What does "metaphysics," the word and the idea, mean?

Jack Leissring, Santa Rosa, CA

Common Definition: Metaphysics is a type of philosophy or study that uses broad concepts to help define reality and our understanding of it. Metaphysical studies generally seek to explain inherent or universal elements of reality which are not easily discovered or experienced in our everyday life.

JCL: What does "broad concepts" mean? How can one explain things that are not experienced in everyday life? What do philosophers mean by reality? What elements, then, are inherent in or universally present in 'reality,?'

Why is metaphysics important in philosophy? Metaphysics is a fundamental and indispensable branch of philosophy that is mainly concerned with the nature of reality in life. It's centered on the "what is?" question and as such seeks to explain everything in existence as well as dissect it.

Why bother with metaphysics when we have science? Science can only exist in an ordered, patterned world, and it is argued that the core aim of the metaphysics of science is to investigate the nature of that order. Specifically, in our world this order consists in lawhood, causation, natural kind hierarchies, and possibly a structure of emergent levels of being.

Is that really an answer? Those aspects of science necessary to its employ are concerned with knowledge; knowledge depends upon the 'ontology,' that is to say the aspects of knowledge that tell us what it means to know something.

Do we need metaphysics in science? Beyond Matter: Why Science Needs Metaphysics: Trigg, Roger ... Trigg claims that the foundations of science themselves have to lie beyond science. It takes reasoning apart from experience to discover what is not yet known and this metaphysical reasoning to imagine realities beyond what can be accessed.

JCL: This sounds like Ca Ca

It seems to me that all this babble about metaphysics lies in an arena of imaginary fable; what might be called "fictional science." After Ayer wrote his thesis: "Language, Truth and Logic," he was seriously dismissed by the dominant academics of the time. (The word dominant is properly chosen, for it implies the nature of being within academic circles, in essence, it is the 'ontology' of academic groups, or fundamentally, it is group think.) It was the gentle R. G. Collingwood whose book "An Essay on Metaphysics," tended to calm the waters a bit in 1940; it offered advice about how a metaphysical idea might lead to real knowledge (as opposed to possible or potential or hoped for or wished for or artistic or . . . non-knowledge). Collingwood's important solution was to define a metaphysical idea as being the manifestation of the users' "absolute presuppositions." This means to me the user's beliefs or prejudices; it thus fits into the proposals of Quine and Ullian1 as part of the 'web of belief' that constitutes common human nature. What metaphysics boils down to is a kind of "hope." It is the hopeful ideation that such and such a belief is true. Yet one cannot hope something into existence, neither prayer nor wish are causal forces.

Metaphysics (as a human activity/pursuit/belief) reflects a fundamental ignorance of what it means to know something. To understand knowing we can return to the Vienna Circle philosophers and to Moritz Schlick.2 Schlick in his text: "A General Theory of Knowledge" carefully analyses the necessary elements that constitute knowledge as it was understand in 1918. There is abundant rhetorical propaganda amongst philosophers which aims at promoting individual ideas and dismissing those of others. Philosophers are like club members, choosing a category of philosophy as a specialty spending their academic lives convincing others. Such a specialization implies a certain rigidity. Hanna (in 2023) asks rhetorically if philosophers can change their minds. 3 Also see below. On an everyday level we could expand that question to humanity in general, not only philosophers. Can anyone have his/her mind changed? My father's dictum was in the form of doggerel: "a man convinced against his will remains of the same opinion still." He was a lawyer and thus realized the problems he faced in court cases. Other barristers, such as Owen Barfield have expanded that understanding by writing about the effects of language on behavior and human understanding,4 whereas Wittgenstein made that function the center of his philosophical life.

Discoveries made in the past several decades concerning the nature of mind and cognition must be made not only a part of philosophy but its starting point. The studies of cognitive neuroscience tell us increasingly the functional aspects of the mind and mind/body. For example, it is found that studies of split brain patients reveal a functional element, apparently located in the left hemisphere of the brain, that acts as an interpreter of the data gathered by the input functions of the mind/brain. In the "Interpreter,"5,6 is found empirical evidence for the metaphysical speculation of Ron Smotherman, a psychiatrist, who asserts that the (teleological) purpose of the mind is to be right!7 The implicit function of this "interpreter" is to rationalize the inputs (what the body sees, hears, feels) in such a way that the world view of the brain, the person, is retained. It is possible to infer such a strong purpose in the brains and minds of those who hang onto a belief system so fully that they are sometimes willing to kill the body that supports this brain.

Why exists, this world view that I have so deeply entrenched? I suppose that it is 88 years of experience in the world. Specific experiences concern the nature of my professional career. It was essential for me as a pathologist to know how the body works, how to recognize deviations from 'normal.' It required that I have a deeper than usual knowing about the meaning of 'normal.' When called upon to make a diagnosis, it became necessary that I be "right" about my judgement. And, through this mechanism, it became clear that philosophy, the philosophy of knowing, was,indeed, the underlying foundation of the science I was practicing. Thus it was crucial that I, as a first cause, understood what it meant to know something. The essence of this meaning is described in Moritz Schlick's book: "A General Theory of Knowledge." Schlick first published it in 1918, and It was in 1964 when teacher and physicist Richard Feynman succinctly defined the nature of scientific knowing and, by implication, "knowledge:"

TRIAL AND ERROR "In general, we look for a new physical law by the following process. First we guess it. Then compute the consequences of the guess to what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is—if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.That is all there is to it. It is true one has to check a little to make sure that it is wrong, because whoever did the experiment may have reported incorrectly, or there may have some feature in the experiment that was not noticed, some dirt or something; or the man computed the consequences, even though it may have been the one who made the guesses, could have made some mistake in the analysis.

