[1] Heidegger’s distinction between ‘conspicuousness’ (Auffalligkeit’) ‘obtrusiveness’ (‘Aufdringlichkeit’), and ‘obstinacy’ (‘Aufsässigkeit’) is hard to present unambiguously in translation. He seems to have in mind three rather similar situations. In each of these we are confronted by a number of articles which are ready-to-hand. In the first situation we wish to use one of these articles for some purpose, but we find that it cannot be used for that purpose. It then becomes ‘conspicuous’ or ‘striking’, and in a way ‘un-ready-to-hand’—in that we are not able to use it. In the second situation we may have precisely the same articles before us, but we want one which is not there. In this case the missing article too is ‘un-ready-to-hand’, but in another way—in that it is not there to be used. This is annoying, and the articles which are still ready-to-hand before us, thrust themselves upon us in such a way that they become ‘obtrusive’ or even ‘obnoxious’. In the third situation, some of the articles which are ready-to-hand before us are experienced as obstacles to the achievement of some purpose; as obstacles they are ‘obstinate’, ‘recalcitrant’, ‘refractory’, and we have to attend to them or dispose of them in some way before we can finish what we want to do. Here again the obstinate objects are un-ready-to-hand, but simply in the way of being obstinate.
I was musing over the notion of frames recently, and apparently Heidegger had a very similar thought to me?
For some reason, I got back into thinking about what the
a priori is. The rationalists had “pure
reason/intellect”. Then we formalized it into logic/mathematics in
the 20th century. But these are mainly standards for, what is true
and how do we know it?
I think a priori could also be something like, what constitutes the very space of thoughts you can have. Like, we can have discussions about the truth or falseness of chair-like propositions, but that presupposes a chair. This isn’t new - a lot of the Logical Empiricists (Reichenbach, for example) discussed this phenomenon. That’s probably where the whole “true in virtue of meaning” came from too (although the way that meaning was instantiated definitely did not live up to the hype…).
You can point to this and maybe say, language is fucked. Or you can try and take a fallibilist approach and allow questioning of everything. But apparently, phenomenology has got me covered here for a more specific dynamic.
A working hypothesis I have is that intelligence requires the ability to actively close off something and dogmatically assert a frame (not just a true statement) explicitly, while also having the ability to acknowledge that the frame can be broken; BUT without resorting to fallibilsim or some kind of higher-level re-descriptoin of how the frame is broken.
When I use encryption and the SHA256 model, for example, I can think:
- This is a secure hash.
- Unless Quantum Computing arrives.
Notice what doesn’t happen - I don’t port above the “hey, 1/2^256 chance of hash collision”. Even though those things are objectively true. There’s a difference between the exported model that I even work with constantly, and the “objective” way things work.
And to further sink this in, I am explicitly not constantly reasoning down the “bad path”. Not like in a tree search kind of way, where it’s even an if statement to see if I go down that. No, at some point, it does become dogma to not search down that path.
In this sense, I don’t believe that fallibilsm is an actually workable philosophy, funnily enough. And also Bayesianism (as a philosophy) as well. If your semantics require complete takeover of your space, then it’s probably not very actionable. And also Carnap’s philosophy, etc. All of these meta-philosophies which try and formally reduce everything to its ontology doesn’t really capture the nature of what it means to be the “base” layer. They also have the issue that I see all too common - you’re going to provide the universal standard substrate for other people? that, in it of itself, warrants suspicion.
The Heidegger passage above is interesting because it actually gives an account of how you break out of dogma. Well, maybe I’m being too fair to Heidegger ; after all, you could just reduce this to, “We can discover that we’re wrong”. But I think it’s the unique constraint that it’s dogma. By definition, you aren’t supposed to be aware that it’s an a priori thing or even that it, itself, is dogma.
I don’t think that these kinds of thoughts are useless, BTW. I mean, the CS world has operationalized a very near-field thought: correct by construction. If fallibilism is “model everything with Bayesianism”, then correct by construction is avoiding “bad states” because they’re literally not instantiatable. This is an operational model that has no woo-woo nonsense.
Admittedly, I haven’t worked out the kinks of this idea, and I’m not trying to become a Heidegger; I want to actually operationalize this somehow. Either in my own life, or in machine learning.
The pragmatist tradition has some interesting reversals (in my mind, they’re the “reversal guys”), but they can commit some of the same errors that they claim other traditions do (at least, Dewey/James is like that; Sellars is more interesting.)