Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
(i) A consistent world view and a methodical search for exhaustive answers.
(ii) If you start from scratch on this topic, there’s no short answer.
(iii) I hope a Jew that is open about it answers this some day. Until then we non-Jews can only wonder about it.
(iv) Randism. A sidepoint.
So you think there MIGHT be a sensus jewinatus? You’re keeping an open mind on that matter?
That’s a pretty seriously freaky thing to say.
I think of Dynamical System Theory as “an area of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex dynamical systems, usually by employing differential equations or difference equations.” I believe this mathematics can be used to model the whole brain, subsystems of the brain, even individual neurons.
But is seems to me that phrases like ” massively complex self-organizing dynamical system” could apply to any model of a living brain which includes time as part of the model. You can find such models in most types of theories, although GOFAI and some forms of connectionism don’t do a good job of capturing the time constraints of living, embodied brains.
As another example, The Phenomenological Mind* says that “according to the dynamical systems approach to neuroscience, the neural activation that underlies experiences is not localized to a specific brain area, but involves {…] widely distributed areas”
That makes sense to me, but it seems to be more in keeping with general models of conscious like Global Workspace, and not with the use of a specific mathematical DST model.
So it seems to me there are two senses in which “dynamical systems” can be used; it’s is important to distinguish them, I believe.
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* I got this book after you recommended Gallagher on a phenomenology which was open to considering neursoscience. I’m getting a lot of out it so far. It’s the first writing on phenomenology I’ve tried that explains its technical terms well enough for me. Usually, I get lost quickly, being unfamiliar with any of them.
But do the vehicles of conscious mental process lie outside the brain.*
There are good arguments for a Clark/Chalmers extended-mind model where the vehicles of unconscious mental processes can lie outside the brain, but I believe even he balks at applying that model to conscious processes.
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* I’m assuming you will allow me to use vehicle versus content, even thought the terms are usually associated with representations. I think I can find a analog for a DST models, if you think that is important to the argument.
My view, as a mathematician, is that almost anything is a dynamical system. So I see the dynamical system idea as too broad to be useful.
I agree, which is why I don’t think the phrase on its own is very helpful. And adding “complex” or “self-organizing” does not make it usefully more specific, I think.
Mathematical DST is useful if you provide a specific mathematical model that can be tested, eg the Hodgkins Huxley neuron model or even the finger-twiddling phase model, beloved among DST enthusiasts in the radical enactivist camp (at least, among the few I have read and their commenters).
BruceS,
Yes, we are pretty much in agreement over dynamic systems theory.
Can we take up the discussion of dynamical systems theory and neuroscience over in the reality and realism thread? I’m very interested in this, but this thread is getting over-crowded.
Or I can start a new post that collects what I’ve been learning lately from Margolis, Dreyfus/Taylor’s Retrieving Realism, and Clark’s Surfing Uncertainty.
Whichever works for you, KN. I’d be interested in such an OP, if you wanted to write it.
I’m hoping to start the Clark book next week and read in it concert with Gallagher/Zahavi.
Man, I cannot wait until I retire . . .
🙂
You guys read so fast!
Don’t you realize there are football games on?
I was sitting with Gallagher 2 eves ago. (Zahavi’s people were there too.) He agreed with my conference comment to him on the lack of complexity in ‘philosophy of mind’, extended mind & cognition in context of broader social sciences and humanities.
Clark’s as flat as KN, or more so. ‘Happy’ TA/SZ escapism.
It is hard to understand why people wish to dud their lives, thud, reduce, shrink their character. Go ‘skeptic,’ go secular, escape difficult reality.
Gregory,
I find this comment a bit difficult to understand, but at least it contributes to the conversation — and thank you for that!
It’s probably true that philosophers of mind should think about culture, sociology, politics, and economics as much as they do about neuroscience. Ray Brassier develops the contrast in terms of the “supra-personal” (the social sciences) and the “sub-personal” (neuroscience). And of course neither the supra-personal nor the subpersonal really makes any sense without a coherent grasp on the personal as well. Certainly the preference for neuroscience over sociology in philosophy of mind rests on some highly dubious philosophical assumptions.
