Feel free to take your own advice and I will follow your example.

As there is nothing new in your reply, that’s the plan.

You are contradicting yourself rather blatantly. On the one hand, you deny the correspondence between the mind and its object by insisting that the universe has no rationality. On the other hand, you suggest that we have “devised” a correspondence as if nature had something for the mind to correspond to.

—-“That doesn’t render the correspondence entirely subjective, although we must sometimes strive to stand apart from that human evolutionary and cultural history, and see ourselves has having emerged from that history, in order to approach objectivity.”

If, as you are unsuccessfully trying to argue, all parts of the correspondence can be explained by the by the evolving rationality of the subject and no parts of the correspondence can be explained by the properties of the object of investigation, then obviously the correspondence is entirely subjective. More to the point, unless the object of the investigation is comprehensible [rational], then there is no correspondence in any case. Correspondence requires a rational universe and a rational mind to comprehend it. That is what correspondence means. You are trying to deny correspondence and have it at the same time. To be consistent, you must deny correspondence altogether. Darwinism and correspondence are incompatible because correspondence requires at least two realms [moderate dualism], otherwise there are no two realms to correspond. You cannot have it both ways.

—–“Indeed, given that we have a good idea of the processes and history that resulted in our conceptual tools and the representations of nature they generate, and the biases such a history may introduce (such as the misapplication of theory of mind, resulting in the overattribution of agency to nature), we may subtract those biases to attain an understanding that better approximates an objective account. That cannot be done from a stance of denial of that history.’”

You seem to be confusing the philosophical meaning of objective with the psychological definition. We are discussion the objective nature of a rational universe apart from the subjective perspective of the investigator. We are not talking about an “objective” investigation in terms of the absence of bias and prejudice.

—-“You are inordinately fond of tautological declarations, as it is only tautologically true that “one cannot comprehend the incomprehensible.” What does NOT
follow is that nature absent authorship is necessarily
incomprehensible.”

Remarkably, you deny even that which you declare to be “tautologically true.” Also, I have already explained that those are two separate but related arguments, and you reject not just the latter argument for the former argument as well. So, that last protest is meaningless.

— “The appropriate question that is not tautological is, “you need to explain how the -investigator can use human science to quantify and comprehend that which was not authored.” The answer is as above.”

The appropriate question will be the one that prompts an explicit and straightforward answer, for which I am willing to try any for which I am willing to try formulation, tautological included. You have in no way explained how the investigator can use human science to comprehend and quantify a comprehensible and quantifiable universe, because you deny the fact that the universe is comprehensible and quantifiable. You have only stated that evolution produces the individual’s capacity to comprehend, even though you also say that there is nothing rational in the universe to comprehend.

.

—-“Indeed, it seems clear to me that StephenB makes the argument that he does because he
wants the fact that nature is often comprehensible in the sense that we all agree upon to compel the
conclusion that must be a “sender” or “author” of phenomena in nature in the same sense that there
must be a “sender” or “author” of a paragraph.”

No, I make the argument for the simple reason which you have not yet grasped. The rational mind cannot comprehend a rational universe unless the universe is rational. That is an epistemological issue. On the other hand, once one understands that regularity, rationality, order, and comprehensibility all serve purpose, then one can infer the author as a second order proposition. That is a metaphysical issue. The arguments are separate but related—as I have stated, and as you have ignored. You reject both the epistemological argument and the metaphysical argument even as you conflate them.

—-Diffaxial: “I think we’ve done a good job setting out opposing
positions on this particular issue. Rather than continuing to state and restate these positions beyond
the point at which the discussion has become completely dysfunctional, and unless you have
something new to say on the topic, I suggest we putthis issue in the mail.”

Feel free to take your own advice and I will follow your example.

The issue is this: Does nature behave with a logic that corresponds to the logic of our minds.

