I think that's kind of right, but also all our metaphysics are kind of just our most general conceptualisations, and so shouldn't be taken as ultimately real either. Which feels a bit awkward because I love thinking about metaphysics and I think there's value in it, and even saying that reality is "nonconceptual" is itself a metaphysical conceptualisation. It's like the Buddhist teaching of the "emptiness of emptiness".
>>I think that's kind of right, but also all our metaphysics are kind of just our most general conceptualisations, and so shouldn't be taken as ultimately real either.<<
But they are real. They are *really* concepts—the means by which we identify entities, attributes, actions, states, and relationships—and propositionally describe them.
>>Which feels a bit awkward because I love thinking about metaphysics and I think there's value in it, and even saying that reality is "nonconceptual" is itself a metaphysical conceptualisation. It's like the Buddhist teaching of the "emptiness of emptiness".<<
We’ve got satellites sitting 20,000 miles off the surface of the earth making this conversation possible. In terms of metaphysics (what exists) and ontology (what its nature is), just reflect on how many entities, attributes, actions, states and relationships had to be objectively identified and understood for that single feat. If that isn’t knowledge of “the thing in itself,” then I don’t know what that term identifies.
The technology that allows us to have this conversation relies on our scientific knowledge, but that scientific knowledge is basically indifferent between different metaphysical systems. An idealist, a materialist, a dualist, a hylemorphist, a Platonist, an animist and a Buddhist can all agree on exactly how the technology and science works, while completely disagreeing over the metaphysical underpinnings.
Science is awesome, but it relies on how we've decided to initially conceptualise the objects of our scientific theories. And it's possible to conceptualise our scientific theories differently too, approaching them from different angles and at different levels.
You’ve actually illustrated my point rather than undermined it. The very fact that people with wildly different metaphysical systems can all use the same science and the same technology shows that those metaphysical systems are not objective. They are add-ons—psychological overlays, imaginative frameworks—rather than knowledge grounded in reality. What holds the iPhone together isn’t Platonism or animism; it’s the disciplined method of identifying entities, their attributes, actions, states, and relationships, and then validating those identifications against reality. That’s why science works the same in Tokyo as in Paris.
Where philosophy goes wrong is exactly in what you’ve described: it doesn’t start from axiomatic first principles, but from reified constructs. If you begin with “forms,” “noumena,” or “vital spirits,” you can still build a mythology around science—but the science itself never needed those constructs. It’s grounded directly in the fact that existence exists, that consciousness is aware of it, and that things are what they are. Without those axioms, you wouldn’t have science at all.
So yes, one can “conceptualize science differently.” But unless those conceptualizations respect the primaries—existence, consciousness, identity—they are just variations of mythology. The success of science is proof that the objective method works. The disagreement of metaphysical systems is proof that, outside of that method, philosophy has failed to discipline itself by the same principles. That’s the epistemological crisis I’m pointing to.
This was an enjoyable read. However, I just want to share my doubts about "So that we can see it as it is". Our perceptions, whether visual or auditory or tactile, are inevitably shaped and limited by the specifics of our evolved sendory organs and nervous system. I agree that our logic cannot go beyond the limitations of our conceptualizations. But I want to go beyond this, our more "intimate" flow experience is also limited.
Yes, that's a really good point. It's true that we never really see things as they are, but as we are, and all our perceptions are necessarily mediated. Even our self-perceptions.
Although, one thing I think we can say is that we can have some experience of reality because we are ourselves real. Not as an experience of reality as something outside ourselves, but as our experience of ourselves existing as part of the world and in relation to it.
It's like it is forever out of reach, and yet also as close to me as I am to myself.
I'm no Husserl expert, but he founded phenomenology, which sounds very much like what you're talking about here (as seen through a Western lens, anyway). The idea is to extricate our perceptions from the abstractions and overlays through which everyday consciousness filters them, and to experience the world in its pure immediacy. In _The Existentialist Cafe_ (the book I happen to be reading these days), Sarah Bakewell explains it in terms of a cup of coffee:
"The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as a phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced.
"If I treated all these as purely 'subjective' elements to be stripped away in order to be 'objective' about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my coffee as a phenomenon -- that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemistry is hearsay. . .
"Husserl therefore says that , to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. . . This 'setting aside' or 'bracketing out' of speculative add-ons Husserl called _epoche_ [forgive me for not looking up the accented final character] -- a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenoenological 'reduction' instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee 'really' is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour -- the phenomenon.".