You can see, of course, that with this method, we can attempt to disprove any definite theory. If we have a definite theory, a real guess, from which we can conveniently compute consequences that can be compared with experiment, then in principle we can get rid of any theory. There is always the possibility of proving any definite theory wrong; but notice that we can never prove it right. Suppose that you invent a good guess, calculate the consequences, and discover every time that the consequences you have calculated agree with experiment. The theory is then right? No, it is simply not proved wrong. In the future you could compute a wider range of consequences, there could be a wider range of experiments, and you might then discover that the thing is wrong. That is why laws like Newton’s laws for the motion of planets last such a long time. He guessed the law of gravitation, calculated all kinds of consequences for the system and so on, compared them with experiment—and it took several hundred years before the slight error of the motion of Mercury was observed. During all that time, the theory had not been proved wrong, and could be taken temporarily to be right. But it could never be proved right. . ." (Ithaca, N. Y, 1964)

For many years it was the belief of most physicians that the cause of gastrointestinal ulcer disease was psychological, was worry, was deeply associated with psychological states. While no one had taken the Feynman pathway to prove this experimentally or to test it empirically, this was the dominant theory for most of my early days in medicine. This theory extended well into past medical lore. Then someone "discovered" something that had been there all along: a bacterium which, although present in biopsies of the duodenal and gastric mucosa, had not been "noticed." In short it was an "Emperor's New Clothes," phenomenon--the dominant figures in anatomic pathology did not "see" it until it was pointed out by a brave observer. It has now been made clear that indeed ulcer disease is largely due to infection by this bacterium.

And, so it goes.

This brings me to a further discussion of philosophy. I could raise a simple accusation that philosophy--as in every other coalesced or categorized study--is trapped by its own belief system, its world view, its accepted factoids or truthiness. This is obvious, for it is simply another aspect of humanity; humans behave like this. If we ask what a philosopher means, we are faced with the question: what does the philosopher mean by the words s/he uses?Let us examine the idea of speaker's meaning (or writer's meaning) promoted by Owen Barfield in his book and lecture series: "Speaker's Meaning:"4

"Here [examining the word 'supper'] you have a simple example of how the difference between the lexical meaning and a particular speaker’s meaning (even in ordinary humdrum human intercourse) may become a source of agonizing confusion, and even perhaps contention. Why? Because it has been the cause of imperfect communication. How much more will that be so in the case of words much less easy to define than “supper.”

Now it is upon this all-important distinction between the speaker’s intention and the “word’s force,” or between the speaker’s meaning and the lexical meaning (regarded as a source of imperfect communication), that linguistic analysis has exercised most of its agility. One could say that, in so far as linguistic analysis has a “purpose” or “aim,” its aim is to eliminate that discrepancy wherever possible and thus to bring about a more accurate communication between human minds (or perhaps it would be safer to say between human organisms). As a help toward this, we ought to be very careful how we talk about words “having” meanings at all. Words do not contain meanings as a cigarette box contains cigarettes and linguistic analysis points out that the so-called meaning of a word or sentence is simply the way in which it is used, or that language means what it is normally used to mean. That is a healthy reminder. We may perhaps feel that some linguistic philosophers overestimate the simple-mindedness of the rest of us in these matters; but their basic approach is helpful. The actual meaning of a word must be regarded as a kind of habit, the normal habit of contemporary people when they speak or write; and a good dictionary will contain the best way possible of recording or describing that habit. The lexical meaning of a word is a kind of norm. But of course that does not dispose of all our difficulties ; no good analyst would maintain that it does. One difficulty, of which I myself am very aware, is that of determining what is to be considered a “wrong” or “mistaken” use of language. Of course the criterion may be simple enough in any particular case. A wrong use of language must be any departure from the norm. If today, for example, I used the word “officious” in the way it was used two hundred years ago, intending to imply helpfulness or charity,6 I should be using it wrongly. The difficulty arises when the mistaken use is said to be widespread, or even universal—because (by definition) the most widespread use of language constitutes the norm and is therefore its “right” meaning. Can everybody make the same linguistic mistakes? Or, can any group of speakers of the same language make the same mistakes and go on making them from generation to generation? My own answer here would be no. From the criterion of “normal usage” it must follow that whatever illusions our ancestors may all have shared, these illusions cannot have arisen from a mistaken use of language. The question might even seem an unnecessary one, if it were not for the fact that a mistaken use of language is just what linguistic analysis appears to maintain that almost everybody has been making almost all the time. Possibly there is some analytical answer to this puzzle; indeed I think I have encountered some attempts at them, but I have never found any that satisfied. However, all I really want to suggest now is that the lexical meanings of words (that is, the ways in which they are being used at any given time) is clearly such an intricate and subtle matter that it needs, for full comprehension, a historical approach to supplement the analytical or empirical one. It is a historical fact that those elusive norms we loosely call “meanings” are involved in a constant process of change. It would moreover not be very difficult to demonstrate that all mental progress (and, arising from that, all material progress) is brought about in association with those very changes. One can go further and say that the changes are made possible precisely by that discrepancy between an individual speaker’s meaning and the current, or lexical, meaning.“If some speaker’s meaning,” says Lewis in the book already referred to, “becomes very common, it will in the end establish itself as one of the word’s meanings; this is one of the ways in which semantic ramification comes about.” He goes on to take the simple example of the word “furniture”: “For thousands of Englishmen today the word furniture has only one sense—a (not very easily definable) class of domestic movables. And doubtless many people, if they should read Berkeley’s ‘all the choir of heaven and furniture of earth’, would take this use of furniture to be a metaphorical application of the sense they know—that which is to earth as tables and chairs and so forth are to a house. Even those who know the larger meaning of the word (whatever ‘furnishes’ in the sense of stocking, equipping or replenishing) would certainly admit ‘domestic movables’ as one of its senses. . . . But it must have become one of the word’s meanings by becoming a very common speaker’s meaning. Men who said ‘my furniture’ were often in fact, within that context, referring to their domestic movables. The word did not yet mean that; the y meant it. When I say ‘Take away this rubbish’ I usually ‘mean’ these piles of old newspapers, magazines, and Christmas cards. That is not what the word rubbish means. But if a sufficiently large number of people shared my distaste for that sort of litter, and applied the word rubbish to it often enough, the word might come to have this as one of its senses. So with furniture, which, from being a speaker’s meaning, has established itself so firmly as one of the word’s meanings that it has ousted all the others in popular speech.”