Biological and cultural evolution resulted and continues to result in correspondence between our representations of nature and nature itself. It is we who were adjusted by selection, and by methods we ourselves have devised, such that correspondence is present (to whatever extent it is present). That doesn’t render the correspondence entirely subjective, although we must sometimes strive to stand apart from that human evolutionary and cultural history, and see ourselves has having emerged from that history, in order to approach objectivity. Indeed, given that we have a good idea of the processes and history that resulted in our conceptual tools and the representations of nature they generate, and the biases such a history may introduce (such as the misapplication of theory of mind, resulting in the over-attribution of agency to nature), we may subtract those biases to attain an understanding that better approximates an objective account. That cannot be done from a stance of denial of that history.

If it doesn’t, then you need to explain how the investigator can use human science to quantify and comprehend that which is not quantifiable and not comprehensible.

You are inordinately fond of tautological declarations, as it is only tautologically true that “one cannot comprehend the incomprehensible.” What does NOT follow is that nature absent authorship is necessarily incomprehensible. The appropriate question that is not tautological is, “you need to explain how the investigator can use human science to quantify and comprehend that which was not authored.” The answer is as above.

The analogy of the paragraph is apt.

I disagree. There are many reasons to believe it inapt (e.g. it commits a category error.)

The fact is that something must be comprehensible in order to be comprehended.

The flip side of the above tautology, as “BY DEFINITION” implicitly calls from the mountaintops and whispers from the trees.

Tautologies aside, authorship does not necessarily follow from comprehensibility.

If the investigator trusts his internal mental processes which tell him that IF it rains THEN the streets will get wet, that is only because the same logic is true in the real world– IF it rains THEN the streets really will get wet.

As above, selection ensured that our cognitive and cultural resources reflect such a correspondence. No mystery there.

Instinctively, the subjectivist understands that a rational universe implies a creator and that the comprehensibility of nature requires an author. So, he denies nature’s rationality in order to avoid nature’s author.

Really just the flip side of:

Indeed, it seems clear to me that StephenB makes the argument that he does because he wants the fact that nature is often comprehensible in the sense that we all agree upon to compel the conclusion that must be a “sender” or “author” of phenomena in nature in the same sense that there must be a “sender” or “author” of a paragraph. Otherwise, StephenB asserts, we would not fine nature intelligible at all. It is his goal to adduce success in the natural sciences as evidence for that authorship, because, he asserts, nature would not be intelligible absent that authorship.

All that said,

One of my favorite journals, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, uses a format that I find very effective. In that journal a target article presents an lengthy argument for a particular thesis. Much of what follows in a given issue are briefer (but substantial) invited responses from numerous researchers and theoreticians in the field, many of whom vigorously dispute the target thesis. The reader is therefore provided a very comprehensive contemporary view of the issue.

I think we’ve done a good job setting out opposing positions on this particular issue. Rather than continuing to state and restate these positions beyond the point at which the discussion has become completely dysfunctional, and unless you have something new to say on the topic, I suggest we put this issue in the mail.

(I will add that no one, not even Barry, has denied that he completely misstated DeLurker’s position in the OP.)

You have yet to explain how the investigator apprehends regularity, order, and rationality if regularity, order, and rationality are not there.

—“I further argued that your conclusion that, in light of our comprehension, nature necessarily bears intentional content (i.e., that it may be likened to a paragraph bearing an encoded message), and otherwise would be unintelligible, doesn’t follow from that fact. We are capable of understanding both columns of text and geological columns, the former comprehension entailing the decoding of encoded message content and the associated communicative intent (as in Grice/Searle above), the latter comprehension entailing a grasp natural events that convey no such content or intent. The former characterizes human communication; the latter human scientific investigation of the natural world.”

