble]

17 hours ago, mfbukowski said:

Rorty sees the need for "religion" in one sense, but not a personal God.

And honestly I know Rortys stuff very well.    I will refer you to "raw feels" which = qualia essentially. I have repeatedly defended pre-linguistic qualia, I cannot understand how you missed that. In fact I think visions are essentially pre-linguistic qualia.

Right, I guess I'm just not sure where your views differ from Rorty. So Rorty is fine with qualia but severely limits what it does. So when I ask about what's beyond language I'm more asking for your views, not Rorty's. Just like while I'm influenced by Peirce, Heidegger and others there are plenty of places I think them wrong.

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Was Peirce religious in any sense?

Yes although it was an idiosyncratic take somewhat. He has a rather famous "proof" for God in his "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." It's mainly of worth less for religion than to showcase how abduction and the pragmatic maxim allow one to inquire on metaphysical claims. I think Peirce would fully acknowledge it's weak evidence though. Peirce's own view on God was more a kind of fusion of what we might describe as Buddhism, elements of the platonism of late antiquity/stoicism, and Christianity - especially the trinity. To the things Mormons concern themselves with in terms of historic intervention he was more skeptical primarily because he didn't have evidence for it. (No personal revelation in Mormon terms) There's a page with a reasonably good writeup on Peirce on religion although it does assume some degree of familiarity with basic notions in his philosophy like his logic of vagueness.

My personal feeling is that while I think he gets at an aspect of the universe correctly, what he describes isn't God in the sense of the persons. It's much more the Spirit as aether of Orson Pratt's theology. However he does not seem to have had a religious experience and thus is caught up in the view of his peers of the era that the interventionist aspects of God are childish to believe in. But again (and he makes this explicit) this is due to what evidence he has, not how his philosophy would apply were he to have evidence.

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All I care about is how Peirce would explain the reality of the first vision. I think it is not possible for Peirce to have been LDS,  but Rorty was very close. 

Peirce would simply ask what the evidence for him to believe was. Lacking such evidence he would not believe. Which seems a very reasonable position to take.

While Rorty had positive feelings towards the Church, I'm not sure I'd say he was close. I believe both his kids left the Church as well, although I think that was primarily over social aspects of our theology like women and the priesthood and our position towards homosexuality - I'm not positive on that though. So far as I know his wife is still active though.

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Please show me how that works using quotes from Peirce, if you can.

That'll take a bit - I might write it up for T&S and just post a link there when done.

[mfbukowski]

On 4/25/2017 at 8:48 AM, clarkgoble said:

Right, I guess I'm just not sure where your views differ from Rorty. So Rorty is fine with qualia but severely limits what it does. So when I ask about what's beyond language I'm more asking for your views, not Rorty's. Just like while I'm influenced by Peirce, Heidegger and others there are plenty of places I think them wrong.

Yes although it was an idiosyncratic take somewhat. He has a rather famous "proof" for God in his "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God." It's mainly of worth less for religion than to showcase how abduction and the pragmatic maxim allow one to inquire on metaphysical claims. I think Peirce would fully acknowledge it's weak evidence though. Peirce's own view on God was more a kind of fusion of what we might describe as Buddhism, elements of the platonism of late antiquity/stoicism, and Christianity - especially the trinity. To the things Mormons concern themselves with in terms of historic intervention he was more skeptical primarily because he didn't have evidence for it. (No personal revelation in Mormon terms) There's a page with a reasonably good writeup on Peirce on religion although it does assume some degree of familiarity with basic notions in his philosophy like his logic of vagueness.

My personal feeling is that while I think he gets at an aspect of the universe correctly, what he describes isn't God in the sense of the persons. It's much more the Spirit as aether of Orson Pratt's theology. However he does not seem to have had a religious experience and thus is caught up in the view of his peers of the era that the interventionist aspects of God are childish to believe in. But again (and he makes this explicit) this is due to what evidence he has, not how his philosophy would apply were he to have evidence.

Peirce would simply ask what the evidence for him to believe was. Lacking such evidence he would not believe. Which seems a very reasonable position to take.

While Rorty had positive feelings towards the Church, I'm not sure I'd say he was close. I believe both his kids left the Church as well, although I think that was primarily over social aspects of our theology like women and the priesthood and our position towards homosexuality - I'm not positive on that though. So far as I know his wife is still active though.

That'll take a bit - I might write it up for T&S and just post a link there when done.

Thanks for the links

I found this highly relevant to the question at hand- 

Quote

“Real” is a word invented in the thirteenth century to signify having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not. Thus, the substance of a dream is not Real, since it was such as it was, merely in that a dreamer so dreamed it; but the fact of the dream is Real, if it was dreamed; since if so, its date, the name of the dreamer, etc. make up a set of circumstances sufficient to distinguish it from all other events; and these belong to it, i.e. would be true if predicated of it, whether A, B, or C Actually ascertains them or not. The “Actual” is that which is met with in the past, present, or future.

So visions are "real" as events but they do not have "properties" thus they have no "substance"

I think all he has in common with Rorty is some form of the pragmatic maxim, but the epistemology is still linked to correspondence whereas Rorty has deliberately given up correspondence- which is a characteristic of the twentieth century in all areas.  I fear Peirce is a bit old fashioned.

But in that brief quote I possibly see here a way to update his ideas and of course that would make them more like Rorty.  The first vision was an event and as such was a cultural phenomenon in language- a new way of seeing God was born that day, whatever it was.  Joseph's description of the vision was "real" because that description itself is a "fact" which happened in time and space.  OK I guess that works, pragmatically.