There you have an example of the speaker’s meaning interacting with the lexical meaning in a way that results in a certain contraction. It is however more the other kind of interaction—the kind that brings about an expansion of meaning (or a wider extension of the term), with which,as we shall see, our mental and material progress is especially associated. At the moment the point is that, one way or another (for there are other types of meaning change besides expansion and contraction), the norms themselves are continually changing. Somehow what was normal yesterday becomes abnormal today, and vice versa. Moreover the changes are sometimes so radical as to be enormous. They can even amount to a volte face. One example of this (which involves a glance forward to Chapter 4) would be the word “subjective.” Originally it was used to signify “existing or being in itself, or independently.” It was the existential predicate par excellence. Today it is used to denote the exact opposite: “existing, if at all, only in someone’s mind.” Moreover many common words cannot be said to have achieved a single semantic norm at all. An all too obvious example is the vocabulary of sociology and politics—words like “democracy,” “freedom,” “peace-loving,” “bourgeois.” But, quite apart from this special case (where there are axes to grind), ordinary educated language is full of such words. Thus, “natural” is sometimes used as if it meant “the opposite of human”; at other times “the opposite of artificial” and at other times again, “organic as distinct from inorganic”; at others yet again, “good rather than evil” or (in the theology of grace) “evil rather than good.” Finally there are not a few who would say that the word “nature” really signifies “all that is or happens, the whole show, the universe”—or just “everything”! Each of these conflicting norms has a traceable history of its own. It does seem that if we are interested in the meanings of words or in their normal usage at all, then, unless we are very incurious indeed, we shall want to know something of how these meanings were arrived at. We shall find something to interest us, for example, in the fifty pages of C. S. Lewis’s Studies in Words, which he actually devotes to all these different ways of using the word “nature,” and in which he traces, with care and erudition, the various ways in which a speaker’s meaning and a lexical meaning have interacted from time to time to bring abou tthe present state of affairs.

To sum up: the single phenomenon of the difference between these two aspects of meaning (lexical and speaker’s) is of importance to us in two very different ways: first, because it is an important key to the history of the human mind and human civilization; second, because it is a source of imperfect communication between human beings. It may seem odd perhaps that it should contrive to be both these things at one and the same time. Indeed it may sometimes appear that the study of language and of the nature of language from the semantic point of view is an impenetrable jungle. If so, we must either give up the study altogether or else we must try (to begin with) to cut at least one broad path through the jungle, by which we can then conduct our further operations. Here is one such path which I myself have found particularly useful, though it is not by any means the only possible starting point.

Language has two primary functions, one of which is expression and the other communication. They are not the only functions language performs, but they are both indispensable to its existence. The goal to which expression aspires, or the criterion by which it must be measured, is something like fullness or sincerity. The goal toward which communication aspires is accuracy. Both functions must be performed in some degree—and at the same time—otherwise there is no language at all. But the extent to which either function predominates over the other will vary greatly. To exemplify by extreme instances: when language is properly used to define the position of a ship at sea, you have a maximum of communication and a minimum of expression; and for that reason the communication can be very nearly perfect. It can achieve total accuracy. (It could of course be argued that things like that can be done even better without using language at all, by mathematics. But I see no objection to regarding mathematics as the terminus ad quern of a language aiming at perfect accuracy to the exclusion of all else. All that is in the domain of information theory.) At the opposite extreme a maximum of expression, with a minimum of communication, would occur in the case, let us say, of a poet, with a genuinely rich psyche, wide powers of observation, great emotional depth, etc., but who was nevertheless, unfortunately, a bad poet—so that few, if any, of his readers were led to share that observation and that emotion.

Here we get a glimpse of the true relation between the two functions. On the one hand they tend to be mutually exclusive; so that Expression could say to Communication, in the words of Alice’s Duchess, “The more there is of mine,the less there is of yours”; but on the other hand the relation is a dynamic rather than a quantitative one. This means that, though each of them is exclusive of, or counter to, the other, yet they are both concurrently necessary. They are, so to speak, “sweet enemies.” There is a tension, or polarity, between them. And it is in this polarity that the depths of language are to be found. The two functions conflict, but they also co-operate. You can say, if you like, that the concern of communication is with the how, whereas the concern of expression is with the what. Perfect communication would occur if all words had and retained identical meanings every time they were uttered and heard. But it would occur at the expense of expression. In the same way, perfect individual or personal expression can only be achieved at the expense of communication, or at all events, at the expense of accuracy in communication. It is not much use having a perfect means of communication if you have nothing to communicate except the relative positions of bodies in space—or if you will never again have anything new to communicate. In thesame way it is not much use expressing yourself very fully and perfectly indeed—if nobody can understand a word you are saying. I hope all this may have emphasized not simply the rather trite and obvious point that the instrument of language performs the double function of communication and expression,7 but the peculiar nature of the relation between those two functions—the relation, namely, of a polarity of contraries. A polarity of contraries is not quite the same as the coincidentia offositorum, which has been stressed by some philosophers, or as the “paradox” which (whether for the purposes of irony or for other reasons) is beloved by some contemporary writers and critics. A paradox is the violent union of two opposites that simply contradict each other, so that reason assures us we can have one or the other but not both at the same time. Whereas polar contraries (as is illustrated by the use of the term in electricity) exist by virtue of each other as well as at each other’s expense. For that very reason the concept of polarity cannot be subsumed under the logical principle of identity ; in fact, it is not really a logical concept at all, but one which requires an act of imagination to grasp it. Coleridge applied to it such terms as “projective unity” and “separative projection.” Unlike the logical principles of identity and contradiction, it is not only a form of thought, but also the form of life. It could perhaps be called the principle of seminal identity. It is also the formal principle which underlies meaning itself and the expansion of meaning.

5. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words. London and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1960.
6. As in Johnson’s poem on the death of his friend Levitt: “Officious, innocent, sincere. See Levitt to the grave descend!”
7. As Mr. Noam Chomsky has recently reminded us in Cartesian Linguistics (New York, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1966), recognition of the two functions is at least as old as the seventeenth century, besides being as modern as “generative grammar.” It appears in fact to be indispensable to any handlingof language that does not willfully shut its eyes to the fact and the problem of expansion of meaning.

I do not apologize for that rather long excursion into the writing and teaching of Barfield. I assert that in the pathway of understanding--knowledge, if you will--he is an important by-way and should be visited. He should be read and understood if one wishes to understand the language of any essay, historical writing or concept. The implication is that there is a flurry of change of meaning on-going at all times. The words we use, for whatever purpose, become somehow (I very much dislike this term) "normalized. That is to say they become part of the usage of groups of persons whose goal and meanings are not necessarily revealed or shared with the reader or listener. The "psychology' of rhetorical pronouncements can be studied and can be viewed from the Aristotelian (rhetorical) point of view initially to seek its usage in 'intention,' a desire to influence or some such goal. We might take the pathway leading from Freud to his nephew, Bernays and the birth of advertising influences. Ideas promoted by Bernays were clearly taken whole by the various media. The influences have been serious and the outcomes variable, ranging from extreme behavior, leading to widespread war and killing, to simple things like preference of one kind of soap over another in a grocery store.

Huxley took the point of view that exposure to conditioning formed the nature of society proposed in his novel: "Brave New World." (1932) Similarly, in 1949, Orwell made his novelistic warning in the book" Nineteen Eighty Four." It is an easy leap from Pavlov's dogs made to salivate at the sound of a bell to the shouting of Trumpers in our time:


Am I in serious error when I deduce from the writing of present day acolytes a kind of worship of long dead persons?The behavior resembles a kind of religion. I feel that it is important and preferable to have an open dialectic with another, in order to see what is being promoted. Instead, we commonly arrive at an imaginary understanding of the meaning of historical writing. Many words and meanings have changed over time; we may be completely off base when we claim understanding of the writing of another, long dead; there is no opportunity to have a one-on one interaction.

But, even beyond the impractical but desirable condition of discussion by two living persons, we are stuck with the meaning of words, and as Barfield shows, even if there exists a lexical definition of a word, we must eventually come to understand what the user of those words means or intends. The word "metaphysics" has been dragged around and changed since the days when A. J Ayer asserted it was a form of nonsense. I suggest you read Ayer's book and not accept the dismissal by self-serving academics.

Ouch! said these academics, each in their own understanding of the word. Well, we know (or have been taught) that the word Metaphysics originated as a title of an essay coming in time AFTER the essay titled "Physics." Thus its only meaning, at that time, was a title of a written pronouncement: Meta-physics (literally 'coming' After Physics). If you access Stanford's (on-line) commonly used lexical definition of philosophical words you will find this: "The word 'metaphysics' is notoriously hard to define." I claim that most of those who use the term have a fairly clear understanding of how THEY mean it, but in communicating this to others (each of whom has her own meaning) the process breaks into another form of nonsense. There is no sense being made. It becomes an arena where all of the talkers are Humpty Dumptys using words just as they choose to use them: "“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” "8

I wrote a little book about the "Mystique of Metaphysics," and even used that phrase as the title.9 Metaphysics must be a powerful word for it reappears often in philosophical writing and yet it is difficult to pin-down exactly what the user's meaning might be. For example, this academic's response to a critique of one of his essays:
"My view about formal & natural science is that scientists are every bit as likely to be conceptually confused as philosophers or ordinary folks for that matter: so, science plays no privileged role in the pursuit of knowledge, & is fully open to philosophical criticism & self-criticism.
Nevertheless, I also think that the proper method in philosophy is a triangulation of (i) formal & natural science, (ii) phenomenology, & (iii) classical philosophical methods like conceptual analysis, metaphysics & ontology, transcendental argument, etc.
Hence each element in the triangle plays an irreducible role, they all engage in mutual interplay & mutual criticism, & philosophical truth is the ideal outcome of that process."
This response appears full of good intentions and is supported by references. But the meanings, of formal and natural science, of phenomenology, of "classical" methods such as analysis of concepts, metaphysics, ontology and "transcendental" argument are not specified. So, I frankly do not know what the author might mean about differences and separations of formal from natural sciences, nor do I have a clear understanding of his meaning for phenomenology, classical methods, metaphysics nor transcendental argument. Thus I am in a real world dilemma an impasse where it becomes necessary to find and define or potentially non-over lapping magisteria (domains) [S. J. Gould]. There might exist such a large difference in meaning between those of the writer and those of me, the reader, that we might be discussing things that differ so completely that the outcome is silly and mutually incomprehensible.

If it were possible in an approach to "knowing," to separate from the whole--so to speak--say science from say philosophy or from say mathematics or physics or architecture or cooking or lip reading, then we are in a mutually separate and separable world view in which, depending upon interest, we become a mass of separated specialized groups each following its own pathway. Those who lean in the religio-spiritual direction create for themselves a rationally possible description of reality which is totally based in fable, wish and superstition. And, they can become satisfied with their explanation, as we know from the historical facts of the past 2000 years. But in so doing, they become the very subject of non-overlapping domains by establishing their belief in knowledge within a tightly defined sphere of shared beliefs--with no verification through testing. In fact they commonly claim a test to be the enemy of their foundational belief, which they call faith.

So by science I do not mean only those persons who call themselves scientists and who thereby group together as if in some sort of club or fraternal organization. I claim that the lexical meaning of the word "science" and its purpose, are the very same: to know, knowledge, knowing, what it means to know, what knowledge is. And it would be (and is) for this reason that it underlies everything. Thus it supports philosophy and, every field of endeavor there is. If you and I disagree on that we indeed share non-overlapping magisteria (domains) and further discussion becomes silly.