The issue is this: Does nature behave with a logic that corresponds to the logic of our minds. If it doesn’t, then you need to explain how the investigator can use human science to quantify and comprehend that which is not quantifiable and not comprehensible. [A Darwinist scenario of the history of human comprehension does not address that topic because it says nothing about the object of the investigation]. The analogy of the paragraph is apt. Just as the logic of the written paragraph exhibits a logic that corresponds to the logic of our mind, the universe also exhibits a logic that corresponds to the human mind. Just as the interpreter reads the paragraph, the scientist reads nature. I am not committing a “category error” or “reifying,” or “personalizing” or “projecting” or imposing human characteristics onto nature. None of those formulations are arguments, they are simpy misplaced accusations that do not address the topic. The fact is that something must be comprehensible in order to be comprehended. The observer cannot take away from nature that which nature does not have. Again, this should be obvious and ought not need any defense. It is your position of an incomprehensible universe that requires a rational defense, and, so far, you have provided not even a hint of one.

–“Again, this has nothing to do with subjectivity, and indeed removes another subjective element, as we often disagree for subjective reasons over what messages are intended by events that do fall in a domain that can be rightly said to often include intentional content and “encoding-decoding,” namely human actions and utterances.”

The subjectivity consists in holding that the investigator can comprehend nature even if nature’s behavior is incomprehensible, which is tantomount to saying that the subject [investigator] can apply human logic to understand an object [investigation] that does not behave logically. That makes no sense. If the investigator trusts his internal mental processes which tell him that IF it rains THEN the streets will get wet, that is only because the same logic is true in the real world– IF it rains THEN the streets really will get wet. We can reasonably predict events in the real world only because the real world itself is reasonable. Narcissistic subjectivism intrudes into the investigation and makes it all about the investigator. Subjectivism does not read comprehensibilty “out of nature,” as the scientist is obliged to do but rather reads incomprehensibiltiy “into nature.” Instinctively, the subjectivist understands that a rational universe implies a creator and that the comprehensibility of nature requires an author. So, he denies nature’s rationality in order to avoid nature’s author.

To suggest that nature is rational is to point out that it has rational properties that can be understood by rational minds. For you nature is not rational, which means that rational minds could not comprehend it since there would be nothing there comprend.

I am arguing that nature is neither rational nor not-rational, as the ascription of either commits a category error. This has nothing to do with subjectivity. Indeed, it removes a subjective element, as we often disagree for subjective reasons over what may be described as “rational” in that domain in which those terms are applicable, namely the domain of human actions.

The essence of your error lies in the words, “in the sense that we all agree upon”…… It is not our “agreement” that makes nature comprehensible; it is nature’s properties.” Once again, you have tried to subjectivize an objective reality.

This misconstrues my statement. I did not state that our attainment of comprehension of nature occurs because of agreement or consensus. I stated that we (you, me, VJ) agree that human investigation and reason (e.g. science) sometimes result in the comprehension of nature.

I further argued that your conclusion that, in light of our comprehension, nature necessarily bears intentional content (i.e., that it may be likened to a paragraph bearing an encoded message), and otherwise would be unintelligible, doesn’t follow from that fact. We are capable of understanding both columns of text and geological columns, the former comprehension entailing the decoding of encoded message content and the associated communicative intent (as in Grice/Searle above), the latter comprehension entailing a grasp natural events that convey no such content or intent. The former characterizes human communication; the latter human scientific investigation of the natural world.

Again, this has nothing to do with subjectivity, and indeed removes another subjective element, as we often disagree for subjective reasons over what messages are intended by events that do fall in a domain that can be rightly said to often include intentional content and “encoding-decoding,” namely human actions and utterances.

The essence of your error lies in the words, “in the sense that we all agree upon”…… It is not our “agreement” that makes nature comprehensible; it is nature’s properties.” Once again, you have tried to subjectivize an objective reality. Indeed, you are making the opposite or the reverse of a categorical error. You are ascribing to the subject [the human capacity to comprehend] that which should be ascribed to nature [comprehensibility]. Subjectivists cannot come to terms with the ontological reality of the investigator and the ontological reality of the object of the investigation so they oversimplify by trying to explain everything in terms of the investigator alone. That will not do. [This, by the way, is not reminiscent of "Cartesian dualism," the error that prompted Ryle's notion of "categorical error." Skeptics are always busy trying to slay the radical Cartesian dualistic strawman while ignoring the logical and sensible Aristotelian/Thomistic dualism.]