Thank you! I see the similarity now. I think the summary I got (from chatgpt) gave me the impression that it was about conceptualising our inner experience, which is not what I was arguing for, but this sounds much more like what I was thinking.
One approach I find useful is not to view everything encountered through a concept that is ready to explain it all. Like sense the world and play around with it, but don't put things right away into conceptual boxes, which are often little verbal cells. I think this paves the way for more creative or at least interesting ideas and perhaps reduces bias, since there is not always a box that has to fit. In the other direction, the benefits are clarity of thought and expression, but also intellectual rigidity and potentially extreme mental filters that end up being detrimental.
I'm all for not taking ourselves too seriously. But part of that, I fear, is not taking our perception of reality too seriously either. I don't think reality, at least any reality that we perceive, is non-conceptual. Most of it is outside of our volitionally symbolic concepts. But the most basic thing we can perceive or imagine is going to be a concept.
It may just be a concept the pre-conscious parts of our nervous system forms, which to us just seems to be reality as given. But I don't think there's any such thing. There is only reality as constructed by the control system of our body, much of which it can't self referentially inspect. The temptation is to think that's the real reality, when it actually is just the reality our neural network is currently tuned to put together as is initial draft inference.
Sorry, don't mean to be a downer. Absolutely disconnect and feel the grass. It may well make you feel better, and help to recharge your batteries. Definitely worth doing for mental health purposes. But I'd be cautious about assuming it's providing any special epistemic insights.
"I don't think reality, at least any reality that we perceive, is non-conceptual."
Haha! I have tricked you into espousing idealism! I'm joking of course, but also... it kind of is idealism. If you're limiting it to reality as we perceive it then it seems to me you're extremely close to Kant's transcendental idealism, with the "noumena" reserved as potentially non-conceptual yet forever out of reach.
I suppose that's true if we define anything mental/experienced at all as a concept, but I don't think that's necessary or how we normally use the word. But I don't mean to suggest that we can escape the particularities of our brains' perspective or way of making sense of the world. Although even if we take these as "concepts", we can still come to understand them as not ultimate reality, and as being contingent ways of conceiving of reality rather than reality itself.
But I also think that, to the extent that I am myself real, I must be able to really experience reality, right?
I think maybe it would help if I expressed the idea of the post in terms of relational structures, since we both hold to something like ontic structural realism. Our concepts are structures, and reality is structures, so our concepts aren't entirely unreal. But our concepts, as I'm thinking of them in the post, are fixed templates, whereas reality is very much messy and dynamic and particular in flux. The "intuition" I referred to is a way of being and perceiving that's less fixed and more at home in that flux. More like how animals perceive the world (I imagine).
I actually didn't say that reality is limited to what we perceive, just that *at least* the reality that we do perceive is conceptual. But to your point about ontic structural realism, I do think those concepts are structurally related to what's "out there". So no, I'm not an idealist, either of the ontic or epistemic varieties.
I do agree that reality is often far messier than the concepts we map onto it, although that seems as true for our initial intuitions and dispositions as anything we later come up with through deliberation. How often do scientific discoveries force us to revisit old intuitive categories?
And animal intuitions are often just as wrong as ours. Sometimes that's taken advantage of by other species, such as birds tricked into taking care of the eggs and chicks of cuckoos who engage in brood parasitism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo#Brood_parasitism
"I do agree that reality is often far messier than the concepts we map onto it, although that seems as true for our initial intuitions and dispositions as anything we later come up with through deliberation. How often do scientific discoveries force us to revisit old intuitive categories?"
So, I'm not arguing for our intuitions as a set of initial concepts (although as a general rule I do give a fair deal of weight to "common sense"), but for "intuition" as a kind of faculty within the mind as opposed to "intellect". The point is that intellect is a much more particular faculty within the mind that is by its own nature suited for dealing with static and rigid realities, but it is not suited to appreciating or experiencing things as being in flux. The intuition is the part of your mind you use when dancing for example.
My point isn't that intuition or nonconceptual experience is a source of infallible information. As soon as we're getting information from it, we're back to conceptualising anyway. My point is to broaden our minds beyond all our fixed conceptualisations, understanding that reality doesn't fit neatly into our boxes.
Reality is metaphysical. Our conceptualization of reality is epistemological.
I think that's kind of right, but also all our metaphysics are kind of just our most general conceptualisations, and so shouldn't be taken as ultimately real either. Which feels a bit awkward because I love thinking about metaphysics and I think there's value in it, and even saying that reality is "nonconceptual" is itself a metaphysical conceptualisation. It's like the Buddhist teaching of the "emptiness of emptiness".
