Comments on “No middle way”

Probably this is one of the things you’re heading toward [in the stance recommended that is akin to Vajrayana]– but, reading this, what came to mind for me was the forsaking of BOTH belief system and stance implied in the third ‘terrible oath’ of Dorje Trollo: ‘… There is no purpose.’ To me, this suggests an immediate response that may very well surprise even the responder.

‘Stance’ seems more fluid and workable than ‘belief system,’ but it shares a certain anxious self-consciousness, that puts self-definition at the heart of experience – where, it seems to me, to get in the way of what is really interesting. It seems a version of Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”

This analysis, in my mundane thinking, seems like a technique I often use. If two “positions” are contradictory but both seem to capture some truth, then I look to see if the dichotomy is artificial. We may be made to look at the two on a one-dimensional continuum, but if I add a second dimension, I get more options. Adding and 3rd and a 4th does even more.

For example, in politics, common media sterilizes peoples brains making them only think of conservative vs liberal. Far better maps have been draw two dimensionally. Alas, our minds don’t handle more more than 2 dimensions easily and we seem to prefer 1-dimension.

But then, I am way off topic – which I must admit is so abstract and so deeply hypertexted that I struggle a bit – though I find it interesting, when I walk away, I can’t really remember what you have said. That is the problem with abstractions and specialized vocabulary of philosophers. Or at least that is the challenge for people like me. But this is a philosophy blog and that is the turf.

Hi David,
I’m struggling to understand your position here. You explicitly reject synthesis between dualistic oppositions, but offer nebulosity of meaning as an alternative solution. Yet when I turn to your page on nebulosity, you also accept that nebulosity is necessarily paired with what you call pattern, which would seem to require clarity of conception. Aren’t you just substituting an unresolved dualism of meaning, between nebulosity and pattern, for other types of dualism?

What I don’t understand is how you can offer any kind of solution to dualism without a dialectical structure that in some way combines the strengths or relative truths of each side - and thus becomes a Middle Way in a specific sense (obviously not just a compromise). Just acknowledging nebulosity does not do this, because we have a practical and moral need to focus and specify our concepts in order to act in response to them. It is surely thus the maximising of objectivity in relation to practical needs that we need to resolve dualisms, rather than just nebulosity? What you say about pattern (without there being a pattern page yet) already seems to acknowledge this point to some degree.
Best wishes,
Robert

Hi David,
Happy New Year to you too, and thanks for this. It does make your position a bit clearer. My problem with it, as you will already appreciate, is its ontological approach. I’m beginning to suspect a kind of unholy alliance in your thinking between expressivism in relation to meaning together with ontological claims - just a suspicion of course, I may have got it wrong. If meaningness is only to be understood as recognition of nebulosity, what makes it valuable without any epistemological criteria to rescue it from mere aestheticism? And how do your claims about it being “a feature of reality” (nebulosity page) avoid just being dogmatic without any epistemological method by which to judge it?

I would see this as a practical problem, not just a theoretical one, because the need for objectivity is a basic feature of our practical life. Whenever we make practical judgements it has to be according to a standard of some kind.

When you write above: “I definitely agree that we need as much clarity as we can get. But in many cases, perfect clarity is unavailable, and will remain unavailable for the foreseeable future.” you seem not to be recognising the relative nature of any clarity. Of course perfect clarity is unobtainable (like perfect anything), but we need as much clarity as is possible to provide the basis for practical decisions. Such clarity is also not enough without a degree of objectivity to inform our relatively clear conceptions. We could have clear conceptions that fully acknowledged nebulosity and yet were unjustified in terms of the evidence available to us (in terms of my work, they would have negative foundationalism but not coherentism(http://www.moralobjectivity.net/concept%20-%20coherentism.html).

Perhaps it’s unfair to make such criticisms early on when you’re still shaping your book. But are you planning to address any of these issues? Does the justification of beliefs form any part of of your account?

Leaving aside issues of belief, there are also things I’m not quite getting even about your account of meaning. What is it that positively provides us with the sense of meaning, nebulous or otherwise? For example, are you sympathetic to George Lakoff’s radical and, I think, extremely useful account of meaning?

I’m hugely sympathetic to the difficulties involved in creating a book like this, and to your intention of not necessarily satisfying philosophers but rather aiming your account at “plain folks”. However, personally I don’t think you’ll be able to produce an account that convinces “plain folks” unless you can get the philosophy a bit clearer.

The general message seems to be “be patient”!

I’d certainly agree with your first three paragraphs here. The next worst trap in philosophy after the defence of ideas that we actually take to be certain, is hypothetical discussion of what might be certain and what might happen if it was (the preserve of analytic metaphysics). It’s much better to recognise that the question of whether anything could be certain is irrelevant to our practical concerns.