I well know that meaning of the term, its origin, and the subjectivist motivation that prompts it. The word you need to focus on is “distraction,” which constitutes your damage control strategy.

To suggest that nature is rational is to point out that it has rational properties that can be understood by rational minds. For you nature is not rational, which means that rational minds could not comprehend it since there would be nothing there comprend. Thus, you ignore the correspondence between natures comprehensibility and man’s capacity to comprehend it, providing the simplistic and subjectivist answer that human history explains all. That argument makes no sense since it ignores the object of the investigation, leaving the investigator to investigate himself.

+

Your definition of category mistake is exactly right. What you are incompletely characterizing, however, is StephenB’s argument. StephenB’s argument turns on an ambiguity or equivocation (I don’t think intentional) that is apparent in his use of words such as “rational” and/or “comprehensible,” and does so in a way that does result in a category error. Stephen’s main assertion lies downstream from that error.

We all agree that it is perfectly intelligible to ask whether entities within the universe, or even the universe itself, are such that we may be capable of understanding them. We agree that it makes sense to to ask about any entity, “can that entity be understood by human investigation and reasoning?” Scientific success indicates that many phenomena can be understood and that perhaps the universe as whole may someday be understood as well, particularly when you define human reason and the scientific enterprise as I have above (the product of a network of distributed cognition over historical time scales). As you say, “All entities, it seems, can be sorted into two baskets: amenable to human reason, or not.” There is no category error there.

But Stephen is asserting more than that, and it is this additional assertion that commits a category error. Stephen’s assertion is that nature is “intelligible” and “comprehensible” in the way that a paragraph is intelligible, and further insists that if it were not intelligible in this way, it would not be intelligible at all.

Paragraphs are intelligible or comprehensible in the sense that they have been “made comprehensible” by an author, in the sense that an intelligible message has been encoded into it. The reader, upon comprehending the paragraph, decodes that encoded message and retrieves its meaning. When meaning is successfully conveyed in this way it is right to say that there is intentional activity on both ends – a sender and a receiver. And, it is no coincidence that the word “meaning” can refer both to message content and to “intentions” (as in, “I didn’t mean to do that”), as the recovery of the meaning of a message occurs when I understand what the sender intends that I understand. Here I think of Searle’s pithy take on Grice:

Grice saw correctly that when we communicate to people, we succeed in producing understanding in them by getting them to recognize our intention to produce that understanding. Communication is peculiar among human actions in that we succeed in producing an intended effect on the hearer by getting the hearer to recognize the intention to produce that very effect….I can, for example, tell them that it is raining just by getting them to recognize my intention to tell them that it is raining. (from Searle, J. R. (1998). Mind, language, and society: Philosophy in the real world. New York: Basic Books, pages 144-145.)

That Stephen intends “comprehensible” in this sense of “encoding-decoding,” and a sense that includes intentional meaning, is completely clear from his above statements:

Just as a written paragraph must be made comprehensible before a reader can comprehend it, a universe must be made comprehensible before a scientist can study it.

And, particularly:

if there was no coded message in nature, then the message could not be decoded…That is exactly what a scientist does, he decodes, unscrambles, and reverse engineers the messages found in nature.

It is my claim that Stephen’s additional assertion, in the context of the contemporary scientific world picture, commits a category error. Just as hurricanes destroy homes neither accidentally nor intentionally (because hurricanes are not agents, and the dimension “intentional – accidental” can only be said to apply to actions initiated by agents), neither are galaxies and thunderstorms either “rational” or “irrational,” because only agents capable of reasoning (or faulty reasoning) are capable of rationality or irrationality in that sense. Similarly, to construe the causal facts behind a lightning strike or supernova as reflecting rational authorship and a message (“what was intended by THAT??”) is indeed similar to remarking on the color of a number or the oafishness of a hurricane.