A few further observations concerning philosophical study. (See also above) I received from an academic philosopher, a professor at an important university, a thoughtful assessment of his self-imposed requirements for attainment of "philosophical truth." I have already approached his response and will not repeat my questions except to restate my concerns about meaning, speaker's or writer's meaning. It is clear (I hope ) that I have some degree of understanding of the meaning of the words used, and shown by my post-hoc analysis above, I do not really know what the professor's definitions are. I believe I am describing a common problem that influences all forms of dialogue. Albert North Whitehead suggested a descriptive phrase for specialties that depend upon each other for data. He called it “The Cross Sterilization of Disciplines,” "The bolstering up of arguments in one field with doubtful and imperfectly understood inferences made from another." In this present essay, which probably arose from my concerns about how professional philosophers use their words, specifically the word "metaphysics," I am playing the role of the scientist who is having a dialog with a philosopher and is discovering mutual cancellation of concepts through, at least, a different understanding of the meaning of words or disciplines. I refer to an essay I wrote in 2010 which discussed the effects of mis- or dys-understanding of concepts within pathology and oncology.10 As I am of the opinion that philosophy underlies ALL disciplines and is of particular importance to me as a 'scientist,' what I am experiencing is a feeling, an emotional fear, that philosophers might be influencing students and themselves without knowing or applying sufficient knowledge of the 'scientific' truth of current mind/brain science.

Another philosopher, Roger Poole, who wrote a short book titled : "Towards Deep Subjectivity," was intrigued by what he called spaces According to the writings of Poole, “there are two sorts of space because there are two sorts of intentions. The intentions structure the space in two different ways. When the two sets of intentions … confront each other … then ethical space is set up instantaneously.” In Roger Poole’s description of ethical space, a photograph dating to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia is presented. In the picture, two men are sitting on a park bench looking at each other. One man is dressed in army fatigues and is clearly representative of the dominant and occupying force, while the other man, dressed in civilian, peasant clothing, clearly represents one of the “occupied.” The space between them is what intrigued Poole. What Poole is postulating is a "space" arising at an encounter between two differing sets of intentions. We could also call this two differing sets of understanding. In this way the encounter would exemplify Whitehead's assertion about self-canceling understandings. What I obtain from Poole's book is the emergence of what are self-protective, ethical reactions to differences of intention and opinion. The neuroscience of this is Gazzaniga's "Interpreter," and Smotherman's contention that for survival, it is necessary that the brain/mind be right. The response might be called a Darwinian survival response and I suggest that it affects all of us. Mencken described philosophers in a contemptuous manner, saying that they largely spend their time dismissing the ideas of other philosophers. If this shoe seems to fit, it might be a manifestation of this ethical "space' described or postulated by Poole.11

Another view is presented by the theoretical physicist/philosopher Erwin Schrodinger. In his short book: What is Life?, he points out that thinkers, theorists, and philosophers do not specifically define their world views, that is to say, separate from their propositions or concepts. He maintains that the reason they do not do so it because their "world view' is contained in their propositions and concepts. He say it this way: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture."

And, how about this: In my thought method (Methode Leissringoise) which involves images and theatrics, I wondered if this story might be of aid: Imagine: A group of humans knocks on my door, each with her own explanation for the world. a. RL a Lutheran musician friend since 1948 tells me God makes all the decisions about everything, including climate change and who will be president. B. Richard Feynman tells me that the only way to know something is to think of a way to test the theory. C. A. J. Ayer, overhears what Feynman says and agrees: Theories derived of metaphysics are nonsense. D. A couple of Jehovah's Witnesses tell me that God wrote the 'bible' and that everything in it is what is. There is no trinity and Jesus was not resurrected. E. A Jewish guy also overhears what the JWs say and agrees that there is no trinity, just one god; Jesus was just a teacher. F. Two ladies in head covers tell me that Allah is god, and it is necessary to tell the world that they believe and to travel to Mecca before they die and to fast during Ramadan. G. Freeman Dyson knocks on my door and tells me that physics will reveal everything about the world. It is based upon mathematics and logic which exist as part of the world or universe as a Platonic truth. H. George Lakoff overhears Dyson's comments and points out that there is no Platonic mathematics, but that mathematics occurs in the minds of scientists and is like a religious faith. Its existence derives from a conceptual metaphor reflecting the embodied mind. I. Professor Wu knocks on my door and tells me that Dyson and other physicists are correct: their theories, even when untested, support a world view of interacting processes. Mathematics and symbolic logic shows this to be so.

And so it goes. Clearly my staged encounters at my front door represent a portion of the belief systems of most of our fellow humans. There are probably "reasons" why each of them believes what they do and within the system or world view each of them holds there might even be a logical or reasonable path from cause to belief. We live with these people and share the atmosphere with them. For the most partit probbly doesn't matter what belief system each of them has unless they become the focus of some other belief system that does not tolerate other beliefs. Walker Percy, in his book" "Lost in the Cosmos" suggests that some of us attempt to transcend the day-to-day boredom of common reality and enter esoteric and obscure fields to bring us out of the boredom. We become physicists, philosophers, priests, and through that means create for ourselves an imaginary world where we are separate from the quotidian. Percy says the problem happens when we attempt to return from our secret place and are faced with the reality we were escaping. I suppose in a way I am experiencing a transcendency whilst typing this essay. I could be just relaxing or reading a book or watching the TV box (if I had one).

Here I am speaking and writing to Joe Brenner, life-long friend and present-day philosopher: "As I have told you about my experiences with your first book (Logic in Reality, Springer, ), I had difficulty accepting what you called axioms and I came to realize that all of the above individuals who were knocking on my door to tell me about their world and how it works were equally "intelligent," (that is to say they employed the same processes to arrive at their conclusions). Those processes appeared to resemble levels of acceptance of factors--really factoids--which as "conceptual metaphors" were axioms. Thus, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift, emerged a population of creatures each of whose world view was based upon the acceptance of these different levels of ideas, their axioms. In carrying your question to me to a level of general humanity, in a Swiftian sense it is possible that any generation of persons basing their world views upon a group of axioms that were taught to them or adopted by them could create worlds that were, to them, in no way worthless. But the world, or reality, does not care about humanity's explanation for it. It simply is. The only thing that is changing is the idea of the world held by a person or group of persons. I report the following: I was reading a group of essays by Wallace Stevens and came upon one that concerned itself with imagination. This is germane because I just finished a binge of movie watching that included: Monseur Ibrahim, Lawrence of Arabia, the Manchurian Candidate, the 3 Faces of Eve, Babette's Feast, two versions of West Side Story, a film about Beatrix Potter, and the Big Fish.