I think that’s beginning to change, though, as quite a few philosophers are starting to work on collective intentionality. Collective intentionality is quite interesting to me, actually, because Tomasello argues — and I think he’s right about this — that the capacity to engage in collective intentionality makes possible language and culture, and in effect is what distinguishes human cognition from the cognition of all other animals.
So if that’s what you were getting at, I quite agree. But if that’s not what you were getting at, then I’m puzzled as to what you meant.
Similarly, I never understand what “flat” means in this idiom, or what the metaphors “horizontal” and “vertical” really mean. I have my own sense of those metaphors but I never know if we’re using these words the same way.
So what, precisely, does “flat” mean you say that Clark’s views are “flat”?
I have my doubts. But if it’s true, I’m surprised you didn’t just ask him what church his parents took him to when he was little. That seems all you’re capable of here in the question department. Of course you were in suck up mode there, so you’d be a little different. But still.
What would you do — IT? Does it count as retirement if you still do philosophy?
Well, I did say start the book. It will take me some time to finish it. I have to take notes, else I forget it almost immediately. With notes, it takes at least a few days.
I’d take up painting and farming. I’d still philosophize as a way of life but I wouldn’t keep up with reading and writing professional philosophy.
And from what KN has shown so far, he has no “coherent grasp on the personal.” Mixed up, confused, self-contradictory, against his childhood ‘faith’ and religious roots, hiding behind sophistic diversions. Not actually a lover of truth.
No, you’d likely still promote philosophistry, atheism and ultimate despair. Ask a new rabbi about it. That’s your chosen ‘religious language’ so far. Feeling ‘good’ and comfortable about your atheism is merely a personal trauma, explicit or implicit.
Except that when we talk spirituality, you require that it not be something “biologically impossible”. Isn’t your own preference for neuroscience in your own philosophy of mind highly dubious? Of course not, because it’s yours…
I’m tired of your inconsistency. You win.
But I do not prefer neuroscience more than sociology in philosophy of mind. The inconsistency is due to your misreading what I said.
What I said was:
Firstly, that view is perfectly consistent with also thinking that cognitive science should take sociology more seriously than it does, especially in light of recent work in extended cognition and collective intentionality. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that draws on psychology, artificial intelligence and computer theory, neuroscience, and linguistics. Incorporating sociology into that interdisciplinary framework strikes me as a very good idea.
Secondly, it would be a problem only if sociologists themselves posited anything biologically impossible in their explanations of human behavior. Since they don’t — at least not according to the many sociologists I know — there’s no inconsistency here.
I’m not interested in “winning” anything. I participate in TSZ for exactly one reason: I’m interested in polite, civil, reasonable conversation with very intelligent, educated people. I’m not interested in anything more than that. We had a very productive (I thought) exchange of views about the PSR a few months ago and I was hoping to have a similarly productive exchange about how religious language differs from assertional language.
As far as I’m concerned, we can still have that conversation. It’s true that I objected to the phrase “sensus divinatis”, but that’s really because I objected to the conception of mindedness that operates as background to that idea.
I really do want to discuss with you the feeling or experience of transcending one’s ego, and how our interpretations of that experience generate texts (and interpretations of those texts) different from the kinds of descriptions and explanations that one finds in science or in history.
If that’s simply not what you’re interested in discussing, that’s fine with me. There is no winning, and there is no losing.
At least, not on a discussion board. 😉
Because, of course, humanism without religion is — what? — impossible? incoherent? foolish? _______? There’s a lot of innuendo here but no argument. There’s not even a clearly defined thesis that anyone could argue for or against.
I’m impressed. That’s a lot of long-distance mind-reading for someone who’s never met me in person. I’m surprised someone as telepathic as you isn’t working for the government, or making a lot of money in casinos.
Apart from the last sentence, I agree with that.
Right. But to underscore: I deny sensus divinitatis because I reject the conception of the mind on which it seems to rest, according to which the mind consists of two distinct capacities: a capacity for taking in sense-data and a capacity for judging those sense-data.