What it does not account for is that in my world time and space themselves are products of the human mind- they are the rules by which thought becomes possible- they are like the Kantian synthetic apriori.  I see what Kant calls the "synthetic a priori" as being part of the God given categories of experience that enable us to organize raw feels unorganized.

But that is not for this board- that's the real stuff

I think Peirce needed some eastern meditation in his life to know that not all experience is a sign pointing at something else.  The goal of meditation is exactly to make that point.

But I suppose that is neither here nor there and therefore not real  

I differ with Rorty on raw feels and the contingency of language if you want to know.  Also his politics but that is based on the contingency of the self which is based on the contingency of language.  I see a great contradiction in the notion of "Ironist"

As to what I believe- I think this description of Kant's philosophy from the SEP captures it entirely and perfectly, with the exception of the bolded words which I inserted

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He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that God given human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. Therefore, scientific knowledge, morality, and religious belief are mutually consistent and secure because they all rest on the same foundation of human autonomy, which is also the final end of nature according to the teleological worldview of reflecting judgment that Kant introduces to unify the theoretical and practical parts of his philosophical system.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/

Of course Kant only partially pulled this off and created other problems.

But Rorty comes closer- and a lot closer for me than Peirce who still has too much Aristotle in him for my taste

It is that Germanic vision that our understanding of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience BEGIN in human understanding, is what Peirce misses and frankly becomes the center of Phenomenology

History lesson not required in your response.

 

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, mfbukowski said:

So visions are "real" as events but they do not have "properties" thus they have no "substance"

Not quite sure what you're saying here. The medieval debate between Scotus and his follower with Ockham and his followers over nominalism was the question of the reality of properties independent of minds. More or less it's getting at the point that for Ockham things like blue don't exist independent of me mentally associating blue things. So there are no properties of blueness independent of things that have properties. So to say that visions have no properties or substance is to say they are fictions with no connection to real world events outside of the mind. 

Relative to our discussion though the event of a vision has to include not just the mental phenomena of the vision but it's causal history. So the debate really is over the cause of the vision and what it represents.

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I think all he has in common with Rorty is some form of the pragmatic maxim, but the epistemology is still linked to correspondence whereas Rorty has deliberately given up correspondence- which is a characteristic of the twentieth century in all areas.  I fear Peirce is a bit old fashioned.

As I said there's a certain kind of correspondence but it's the correspondence of object to interpretant in a sign and not the correspondence of internal representation to external reality. So it's significantly different from Descartes'. 

Epistemologically it's different too since the issue isn't correspondence in mind between representation and reality but inquiry and reality imposing stability on beliefs. I'm not sure I'd call this old fashioned since effectively it's the same as Derrida's epistemology - again I'd point to the interview at the end of Limited Inc there. (Page 150 is the key passage) Effectively I'd say Peirce's conception is more Nietzschean and is the selection by greater powers. Derrida makes a big deal of that relative to his own views while denying the common relativist or nihilist interpretation of his views on matters like truth, reference, or so forth. So I'd argue he was ahead of his time and more radical than even Nietzsche.

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What it does not account for is that in my world time and space themselves are products of the human mind- they are the rules by which thought becomes possible- they are like the Kantian synthetic apriori.  I see what Kant calls the "synthetic a priori" as being part of the God given categories of experience that enable us to organize raw feels unorganized.

I'd distinguish between what I'd call the Idea in the Kantian sense (which I actually don't buy) and the things represented. Put an other way, even Kantians make a distinction between space and time as the synthetic a priori that enables thought and the structures within the universe described by physics. They might say space/time as substance in itself is the ultimate reference and unknowable. But they'd still make a distinction between the two.

An obvious argument against equating the two is that the Kantian categories are different from the non-euclidean conception of space time that physicists hold.

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I differ with Rorty on raw feels and the contingency of language if you want to know.

It is that Germanic vision that our understanding of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience BEGIN in human understanding, is what Peirce misses and frankly becomes the center of Phenomenology

That's helpful. I'm not sure such things are ultimately necessary for our discussion, but I'll avoid critiquing along those lines.

I should note that Peirce starts with Kant but rejects the notion of the in-itself and then turns the categories into his trichotomy or logic. So there's only three irreducible categories that structure everything. So I don't think Peirce misses this but rather it's key to his philosophy. And phenomenology is very important in his thought. But I'll avoid the history unless anyone else wants to hear it. <grin>

[Ahab]

21 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

...But I'll avoid the history unless anyone else wants to hear it. <grin>

You're doing a fine job, I think, of explaining what you are talking about and I don't see much need for the history involved in developing these ideas as long as you continue to try to be clear about what you are talking about.

From what I have gathered so far that seems to be what philosophy is all about, anyway, with language as the tool for communicating ideas to other people.

May the force be with you.

[clarkgoble]

1 hour ago, Ahab said:

You're doing a fine job, I think, of explaining what you are talking about and I don't see much need for the history involved in developing these ideas as long as you continue to try to be clear about what you are talking about.

Thanks. I always worry in these discussions of either explaining too much and coming off as pedantic and patronizing or not explaining enough so people think you're just speaking mumbo jumbo no one can follow.

[Ahab]

16 minutes ago, clarkgoble said:

Thanks. I always worry in these discussions of either explaining too much and coming off as pedantic and patronizing or not explaining enough so people think you're just speaking mumbo jumbo no one can follow.

I'm not as familiar with philosophical terms as much as you are but I know how to use Google to try to figure things out. Still, though, if you could use simple terms as much as you can, I would appreciate it.