>>I think that's kind of right, but also all our metaphysics are kind of just our most general conceptualisations, and so shouldn't be taken as ultimately real either.<<
But they are real. They are *really* concepts—the means by which we identify entities, attributes, actions, states, and relationships—and propositionally describe them.
>>Which feels a bit awkward because I love thinking about metaphysics and I think there's value in it, and even saying that reality is "nonconceptual" is itself a metaphysical conceptualisation. It's like the Buddhist teaching of the "emptiness of emptiness".<<
We’ve got satellites sitting 20,000 miles off the surface of the earth making this conversation possible. In terms of metaphysics (what exists) and ontology (what its nature is), just reflect on how many entities, attributes, actions, states and relationships had to be objectively identified and understood for that single feat. If that isn’t knowledge of “the thing in itself,” then I don’t know what that term identifies.
The technology that allows us to have this conversation relies on our scientific knowledge, but that scientific knowledge is basically indifferent between different metaphysical systems. An idealist, a materialist, a dualist, a hylemorphist, a Platonist, an animist and a Buddhist can all agree on exactly how the technology and science works, while completely disagreeing over the metaphysical underpinnings.
Science is awesome, but it relies on how we've decided to initially conceptualise the objects of our scientific theories. And it's possible to conceptualise our scientific theories differently too, approaching them from different angles and at different levels.
You’ve actually illustrated my point rather than undermined it. The very fact that people with wildly different metaphysical systems can all use the same science and the same technology shows that those metaphysical systems are not objective. They are add-ons—psychological overlays, imaginative frameworks—rather than knowledge grounded in reality. What holds the iPhone together isn’t Platonism or animism; it’s the disciplined method of identifying entities, their attributes, actions, states, and relationships, and then validating those identifications against reality. That’s why science works the same in Tokyo as in Paris.
Where philosophy goes wrong is exactly in what you’ve described: it doesn’t start from axiomatic first principles, but from reified constructs. If you begin with “forms,” “noumena,” or “vital spirits,” you can still build a mythology around science—but the science itself never needed those constructs. It’s grounded directly in the fact that existence exists, that consciousness is aware of it, and that things are what they are. Without those axioms, you wouldn’t have science at all.
So yes, one can “conceptualize science differently.” But unless those conceptualizations respect the primaries—existence, consciousness, identity—they are just variations of mythology. The success of science is proof that the objective method works. The disagreement of metaphysical systems is proof that, outside of that method, philosophy has failed to discipline itself by the same principles. That’s the epistemological crisis I’m pointing to.
This was an enjoyable read. However, I just want to share my doubts about "So that we can see it as it is". Our perceptions, whether visual or auditory or tactile, are inevitably shaped and limited by the specifics of our evolved sendory organs and nervous system. I agree that our logic cannot go beyond the limitations of our conceptualizations. But I want to go beyond this, our more "intimate" flow experience is also limited.
Thanks!
Yes, that's a really good point. It's true that we never really see things as they are, but as we are, and all our perceptions are necessarily mediated. Even our self-perceptions.
Although, one thing I think we can say is that we can have some experience of reality because we are ourselves real. Not as an experience of reality as something outside ourselves, but as our experience of ourselves existing as part of the world and in relation to it.
It's like it is forever out of reach, and yet also as close to me as I am to myself.
This reminds me of Husserl's "epoche" or "reduction."
I'm not really familiar with it, would you mind elaborating? I looked it up and it sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I see the link
I'm no Husserl expert, but he founded phenomenology, which sounds very much like what you're talking about here (as seen through a Western lens, anyway). The idea is to extricate our perceptions from the abstractions and overlays through which everyday consciousness filters them, and to experience the world in its pure immediacy. In _The Existentialist Cafe_ (the book I happen to be reading these days), Sarah Bakewell explains it in terms of a cup of coffee:
"The promise, the anticipated sensations, the smell, the colour and the flavour are all part of the coffee as a phenomenon. They all emerge by being experienced.
"If I treated all these as purely 'subjective' elements to be stripped away in order to be 'objective' about my coffee, I would find there was nothing left of my coffee as a phenomenon -- that is, as it appears in the experience of me, the coffee drinker. This experiential cup of coffee is the one I can speak about with certainty, while everything else to do with the bean-growing and the chemistry is hearsay. . .