I do think that there is both “receptivity” and “spontaneity” (to use the Kantian language) but I do not think that receptivity is best understood in terms of sense-data and I do not think that spontaneity is best understood in terms of intellectual judgment.
Instead, I think that there is a kind of pre- or proto-conceptual spontaneity at the level of bodily engaged coping as well as the full-blooded spontaneity of conceptual reflection. Receptivity, on this view, consists of the play of energies across an animal’s sensory receptors — but it has already been infused with bodily spontaneity by the time we get to anything like sensory consciousness.
That’s why I have severe reservations about sensus divinitatis as a concept for understanding spiritual experience. It’s not a reservation about spiritual experience itself.
Cognitive science is relevant for understanding how experience is causally realized in animals and humans (which is not to deny, of course, that language and culture give humans a range of cognitive abilities that non-humans animals lack). Whether cognitive science is relevant for understanding spiritual experience is, by my lights, an open question worthy of investigation.
The cognitive system is embodied, in that a properly functioning cognitive system is a properly functioning body of a living animal embedded in a physical environment. The acquisition of culture and true language transforms the minded animal into a truly rational animal, embedded in both physical and social environments.
My point was that if we are going to introduce posited entities that have no place in any of the empirical sciences in order to do justice to the description of lived experience, we will need extremely compelling reasons to do so.
I’m also interested in truth. But I don’t see any alternative to empirical science for determining what is true or false with regard to contingent (non-necessary), and even our knowledge of necessary reality is itself going to be contingent on the logical system we use to determine that knowledge. The role of phenomenology — first-person descriptions of lived experience — is an indispensable starting-point for philosophical and even scientific inquiry, but until we actually engage in empirical inquiry, we won’t be in any secure position to know what aspects of experience are real and what aspects aren’t. Neither metaphysics nor epistemology can be done wholly a priori.
This is pretty much the only thing I am interested in discussing. It’s the single most important topic in my opinion. However:
What’s the problem with mindedness? What kind of mindedness are you talking about?
We have to get to the bottom of your objection to sensus divinitatis, because in my view there’s no interpretation without that which interprets. The other option is the reductionist thesis that “Reality is out there,” implying that the perceiver of reality is somehow less real, ignorable.
I thought I made that clear — I was objecting to your conception of mindedness in which the mind has two distinct capacities, “the senses” and “the intellect”. I’ve given my objections to that conception many times, including here
It was never my intention to downplay the role that the perceiver and interpreter plays in how she experiences and understands reality. (On the other hand, I do think that once we do play careful attention to how embodiment and culture contribute to the construction of experience, that is going to undermine most forms of realism.)
My intention was strictly limited to an objection to the idea of a sensus divinitatis, which I had been understanding as the idea that spiritual experience is best understood in analogy with an empiricist’s conception of sense-perception.
By my lights, it is more intuitive to think of spiritual experience as a “how” of experience rather than a “what” of experience — if you will, more about the felt quality of consciousness than about the intentional object of thought.
On the one hand:
On the other:
Looks like you’re saying that the experience exists, but that which experiences.
So the quality of consciousness is there, only it’s something like unintentional? Why so? And how do you know, if it’s not an object of thought?
This sentence was meant to be Looks like you’re saying that the experience exists, but that which experiences doesn’t.
After all this discussion, my impression that you are deliberately obfuscating has only strengthened. Even though the spiritual experience is not supposed to be a “what” you demand that we talk about it in biologically grounded terms while at the same time you admit that the neuroscience of e.g. meditation has barely begun. In other words, you like to be messy and confused, never straight and clear. You hate things that can be known with certainty and you love to stray in random directions where things are known to be unknowable.
I don’t have strength to type full sentences anymore. You win.
Erik,
To be honest: since your responses and questions indicate very little comprehension of what I actually say, I don’t see the point of further dialogue between us on this topic either.
I have a fair understanding of what you are saying, but I have absolutely no understanding why you are saying it. For example, why insist on some biological connection to spiritual experience? Particularly when it’s an empirically unstudied ground and therefore there’s nothing useful to say about it. I can see it only as a deliberate attempt on your part to avoid the actual topic while otherwise you’re trying to convince me as if you were interested in it.