All of these involved some kind of imaginary processing and thus Wallace's remembrance of Pascal's definition seems important: Pascal calls imagination the deceptive element in man, mistress of error and duplicity. Yet, in LIRian bent, Wallace reminds that imagination contains truth and untruth. Wallace's essay is about man's search for reality, the definition of which you called otiose: ie serving no useful or practical purpose. Begging to differ with you on this, I assert that defining each person's view/understanding/definition/etc. forms the whole of knowledge. While my journey through the imaginary stories of those movies was satisfying, it also reminded me of dangers. As I have griped before you: physics today contains a large element of imaginary ideas, and like religions, there is always a danger that the model can become twisted into a person's world view; that the imaginary becomes preferred to some kind of testable reality. Of course, this is exactly what bugs me about metaphysics and why after 87 years since he published his book: Ayer was correct. They (metaphysical propositions) are nonsense. And were it not for Collingwood's (kindly) guidance, wherein he showed in his book about metaphysics, that these imaginary nonsensical ideations might potentially contain fruit for further thought, but, let us not forget experimental proof will still be necessary. There were lots of love stories in those movies making me wonder if I have ever been in love with a person--as opposed to an imaginary version of a person. Thoughts to think.

We had abundant rain which are the tears or other body fluids of mother nature; they contrived to leak through the roof at my studio and wreak damage; not permanent nor hugely expensive, just another form of war and entropy. Levi-Strauss and Structured Society. Given that Claude Levi-Strauss is the subject/object of many criticisms, please let us forget these for this purpose. In approaching "anthropology" (define: anthro = human/man(kind) + ology = study of) L-S found a similarity of function amongst the manifestation of (often) tribal elements (in short, tribes appeared to function similarly as regards to kinship relationships, use of phonemes in language, and organized themselves in ways that were comparable and similar between groups.) While for L-S the groups were imagined as "Tribes" for this was his focus in rural Brazil, the basic idea was that the similarity amongst social 'structure' allowed degrees of comparison, that for L-S he imagined metaphorical structuring that might be comparable amongst a wider array of humans. While admittedly (my admission) this sounds much like metaphysics and perhaps largely is, the degrees of comparative structuring L-S imagined can be witnessed in societies, even in our societies, even now. Take for example the structure of tribal leadership: if one is capable of adopting metaphor readily--and wise men from Goethe to Lakoff have shown this to be a basic means of communication and understanding in humans--the existence of a group leader structures itself into at least two entities: a leadership and a followership. This carries into a triangular formation where in the imaginary structure, the leader becomes a vertex on the triangle and the area of the triangle represents the rest of the tribe. Thus, leader/follower or teacher/learner or chairman of a corporation/workers or employees or Sovereign/citizen. Carrying the metaphor further this structural form can be imagined as the common structure of the school room with the teacher at one end of the room (or triangle-at the vertex) and the pupils in the area of the room/triangle. Move this image to architectural forms of large auditoria or halls of learning and you find an even closer relationship to the triangle. If your thoughts can be further influenced, I ask you to think of the early days of radio and the radio's speaker as the triangle's vertex and the listener amongst the auditors. From there to the TV and finally to that thing you have in your hand, the "smart" phone and its tiny screen with annoying pop-ups that interfere with your life. So this idea of structuralism is useful as a means of imagining how this formality of structure can be thought of as a fundamental structure of social intercourse. And, yes, we remain in the provenance of metaphysical speculation and while the empirical evidence is deeply subjective and largely dependent upon the observer's willingness and ability to broadly examine the metaphors, there exists a highly likely explanation for this aspect of human behavior.

I. Metaphysical speculation ( absolute presuppositions) placed into a Theory of All: [Conversation with an academic philosopher: academia.edu] Jack Leissring left a reason for downloading Hawking's Final Theory and The Neo-Organicist Turn (April 2023 version) "This quote, it seems to me is backward:“the observation that the universe happens to be just right for life is the starting point of everything else” (Hertog, 2023: p. 208)." Given that the universe is as it is (and we can argue about what that means), then life echos/reflects that condition/status , not the other way around. Schrodinger's observation: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it." The origin of one's world view is of course complicated, but whatever scholar one becomes is dependent upon bountiful conditioning. It's all metaphysics from then on: if a theory can't be tested it tends towards Ayer's definition of nonsense.[JCL] Apr 16, 2023 From: Robert Hanna Dear Jack, Many thanks! for your continued interest in my work, & your follow-up comment. You've nicely sketched the basic idea of bottom-up cosmology. But later Hawking became convinced that there were too many cracks in the Standard Models paradigm, & decided to undertake a Copernican Revolution not unlike Kant's: in order to make progress, instead of assuming that life, esp. human life, structurally conforms to the natural universe, postulate instead that the natural universe structurally conforms to life, esp. human life. That's top-down cosmology, basically a moderate version of the Anthropic Principle, minus the multiverse. Correspondingly, I've added a sentence + a footnote + a reference to point up the Hawking/Kant parallel a little more explicitly. Well this diversion into metaphysical speculation is worthy of further babble: If it seems true that humans appear (from all studies, descriptions, literary, scientific and poetical) to share similarities in mind/body, brain/body function and behavior then what these mind/bodies are trying to explain (interpreter?) is based upon a certain commonality of perception and resultant behavior. If we accept that the historical view of this process of interpretation shows change, what does the thoughtful person do when revolutionary changes in facts about the mind and mind/body appear, as they are now so doing?

