Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 5:23 pmWow, wait!AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Nov 19, 2021 5:14 pm No because I reject the assumption of two separate "spaces" of meaning which just happen to "overlap" in certain instances. A phenomenological approach makes no such assumption and therefore we are dealing with a unified 'space' of experience in which there exists varying peripheral spatiotemporal perspectives perceving the same ideal content, loosely illustrated by the image below.
Before arriving at this, you need first to answer my previous question: how do you know that we are experiencing exactly the same ideas? How did you arrive to this statement based on your 1-st person phenomenal experience?
I wrote above:You said that we can only resolve it by taking a single 1-st person perspective. Fine, let's try, but I think it makes the problem even more difficult. Because if we are both looking at the allegedly the "same wall", how can we prove that we are experience the same meaning if we are not even allowed to compare our experiences?- Now, whether or not we actually experience exactly the same meaning is a whole different question. Here is a problem: how do we know (prove) that when we look at the same chair, the meanings that we phenomenally experience are exactly the same? Your experience of the meaning is experienced from your 1-rst person perspective, mine is experienced from my perspective. How do we compare them if I can only experience such thought forms our own perspectives? What I'm getting to is that the statement that we can experience exactly the same meanings is already an assumption. We can adopt such assumption, but we need to agree that it is an assumption first.
I didn't arrive to anything, but only said we can't assume they are different ideal content from the outset. The problem is that none of what you are trying to do here is really phenomenology - I was just indulging your approach for a bit, but there's a much better way to do it. What we should do is carefully reason through our observation and thinking of the world content as it arrives in our experience. The first few chapters of PoF do precisely that, so if we are going to do a phenomenologial inquiry, we should proceed from there. You can still object to his reasoning or any unwarranted assumptions you think are being employed. We could start with what is below:
Steiner wrote:WHEN I observe how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this observed process. The direction of motion and the velocity of the second ball are determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I remain a mere spectator, I can only say anything about the movement of the second ball when it has taken place. It is quite different when I begin to reflect on the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the occurrence. I connect the concept of an elastic ball with certain other concepts of mechanics, and take into consideration the special circumstances which obtain in the instance in question. I try, in other words, to add to the occurrence which takes place without my assistance a second process which takes place in the conceptual sphere. This latter one is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I can rest content with the observation, and renounce all search for concepts if I have no need of them. If however, this need is present, then I am not satisfied until I have brought the concepts Ball, Elasticity, Motion, Impact, Velocity, etc., into a certain connection, to which the observed process is related in a definite way. As surely as the occurrence goes on independently of me, so surely is the conceptual process unable to take place without my assistance.
We shall have to consider later whether this activity of mine really proceeds from my own independent being, or whether those modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think just as those thoughts and thought-connections determine that happen to be present in our consciousness. (see fn 1) For the present we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel obliged to seek for concepts and connections of concepts, which stand in a certain relation to the objects and events which are given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours or whether we perform it according to an unalterable necessity, is a question we need not decide at present. That it appears in the first instance to be ours is beyond question. We know for certain that we are not given the concepts together with the objects. That I am myself the agent in the conceptual process may be an illusion, but to immediate observation it certainly appears to be so. The question is, therefore: What do we gain by supplementing an event with a conceptual counterpart?