At this point, you can believe whatever you want about me. I don’t care. I’m tired of explaining myself over and over. You win.
I wish you had explained yourself. Sneaking the same problems in through the next backdoor when I already identified the problems and explained why they are problems isn’t an explanation. Explanations answer why questions. If not, then we differ on what an explanation is. In fact, I’m pretty sure we differ on this point. This would explain a lot.
Religious language has levels of interpretation where literal versus spiritual is the first baby-step distinction. After all these pages, I can conclude that nobody here is able or willing to operate with this distinction. You, KN, showed most interest in it, but you do your best to shun actual commitment to it. This means shunning the understanding of the actual purpose and nature of spiritual interpretation.
Lacking commitment to methodical analysis allows you to speculate all over the place in endless circles. I see this with all topics we discuss – speculation is good, conclusions are bad. Problems are fun, solutions are dangerous. This has frustrated me with the so-called pragmatists before. Pragmatism is the least pragmatic school of philosophy I have seen in practice. It’s about as bad as postmodernism.
Consider the possibility that others (certainly I) don’t see much of a distinction between naïve literalism and sophisticated apologetics other than the number and length of words employed.
Though I have, on spotting a few references to Ed Feser by Vincent Torley at Uncommon Descent, been interested enough to look back in at Feser’s blog. I have enjoyed how the commenter, Vaal, has made mincemeat of the regulars there.
I personally think obscurity is inversely proportional to content.
I think the world record for content to word count ratio is held by Watson and Crick in their announcement of the DNA structure. It’s not even particularly difficult to read.
Exactly.
There’s a reason why normal people laugh at so-called sophisticated theology. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Until they can show me that there are any real angels then why wouldn’t I laugh at their self-serious aggrandizement. You’d actually have to be quite naive to take them seriously.
Yes, Erik, this is an analogy for any and all of your supposedly sophisticated “interpretations” of religious texts. As you have always shown, any non-literal explanation is either 1) outright mistaken (ice age instead of Flood, anyone?) or 2) angels-on-pin level fantasy. Dressing it up in university-level vocabulary doesn’t make it any more likely to be real.
Sure, I’m happy to say that makes me shallow. Ignorant. Whatever. Better than being deep in the deepity shit of spologetics. Do feel free to drown yourself in it al you like.
Interesting comment, but the two paragraphs have no meaningful connection. Vaal does not provide any grounds for viewing apologetics as naive literalism. At best (worst, really) he says, in the three consecutive comments that you linked to, that he agrees with some of the criticisms of religion by Harris and Coyne. Those criticisms he doesn’t identify, so I have no idea what he had in mind. But he surely didn’t have in mind the way Christians do apologetics. His statements endorse the way Harris and Coyne do counter-apologetics, while he says nothing about the way Christians do apologetics.
And all this has nothing to do with anything I have said in this thread. I am not doing Christian apologetics. For example, in support of the flood story in Genesis, I have mentioned flood stories in other cultures and scriptures. The flood stories in other cultures and scriptures vary wildly from the flood story in Genesis. So, am I supporting the idea that the flood story historically happened precisely as Genesis tells it?
I have been saying this for pages now, and nobody understood this very simple point. And nobody understands it now either, even though there’s nothing sophisticated and nothing apologetic about it.
ETA: What would be interesting to see from you, is a full-blown explication of how sophisticated apologetics directly stems from and is easily recognisable as naive literalism.
Erik,
Are you? You previously said that it was an historical event. You could still man up and answer the question directly.
Thanks for proving my point, Patrick, yet again.
No hope of any basic understanding here.
ETA: I will answer as soon as you have an actual basis for asking the question, i.e. as soon as you show that you have understood what I said and that you are interested in dialogue. But as things stand, this translates to Never.
FWIW, here is my understanding of how it can be historical without being a news report style of historical (ie interpreted as a literally true report).
The historical analysis of the biblical flood starts by understanding how Babylonian text is based on actual catastrophic floods which occurred in Mesopotamia. The next step in the history is to undertand that the Hebrews learned of this folklore during their exile in Babylonia.