(Wally Shawn-in" My dinner with andre" says it this way: "I mean, I know what you’re talking' about, but I don’t really know what you’re talking, about. And I mean, actually, even if I did feel the way you do—you know, that there’s no possibility for happiness now—then, frankly, I still couldn’t accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to totally reject Western civilization and to fall back into a kind of belief in some kind of weird some thing. I mean—I mean, I don’t even know how to begin talking about this, but I mean—I mean, you know, in the Middle Ages, before the arrival of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything—anything could be true—a statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed or whatever. But the wonderful thing that happened was that then in the development of science in the Western world certain things did come slowly to be known and understood. I mean, of course all ideas in science are constantly being revised—I mean, that’s the whole point—but we do at least know that the universe has some shape and order and that, you know, trees do not turn into people or goddesses, and there are very good reasons why they don’t, and you can’t just believe absolutely anything.")
I have no scientific explanation for why some humans seek an explanation for their existence, yet I suspect that what history (small h) shows is that some of us , perhaps many of us do so. In a book I wrote many years ago I explained this in "Darwinian" terms--having an explanation for how the world works has survival benefit. As science (not the sacred cow but rather the method of scientific search--a search for knowledge for what is likely true and not just hopeful--does generate a retinue of things that we suspect are forms of true things (always subject to revision). I also accept that this is a pathway of towards understanding, a kind of awakening to the fact that the universe is here and we are here and why should that be the case? Going back to Levi-Strauss' Structural ideas, I see in my mind's eye a tendency to hero worship (I call it this knowing that 'hero' and 'worship' carry valences that affect other's subjectivity and (in the Pooleian sense) result in ethical and moral conclusions and attitudes.) The history of humankind, that based in what remains from the approximately 5 thousand years of artifacts left by former civilizations, suggests that we commonly create heroes and gods of a kind and that 'structural' tendency expands to processes that appear on the one hand mundane and on the other are curiously similar over time. In our (my) lifetime I see the honor given possibly insane leaders such as Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Reagan, Trump, Jesus (either real or imagined--doesn't matter) and then on into that same tendency, that leaning towards, accepting and honoring the writings and left-overs of certain figures. I surely have them in my list of honorific persons; so, I presume, do you. Our interpretations or explanations for this are usually founded upon a form of reason, though it could simply be arbitrary or dependent upon a shape or design in the individuals that sparks this in us. Whatever the explanation, this process exists. It is an isness!
I believe or suspect that we are all trapped in a kind of Pooleian process in which our interpretation of an encounter with the environment/world generates an explanation what Poole calls an ethical or moral decision and we run with that, accepting it (that judgment) until something comes along to make us change it.
Well, I just went through my morning ritual of "working-out," with a hidden hope that by so doing I evade the absolutes of entropy. Is this science or hope?
So I began to think while doing the exercise of the pathways of thought that led me to where I now am. I thought about the absence of religion in my life, how there was none in my family: no Sunday school, no weekly church attendances. Of course eventually I discovered that I was different from others of my age or association: they attended Sunday school or "temple" or church and owned a retinue of explanations for the world that must have baffled me even then. And, too, I have often written and spoken of my surprise when at about age 12-13 members of friendship groups seemed to dissolve into something else, which became for them a different tribal or group relationship; I was left behind (if that simile is correct, certainly I was left apart.) How, I wondered could these same boys and girls with whom I must have shared something, conclude that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were imaginary superstitions and not feel the same way about their god or God or gods? So, there was that. And simply watching the world of others as it went by. Those attempts over the years to inquire and perhaps to influence my friends proved useless. I concluded it was impossible to convince others of one's view of the world or even of momentary insights in how the processes of living might be improved.
Others, I found, can do so through writing and through a form of zealousness about their opinions. And I have been influenced by these others. The Montaignes, Voltaires, Goethes, Aristotles, Platos, Copernicus and those more recent observers: Einstein, Schrodinger, Gazzaniga, Huxley, Orwell, Feynman, Lakoff and of course, the poets: Roethke, Eliot, and so it goes. I of course have my list of 'great' books, the ones that specifically made me consider what I accepted or believed and possibly made me change my way of thinking, if only a slight degree of alteration of the "vector" of knowing.
I keep recalling a vague theme about a movie that focused upon a young academic woman trying to change the way literature is taught. Google helps not at all in attempting to discover my (probably) faulty recollection of the theme. But let me re-imagine it here. A woman asks why it is necessary to teach literature (or anything) using a pathway that starts with long-dead writers. She suggests that one could start with current living writers just as well and perhaps be an even better idea. Well, this imaginary theme does raise good questions about how and why we tend to overly honor the long dead when evidence shows us that current knowledge has been additive and that relying upon the state of being of a long dead writer, one who could not possibly have any understandings of the present day knowledge in scientific fact(oids) seems rather silly or to borrow and word used by my friend, Joe, otiose (serving no practical purpose).We all have some honored dead person in our history, so it might be difficult to give-up that person, but the movie theme's question remains a good one. Is there something about an aphorism by Johann Goethe that has lasting strength over a present-day scientific empirical result of some Joe-blow's recent article? I note that a similar question to my own appeared in a book by Lakoff and Johnson: see below.
Taking guidance from a book that should awaken scores of philosophers I offer these snippets from Lakoff and Johnson's book: Philosophy in the Flesh.12
"What we now know about the mind is radically at odds with the major classical philosophical views of what a person is."
". . .the mind is inherently embodied, reason is shaped by the body, and since most thought is unconscious, the mind cannot be known simply by self-reflection. Empirical study is necessary."
"There exists no Kantian radically autonomous person, with absolute freedom and a transcendent reason that correctly dictate what is and isn't moral."