What I mean by “expressivism” isn’t related to whether or not we can choose meanings (that’s just another freewill vs determinism dualism in my view), but is the belief that meaningfulness arises from a relationship with (or expression of) the self, as opposed to a representational relationship with an assumed world-out-there. I am suspecting you of holding this position in some way because you don’t seem to be recognising (and thus synthesising) the representational elements in meaning.

The danger that strikes me if you don’t attempt to address philosophical issues around meaning, is that you will nevertheless assume a particular account of meaning that will remain unexamined, and thus undermine your position. For me it also creates a vagueness that prevents me reaching a helpful level of clarity about what you mean by meaningness.

I don’t think the further development of Lakoff’‘s insights lies in neurophysiology: rather, he provides us with an account of how meaning is directly related to the bodily experience and how even the most abstract ideas become meaningful in a way which us ultimately physical, via metaphorical extension. It seems to me that this provides a key way to dissolve the representationalist vs expressivist dualism. I’m surprised that you are not making use of this, because surely this is central to what you are saying? If meaning is based on our physical experience, surely meaningness involves recognition of that experience, and avoidance of either representationalist or expressivist types of delusion? Lakoff also links the cognitive and emotional aspects of meaning in a way that makes it clear how meaning unites the two, involving cognitive representations but by no means completely comprehensible in terms of them.

Generally, then, I suppose, I feel that so far you’re not using many of the resources available to you to give a more positive account of meaningness, the Middle Way, the Complete Stance, or whatever you want to call it. If your account is vague and not linked to beliefs that people do commonly accept, it won’t be very convincing. But this issue is probably linked to your absolutising of objectivity, which I think prevents you from seeing the relative attainment of objectivity in more positive terms - what I just said about Lakoff would be an illustration of that. It’s only really analytic philosophers and scientists who use “objective” in that absolute way - in ordinary parlance people are often content to use it incrementally, for example to describe character.

Anyway, I realise I’m in danger of jumping ahead too far. I’ll await your writing on epistemology with interest.

Thanks for all that explanation. Am I right in thinking that you believe semantics is not relevant to meaningness for the same reason that meaningness is not about objectivity? If that’s so, then it’s attitudes to objectivity that are the underlying philosophical issue.

Personally I reject the distinction between meaning (in the semantic sense) and meaningfulness. It is the same as the distinction between cognitive and emotional (or affective) types of meaning which undermines analytic philosophy, particularly Wittgenstein. It is because of his refusal to address the affective dimension of meaning that Wittgenstein produces a false pragmatism based on the representation of group language-use, and rejects meaningful language produced outside a group context (“private language”). The distinction between meaning and meaningfulness is also that between representation and expression, which is why I don’t see how you can cut out the meaning side without making expressivist assumptions somewhere along the line, even if you set out to avoid Rorty’s mistakes.

My basic case against the distinction is this. Cognitive and affective elements in meaning constantly intermesh (just as facts and values do) and in experience (as opposed to in abstract analysis) we never encounter either in its pure form. Attempts to analyse one without the other thus unavoidably end up making metaphysical assumptions from beyond possible experience. I don’t think we can ever encounter meaningfulness that is not filtered through some degree of representational meaning: a baby’s wail, for example, has a representational meaning to its parents, even if for the baby it is overwhelmingly affective expression. Similarly there is no such thing in experience as semantic meaning without affective significance: a scientist who writes a highly “objective” paper in scientific language still has feelings about the significance of the paper and its content that are unavoidably communicated through the very fact of its publication, and might also be inferred from the language he uses.

So, I don’t see how semantics can be ruled out of relevance to your project. It is part of the very air it breathes.

I don’t think you could describe the practice of kung fu in a value-neutral way. Whatever you say about the best moves in certain circumstances raises issues about why they are the best moves, and what justifies them as the best moves (as you say, it includes positive and negative assessments). Though your emphasis might be practical, it is impossible to completely separate such practical evaluations from the theoretical concerns that justify your evaluation. How could you train someone in Kung fu without addressing issues of motivation, mental states, thinking? As far as I understand it (without being a practitioner myself) kung fu is at least half about this and only half about following prescribed physical moves. When we start to address reasons for action, the meaning of the language and what we assume about that meaning becomes crucial.

The example of kung fu could also illustrate this well in relation to violence. Could one train in kung fu without a clear sense of when it is appropriate to use violence and when not? As far as I understand it, this is a basic aspect of the discipline. But what do we mean by violence? Is breaking a block of wood abruptly violence? Is behaving in a threatening way violence? Is the use of philosophical argument violence? This is starting to get pretty semantic. But these issues cannot be resolved purely through abstract discussion of semantics, as they are also moral issues: I could only resolve them in a justified way with reference back to the practical situation in its whole context. Meaning, theory and practice are interdependent.