The conclusion of this analysis is that the biblical flood is indirectly but still historically rooted in Mesopotamian floods
Erik,
The rules of this site are to assume other participants are commenting in good faith. I assure you that I am genuinely interested in understanding your position. You’re not making it easy.
You made this statement about the biblical flood:
However, you evade answering the simple questions of when it occurred and if there were at one point in the past only eight humans alive on the planet. Then you blame me for not understanding you.
Say what you mean and have the intellectual courage to make your claims clear. Don’t blame other people for your inability or refusal to communicate effectively.
Erik, I’m sure everyone here has noted that you regularly respond to people saying that you are wrong or have contradicted yourself in some post with these “Well this just proves you’re a dope, so I’m taking my ball, going home, and never playing with the likes of you again” posts.
I mean, you don’t actually ever do that–I guess such posts aren’t meant to be taken literally, but spiritually (or something)–but they still seem pretty immature, and, in any case, are unlikely to convince anybody anywhere that you’re correct about whatever you’ve said that has become the subject of criticism.
If you can reply to the criticism, then I think you ought to do so. But if you really don’t want to reply, well then, don’t reply. But these “I’m never speaking to you again!” posts are not only pointless, but have also been unfailingly false.
BruceS,
Either it really happened or it didn’t. I’m just trying to understand what Erik is claiming about reality.
And I’m sure if Erik actually wanted to say something coherent and clearly comprehensible in response to that simple question, he could do so. But he prefers his enigma foxtrots.
The reporting was fake but accurate?
petrushka,
The Old Testament was The Onion of antiquity? That explains a bit.
I agree with Walto’s previous on Erik’s approach to posting. So I’m just giving how I read him.
In answer to questions like “Is the text to be taken literally when it says ‘8 people’ survived?”, Erik says something like “well, yes, the text does literally say that” (all paraphrases). Which I take as a hint on his estimation of the worth of the question and so an explanation of why he won’t directly respond.
I’m not saying I agree with that oblique style of posting. But that is how I read him.
It actually doesn’t help to ask it this way though:
In fact, no rewording helps. That’s key here, I think.
BruceS,
That’s not the claim I’m talking about (and I disagree that it explains his evasions). If Erik were just discussing the content of the story there would be no issue. However, he claimed that “Anyway, of course it occurred. The Bible has been found historically reliable.” It is not unreasonable to ask for clarification prior to further discussion of that claim.
Part of the problem here is that Erik means something different by “literal meaning” than everyone else here. For Erik, “literal meaning” means “what a text actually says” — as distinct from, for example, what you think a text says or should say. Reading slowly and carefully is an art of its own.
It is true, and I think unfortunate, that Erik has indicated that the Bible is “historically reliable”. I think this is unfortunate because he has not committed himself to any criteria of “reliability.” Since he has not committed himself to any explicit criteria, it seems natural enough to suppose that someone who says “the Bible is historically reliable” means “all or most of the events narrated in the Bible actually happened more or less as described in the Bible”.
That’s very different from what Erik seems to be explicitly committed to — for example, we talked about whether the end of the Ice Ages could have caused local floods that inspired myths about a global flood. And there could be something to that — who knows? But that gives us a much weaker claim, namely that “at least some of the episodes narrated in the Bible were loosely based on orally transmitted myths and stories inspired by actual events”.
I’d be willing to strengthen that a tad — it stands to reason that the Bible is closer to historical accuracy as we get closer to the events it narrates. Noah’s Flood could have been a story passed down over the generations, but the stories about David and Solomon were likely written down within a generation or so, if not by a contemporary. But of course that leaves plenty of room for the writer to elaborate however he or she saw fit, in the interests of his or her ideological biases and political perspective. I imagine the same point could be made about the New Testament as well.
KN, I would be happy if Eric or someone would just explain what spiritual truths are derived from the flood story.
My take is, do whatever the Big Guy says, or he’ll have a tantrum and kill everybody.
Then possibly have a crying jag when he regrets it.
Since the lesson obviously didn’t take, one could assume the Big Guy lacked prescience. Which kind of nullifies any tendency to respect Him.