"Real human beings are not, for the most part, in conscious control of --or even consciously aware of--their reasoning. Most of their reason, besides, is based on various kinds of prototypes, framings, and metaphors."
"The phenomenological person, who through phenomenological introspection alone can discover everything there is to know about the mind and the nature of experience, is a fiction."
"There is no Fregian person--as posed by analytic philosophy--for whom thought has been extruded from the body. That is, there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by the mind, brain or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies."
"The neural structures of our brains produce conceptual systems and linguistic structures that cannot be adequately accounted for by formal systems that only manipulate symbols."
"Finally, there is no Chompskyan person, for whom language is pure syntax, pure form insulated from and independent of all meaning, context and perception, emotion, memory, attention, action and the dynamic nature of communication."
"Given our new understanding of the mind, the question of what a human being is arises for us anew in the most urgent way."
"Without empirical confirmation, these facts about the mind did not find their way into the philosophical mainstream."
"Living a life is a philosophical endeavor. Every thought we have, every decision we make, and every act we perform is based upon philosophical assumptions so numerous we couldn't possibly list them all.. We go around armed with a host of presuppositions about what is real, what counts as knowledge, how the mind works, who we are, and how we should act. Such questions, which arise out of our daily concerns, form the basic subject matter of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and so on."
"Metaphysics, for example, is a fancy name for our concerns with what is real. (Writer's meaning) Traditional metaphysics asks question that sound esoteric: What is essence? What is causation? What is time? What is the self? But in everyday terms there is nothing esoteric about such questions."
Traditional philosophy, then, given tradition's dependence upon historical propositions and theories that could have had no knowledge about how the mind actually functions, needs a serious revision. It will be incumbent upon the functioning philosophers to either come to understand the scientific empiricism which supports present-day cognitive neuroscience or attempt to prove it wrong. Either way, the task is daunting. Hanna asks the question in an essay: "Can Philosophers change their minds? He writes: "I think it’s true that as many as 99% of all contemporary professional academic philosophers, after they’ve completed their PhD dissertations, as much as 99% of the time don’t read anything outside their AOS (Area of Specialization), as much as 99% of the time don’t work on anything outside their AOS, and as much as 99% of the time don’t change their minds about their fundamental philosophical beliefs and commitments, for the rest of their philosophical lives."(R. Hanna: "Can Philosophers Change their Minds?" Www.academia.edu, 2023.) Hanna concludes that philosophers should " change their minds, at least once in their philosophical lives, about their fundamental philosophical beliefs and commitments, especially including their worldviews or their metaphilosophy, for the sake of real philosophy."
It may be true that in our avalanche of information we may have forgotten something noticed way back in time. It is also possible that we are operating upon false foundational material (see Hanna above): we have accepted someone's publication, be it Kant or Chompsky, of a concept or a number, perhaps a kind of sacred number, and thereby, through its origin in an important person's paper we term it a universal physical constant or an established thesis. Why do we accept as established, a group of such physical constants or historical theories? In part, we do, because the testing done so far provides no important reasons to change our opinions. But if we ask, say, about the speed of light, we do know that traversing different media does affect that speed, the data upon which we depend for cosmological theories makes the assumption the light coming to us from "out there" somewhere has not changed. Yet, we know that it could have. Interesting problem. We also know that assumptions about the mind and thinking have undergone radical changes, so radical that the changes imply similarly radical changes of belief (scientific belief).
Within the processes involved in knowledge, there are many errors possible. It is like a gigantic error maze. Complete confidence cannot be attained; at least, may I say, complete scientific confidence cannot be attained. Belief, however, is something else again. Many appear to have attained a degree of complete confidence simply by applying the dictum that 'god' causes everything. That is to say that their idea of god is the starting point for everything. While it is a binary form of thought, this condition largely fits my experience of those who are religiously convinced. There seems to be no active present-day Copernicus who whispers to them: "but it moves!"
But departing from the purely binary possibilities: yes/no, right/wrong, black/white most of us can conceive of varying degrees of imaginary ideation, and thus we are back to Wallace and Pascal. Pascal calls imagination the deceptive element in man, mistress of error and duplicity. What is the aphorism about seeing ten faults in another but not one of our own? It's in Shakespeare, in biblical fables, and very common and strikingly true. When we are in the penumbra of metaphysics, where the assertions of metaphysical things, like god, are just made-up hopes or superstitious longings, literally anything can be believed true: statues can bleed, trees can turn into people, the dead can return to life, virgins can bear children. And, this short list of absurdities does not obviate the possibility that anyone can choose one amongst unlikely or absurd reports. It results in a condition a friend calls "focal schizophrenia." I liken it to a flat spot on an otherwise perfect wheel and in the life of that person goes thump, thump, thump as they progress. Its adoption, in the spirit of the little book by Quine and Ullian: "The web of Belief," constitutes a point in the web where it affects all of the other points. I likely have some of these, and so do you.
References:
1. W. V.Quine and J. S. Ullian: "The Web of belief," McGraw-Hill, 1978, ISBN: 978-0075536093
2. Schlick, Moritz, "General Theory of Knowledge, 1918/1985, Open court Pulishers (1985 ed) Paper
3. Hanna, Robert, "Can Philosophers Change Their Minds?" Www.academia.edu, 2023
4. Barfield, Owen, "Speaker's Meaning," Barfield Press, UK, 2011, ISBN 978-0956942302
5. Gazzaniga, Michael, "The Mind's Past," University of California Press, 1998, ISSBN 0-520-22486-8
6. Gazzaniga, Michael, "Who's in Charge?: Free will and the Science of the Brain, Ecco, 2011 ISBN- 978-0061906107
7. Smotherman, Ron, "Winning Through Enlightenment," Content Publications, 1979, ISBN-978-0932654014
8. Carroll, Lewis, "Through the Looking Glass," Bantam Classics, 1984, ISBN-978-0553213454
9. Leissring, Jack, "The Mystique of Metaphysics, Aristotle to Frankfurt," https://www.jclfa.com/metaphysics.htm
10. "The Cross-Sterilization of Disciplines: Primum non Nocere," https://www.jack-leissring.info/essay-028.htm
11. Poole, Roger, "Towards Deep Subjectivity," Harper and Row, 1977, ISBN-978-0061316760
12. Lakoff, G and Johnson, M., "Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought." Basic Books, 1999, ISBN-978-0465056743
Jack Leissring.
Santa Rosa, CA,
www.jclfa.com