> Ouch; that's gotta sting. I was going to make the same point a bit
> more tactfully, but thanks for saving me the trouble.
The point misses the point.
The contradiction is found in asserting both that all "seeing and judging" is determined by an "epistemological frame" and that some "seeing and judging," e.g. the "seeing and judging" that "that frame is created by our embeddedness in society, discourse, etc.," is not determined by an "epistemological frame." As I've pointed out before, I'm repeating arguments made by Husserl and Whitehehead (the use of the term "solipsism of the present moment" to describe the absurd implication of the assumptions comes from Whitehead who has taken it from Santayana - as a little googling would have been sufficient to show).
Here is the argument as applied to Hume's scepticism by Husserl in the Crisis.
> LOCKE'S NAÏVETÉS and inconsistencies lead to a rapid further
> development of his empiricism, which pushes toward a paradoxical
> idealism and finally ends in a consummated absurdity. The foundation
> continues to be sensationalism and what appears to be obvious, i.e.,
> that the sole indubitable ground of all knowledge is self-experience
> and its realm of immanent data. Starting from here, Berkeley reduces
> the bodily things which appear in natural experience to the
> complexes of sense-data themselves through which they appear. No
> inference is thinkable, according to Berkeley, through which
> conclusions could be drawn from these sense-data about anything but
> other such data. It could only be inductive inference, i.e.,
> inference growing out of the association of ideas. Matter existing
> in itself, a je ne sais quoi, according to Locke, is for Berkeley a
> philosophical invention. It is also significant that at the same
> time he dissolves the manner in which rational natural science
> builds concepts and transforms it into a sensationalistic critique
> of knowledge.
>
> In this direction, Hume goes on to the end. All categories of
> objectivity - the scientific ones through which an objective,
> extrapsychic world is thought in scientific life, and the
> prescientific ones through which it is thought in everyday life -
> are fictions. First come the mathematical concepts: number,
> magnitude, continuum, geometrical figure, etc. We would say that
> they are methodically necessary idealisations of what is given
> intuitively. For Hume, however, they are fictions; and the same is
> true, accordingly, of the whole of supposedly apodictic mathematics.
> The origin of these fictions can be explained perfectly well
> psychologically (i.e., in terms of immanent sensationalism), namely,
> through the immanent lawfulness of the associations and the
> relations between ideas. But even the categories of the
> prescientific world, of the straightforwardly intuited world - those
> of corporeity (i.e., the identity of persisting bodies supposedly
> found in immediate, experiencing intuition), as well as the
> supposedly experienced identity of the person - are nothing but
> fictions. We say, for example, "that" tree over there, and
> distinguish from it its changing manners of appearing. But
> immanently, psychically, there is nothing there but these "manners
> of appearing." These are complexes of data, and again and again
> other complexes of data - "bound together," regulated, to be sure,
> by association, which explains the illusion of experiencing
> something identical. The same is true of the person: an identical
> "I" is not a datum but a ceaselessly changing bundle of data.
> Identity is a psychological fiction. To the fictions of this sort
> also belongs causality, or necessary succession. Immanent experience
> exhibits only a post hoc. The propter hoc, the necessity of the
> succession, is a fictive misconstruction. Thus, in Hume's Treatise,
> the world in general, nature, the universe of identical bodies, the
> world of identical persons, and accordingly also objective science,
> which knows these in their objective truth, are transformed into
> fiction. To be consistent, we must say: reason, knowledge, including
> that of true values, of pure ideals of every sort, including the
> ethical - all this is fiction. This is indeed, then, a bankruptcy of
> objective knowledge. Hume ends up, basically, in a solipsism. For
> how could inferences from data to other data ever reach beyond the
> immanent sphere? Of course, Hume did not ask the question, or at
> least did not say a word, about the status of the reason - Hume's -
> which established this theory as truth, which carried out these
> analyses of the soul and demonstrated these laws of association. How
> do rules of associative ordering "bind"? Even if we knew about them,
> would not that knowledge itself be another datum on the tablet?