Just a further addendum to ‘Kung fu’. Maybe you’re wearying of the discussion, David, but I just wanted to say why I think it’s important. Dualism is like an octopus: no sooner does one disengage one arm of it then another one sneaks round and takes hold. Meaning seems to me to be one of the arms of the octopus that is often allowed to sneak a hold unchecked, as we focus our attention either on the psycho-spiritual arm or on the belief arm (that leaves five more arms for the octopus - maybe we’re not even aware of what they are doing!) Meaning is a third area of work, and the prime area where we can tackle it is the arts. As in the psycho-spiritual sphere or the sphere of belief, there is both theory and practice to take into account. I don’t think there’s any more of a case for neglecting the theory entirely here than there is, say, in meditation. Meditation is basically practical, and one can’t really understand it without practice, but theoretical understanding can nevertheless be very helpful - just as ‘semantics’ (or at least, a wider discussion in which ‘semantics’ is included) can be helpful in the practice of integrating meaning.

Meaning is also the area where I have struggled most to communicate the understanding I think I’ve arrived at. I’ve recently had another go at summarising the key points in as lucid a way as possible on my website: if you’re interested in this please see http://www.moralobjectivity.net/concept%20-%20meaning.html .

Just to link this back to the ‘No middle way’ heading: I still think this is the starting point for an argument as to why there is a Middle Way, based on moral/epistemological synthesis rather than compromise. Theories are important and relevant to practical change because they provide the assumed basis for opposed positions that ignore uncertainty/nebulosity. If we ignore the vagueness and uncertainty of the boundaries between semantics and our practical appreciation of meaning, like that between other theory and practice, then we are both denying nebulosity and allowing another dualism to creep back.

Anyway, I will now shut up and allow you chance to reply - if you wish.

This may be a poor analogy, but as I read this section and the later ones describing the pairs of confused stances and the balanced alternative, I can’t help but keep thinking of the problem of describing photons in physics. Early experiments with photons produced conflicting results, sometimes indicating that they had properties of particles, other times that they had properties as waves. The eventual answer (assuming that it’s not pending further refinement, and excusing for a moment what’s probably not perfectly accurate physics) is that photons aren’t particles OR waves, but constructs of energy and probability that can exhibit properties resembling either, depending on circumstances. The synthesis of the particle-wave conflict isn’t halfway between, or even half and half, but something deeper and much more complex, with occasional test results that just happen to fall out one way or the other as circumstances merit.

Not sure if that one will make sense to anyone else, but I haven’t been able to shake the idea that something similar is being described here.

Hi, can you give an example that would clarify the difference between the muddled middle stance and the complete stance? You write that the muddled middle stance may e.g. lead to pursuing fame through a media campaign to help starving Africans. What may the complete stance lead to, then? To the same thing, but with a different motivation? Or to something different?

I’m not trying to prove you are wrong or anything like this, I’m just not sure if I understand your main point about the complete stance and nebulosity. If your aim is to write a practical book, you definitely need more examples. I read the example about ethics, too, but there, again, there is no comparison how the “muddled middle” stance would look like, and how it would be different from the complete stance.

Thanks. If I understand it correctly, the complete stance in your original example means:
- to be happy that people who otherwise would have starved will have something to eat,
- have a selfish enjoyment of getting famous,
- not to be disturbed by thoughts that helping Africans is just an excuse for getting famous.
Did I get that right?

Do the muddled middle stance and the complete stance differ with regard to activities that are only enjoyable, but not “eternally” useful (or maybe even harmful), or those that are only useful, but not too enjoyable (or even causing aversion)?

I’m not quite sure about the seeming contradiction between nebulosity and the middle path through a dialectic.

I imagine this geometrically: each dialectic represents a single dimension. Nebulosity rejects this and says all phenomena are very high dimension–at least to my reading. What stops you from performing standard dimensionality reduction techniques to find the closest middle point on the dialectic and calling that the middle path?

Otherwise, I have to interpret this as a rejection of dialects in general–they are inevaluable! Which may be admirable in the pursuit of truth, but does not empower one to resolve contradictions easier or better–you’re trading a known incorrect conclusion with a problem with error nearly infathomable to human intuition.

perhaps I’m reading something else into what you are saying. Could you elaborate why you find nebulosity to be so useful on a pragmatic level?

Teal Swan has a fantastic video that talks about The Middle Way called “AND Consciousness” which actually talks about incorporating both extremes in order to find truth. You might enjoy it.