"Husserl therefore says that , to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. . . This 'setting aside' or 'bracketing out' of speculative add-ons Husserl called _epoche_ [forgive me for not looking up the accented final character] -- a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics, who used it to mean a general suspension of judgement about the world. Husserl sometimes referred to it as a phenoenological 'reduction' instead: the process of boiling away extra theorising about what coffee 'really' is, so that we are left only with the intense and immediate flavour -- the phenomenon.".
Thank you! I see the similarity now. I think the summary I got (from chatgpt) gave me the impression that it was about conceptualising our inner experience, which is not what I was arguing for, but this sounds much more like what I was thinking.
One approach I find useful is not to view everything encountered through a concept that is ready to explain it all. Like sense the world and play around with it, but don't put things right away into conceptual boxes, which are often little verbal cells. I think this paves the way for more creative or at least interesting ideas and perhaps reduces bias, since there is not always a box that has to fit. In the other direction, the benefits are clarity of thought and expression, but also intellectual rigidity and potentially extreme mental filters that end up being detrimental.
I'm all for not taking ourselves too seriously. But part of that, I fear, is not taking our perception of reality too seriously either. I don't think reality, at least any reality that we perceive, is non-conceptual. Most of it is outside of our volitionally symbolic concepts. But the most basic thing we can perceive or imagine is going to be a concept.
It may just be a concept the pre-conscious parts of our nervous system forms, which to us just seems to be reality as given. But I don't think there's any such thing. There is only reality as constructed by the control system of our body, much of which it can't self referentially inspect. The temptation is to think that's the real reality, when it actually is just the reality our neural network is currently tuned to put together as is initial draft inference.
Sorry, don't mean to be a downer. Absolutely disconnect and feel the grass. It may well make you feel better, and help to recharge your batteries. Definitely worth doing for mental health purposes. But I'd be cautious about assuming it's providing any special epistemic insights.
"I don't think reality, at least any reality that we perceive, is non-conceptual."
Haha! I have tricked you into espousing idealism! I'm joking of course, but also... it kind of is idealism. If you're limiting it to reality as we perceive it then it seems to me you're extremely close to Kant's transcendental idealism, with the "noumena" reserved as potentially non-conceptual yet forever out of reach.
I suppose that's true if we define anything mental/experienced at all as a concept, but I don't think that's necessary or how we normally use the word. But I don't mean to suggest that we can escape the particularities of our brains' perspective or way of making sense of the world. Although even if we take these as "concepts", we can still come to understand them as not ultimate reality, and as being contingent ways of conceiving of reality rather than reality itself.
But I also think that, to the extent that I am myself real, I must be able to really experience reality, right?
I think maybe it would help if I expressed the idea of the post in terms of relational structures, since we both hold to something like ontic structural realism. Our concepts are structures, and reality is structures, so our concepts aren't entirely unreal. But our concepts, as I'm thinking of them in the post, are fixed templates, whereas reality is very much messy and dynamic and particular in flux. The "intuition" I referred to is a way of being and perceiving that's less fixed and more at home in that flux. More like how animals perceive the world (I imagine).
I actually didn't say that reality is limited to what we perceive, just that *at least* the reality that we do perceive is conceptual. But to your point about ontic structural realism, I do think those concepts are structurally related to what's "out there". So no, I'm not an idealist, either of the ontic or epistemic varieties.
I do agree that reality is often far messier than the concepts we map onto it, although that seems as true for our initial intuitions and dispositions as anything we later come up with through deliberation. How often do scientific discoveries force us to revisit old intuitive categories?
And animal intuitions are often just as wrong as ours. Sometimes that's taken advantage of by other species, such as birds tricked into taking care of the eggs and chicks of cuckoos who engage in brood parasitism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuckoo#Brood_parasitism
"I do agree that reality is often far messier than the concepts we map onto it, although that seems as true for our initial intuitions and dispositions as anything we later come up with through deliberation. How often do scientific discoveries force us to revisit old intuitive categories?"
So, I'm not arguing for our intuitions as a set of initial concepts (although as a general rule I do give a fair deal of weight to "common sense"), but for "intuition" as a kind of faculty within the mind as opposed to "intellect". The point is that intellect is a much more particular faculty within the mind that is by its own nature suited for dealing with static and rigid realities, but it is not suited to appreciating or experiencing things as being in flux. The intuition is the part of your mind you use when dancing for example.
My point isn't that intuition or nonconceptual experience is a source of infallible information. As soon as we're getting information from it, we're back to conceptualising anyway. My point is to broaden our minds beyond all our fixed conceptualisations, understanding that reality doesn't fit neatly into our boxes.