>
> Like all scepticism, all irrationalism, the Humean sort cancels
> itself out. Astounding as Hume's genius is, it is the more
> regrettable that a correspondingly great philosophical ethos is not
> joined with it. This is evident in the fact that Hume takes care,
> throughout his whole presentation, blandly to disguise or interpret
> as harmless his absurd results, though he does paint a picture (in
> the final chapter of Volume I of the Treatise) of the immense
> embarrassment in which the consistent theoretical philosopher gets
> involved. Instead of taking up the struggle against absurdity,
> instead of unmasking those supposedly obvious views upon which this
> sensationalism, and psychologism in general, rests, in order to
> penetrate to a coherent self-understanding and a genuine theory of
> knowledge, he remains in the comfortable and very impressive role of
> academic scepticism. Through this attitude he has become the father
> of a still effective, unhealthy positivism which hedges before
> philosophical abysses, or covers them over on the surface, and
> comforts itself with the successes of the positive sciences and
> their psychologistic elucidation. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm
> >
>
Here is Whitehead on the same absurd implications in "Uniformity and Contingency" (the full working out of "solipsism of the present moment" as the implication is found in his book Symbolism).
> It is urged that sense-objects - to use the term which I have
> applied to colours, sounds, bodily feelings, and such like things -
> are purely individual and mental, and that the common nature, in
> which we are incarnate, and which is the nature described in
> science, is a different order of being from these psychological
> offshoots of mental excitement. I again draw your attention to
> Hume, who has stated to perfection the first comment to be made on
> this doctrine. I repeat the passage which l have already quoted:
> "'Tis universally allowed by modern enquirers, that all the sensible
> qualities of objects, such as hard, soft, hot, cold, white, black,
> etc., are merely secondary, and exist not in the objects themselves,
> but are perceptions of the mind, without any external archetype or
> model, which they represent. If this be allowed, with regard to
> secondary qualities, it must also follow with regard to the supposed
> primary qualities of extension and solidity; nor can the latter be
> any more entitled to that denomination than the former. The idea of
> extension is entirely acquired from the senses of sight and feeling;
> and if all the qualities, perceived by the senses, be in the mind,
> not in the object, the same conclusion must reach the idea of
> extension, which is wholly dependent on the sensible ideas or the
> ideas of secondary qualities." But, according to the new relativity
> theory, space and time cannot be disjoined. Thus - if we follow the
> line of thought of the objection - not only must perceived space,
> but also perceived time, be considered as mental and purely personal
> to each individual. But we have agreed that all our knowledge is
> based on experience. We are thus led to the conclusion that all our
> knowledge is the play of our own mind. Indeed, on this supposition,
> it is a mere silly trick which leads me to speak in the plural, and
> I cannot imagine how I acquired the habit. For I have no source of
> information to give me news of anything beyond myself. The space-
> time of science is thus absolutely swept away. …
>
> Hume explains a ground for the origin of our instinctive trust in
> induction. But unfortunately his explanation does not disclose any
> rational explanation of this trust. The rational conclusion from
> Hume's philosophy has been drawn by those among the lilies of the
> field, who take no thought for the morrow.
>
> Hume admits this conclusion. He writes:-
>
> "The sceptic, therefore, had better keep in his proper
> sphere, and display those philosophical objections, which arise from
> more profound researches. Here he seems to have ample matter of
> triumph; while he justly insists, that all our evidence for any
> matter of fact, which lies beyond the testimony of sense or memory,
> is derived entirely from the relation of cause and effect; that we
> have no other idea of this relation than that of two objects, which
> have been frequently conjoin'd together; that we have no arguments
> to convince us, that objects, which have, in our experience, been
> frequently conjoin'd, will likewise, in other instances, be
> conjoined in the same manner; and that nothing leads us to this
> inference but custom or a certain instinct of our nature; which it
> is indeed difficult to resist, but which, like other instincts, may
> be fallacious or deceitful" (Essay XII, of the Academic or Sceptical
> Philosophy).
>
> Hume runs away from his own conclusion: he adds:-
>
> “On the contrary, he (a Pyrrhonian) must acknowledge, if
> he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were
> his principles universally and steadily to prevail" (loc. cit.).
>
> I wonder how Hume knows this: it must be that there is
> some element in our knowledge of nature which his philosophy has
> failed to take account of. Bertrand Russell adopts Hume's position.
> He says:-
>
> " If, however, we know of a very large number of cases
> in which A is followed by B and few or none in which the sequence
> fails, we shall in practice be justified in saying 'A causes B,'
> provided we do not attach to the notion of cause any of the
> metaphysical superstitions that have gathered about the
> word" (Analysis of Mind, Lecture V, Causal Laws). Again I should
> like to know how Russell has acquired the piece of information which
> he has emphasized by italics - " we shall in practice be justified,
> etc."
>
> “I do not like this habit among philosophers, of having
> recourse to secret stores of information, which are not allowed for
> in their system of philosophy. They are the ghost of Berkeley's
> "God," and are about as communicative.” <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544031
> >
>
Ted