Of course, at another remove, that is the debate at hand, in that the contemporary scientific world picture also asserts that the advent and history of living organisms (including ourselves) does not reflect “authorship,” a world picture many people find impossible to accept. Indeed, it seems clear to me that StephenB makes the argument that he does because he wants the fact that nature is often comprehensible in the sense that we all agree upon to compel the conclusion that must be a “sender” or “author” of phenomena in nature in the same sense that there must be a “sender” or “author” of a paragraph. Otherwise, StephenB asserts, we would not fine nature intelligible at all. It is his goal to adduce success in the natural sciences as evidence for that authorship, because, he asserts, nature would not be intelligible absent that authorship.

But here is where the (I think unintentional) equivocation occurs, as Stephen ascribes to nature “comprehensibility” in the sense of “comprehensible like an encoded paragraph” (and “rationality” in the sense of “the actions of a rational agent”), but claims in support of that assertion “comprehensibility” in the sense we all agree is appropriate, that is, “amenable to understanding by means of human investigation and reason,” a relationship to human comprehension that may be shared by authored and non-authored phenomena alike. But “comprehensible” in the first sense does not follow from the fact of comprehensibility in the second sense. Nor is the conclusion that nature is “comprehensible” in the first sense (the intelligible encoding/decoding of messages) compelled by success in attaining scientific understanding in the second.

Is the number 2 green or not green?

Merely asking the question betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a number is. To ask whether an abstract methematical entity can be colored is indeed tantamount to a category mistake.

But I cannot think of any kind of entity, abstract or otherwise, for which the question, “Can that entity (and all its properties) be understood by human reason?” is an illegitimate question – i.e. one that doesn’t even make sense. It seems to be a question that we can meaningfully ask about any object, or collection of objects – even the whole cosmos. If the question didn’t make sense, then we wouldn’t have a science called cosmology, would we?

Thus, to maintain that the question, “Is the cosmos rational?” is a category mistake, you have to argue that there is something wrong-headed about the scientific quest. For it really is that bold – a quest for unbounded knowledge.

So far, human beings have had a pretty good track record in unravelling the secrets of the cosmos – even if their investigations often give rise to new questions. There seems to be nothing out there, which we can observe, which remains impervious to scientists’ best attempts to understand it. Even black holes can be modeled.

There are, however, some entities which cannot be understood by human reason.

(1) Once we have identified the fundamental laws of science, we shall have to take them as a “given” – although even here, we can still investigate the question of why the universe has these laws and not some other ones. For instance, if (as physicist Garrett Lisi proposes in his Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything) it turned out that the universe instantiates the geometrical structure E8, which many mathematicians consider to be the most beautiful mathematical object, that would be a very surprising fact, which we might reasonably explain by the hypothesis that the universe was designed by an intelligent Being who wanted to make the universe in the most elegant possible manner.

(2) We don’t seem to be very good at understanding ourselves. Although we can model any aspect of our behavior, we cannot construct a complete model of human nature, the way we can for the nature of gold, say. Nothing surprising here – it’s just a consequence of our capacity for recursion, coupled with the fact that we can’t step outside our own skins.

(3) If higher intelligences (i.e. aliens or angels) exist within the cosmos, or if the cosmos itself is the creation of a Supreme Intelligence, as theists believe, then of course, we can hardly hope to understand the workings of these minds.

So in these cases, the answer to our question, “Can this entity be understood by human reason?” is: No. But I defy you to name a single entity for which the question isn’t even legitimate. All entities, it seems, can be sorted into two baskets: amenable to human reason, or not.

—-Diffaxial; “[C] To state either that nature is rational or that nature is irrational is to commit a category error.”

No, actually that is incorrect. If the universe was not rational and, if under those conditions, someone falsely attributed rationality to it, that would be a category error.

Which tells me that you don’t know what a category error, or category mistake, is. Get busy.

Do you see the word “irrational” in that paragraph. No, someone quietly slipped it in and hoped no one would notice. [Who on earth could that have been?]

That would be StephenB in 105:

By your account, the scientist does none of those things, rather he is simply reflecting on…an irrational nature which cannot really be comprehended at all.