Body-environment (b-en) -- Functional cycle (fucy) -- An object -- The body and time -- Evolution, novelty, and stability -- Behavior -- Culture, symbol, and language -- Thinking with the implicit.

In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage.

Commentary on ‘The View from Within’, edited by Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear.

In this paper I will attempt to discuss linguistic analysis and phenomenology accurately so that the adherents of each can agree with what I say, and yet also the discussion of each method must be understandable to the adherents of the other. If I can really do that, the basic similarities will appear. I will attempt to state some propositions that apply to both frames of reference. The similarities which these propositions state are basic aspects of philosophic method, and they (...) also pose a major problem. (shrink)

In this paper I will attempt to discuss linguistic analysis and phenomenology accurately so that the adherents of each can agree with what I say, and yet also the discussion of each method must be understandable to the adherents of the other. If I can really do that, the basic similarities will appear. I will attempt to state some propositions that apply to both frames of reference. The similarities which these propositions state are basic aspects of philosophic method, and they (...) also pose a major problem. (shrink)

WHEN THE FIRST GIFFORD LECTURES were delivered in Scotland in 1888-89, the Scottish philosophical and theological worlds were undergoing significant changes. Through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, natural theology referred to the traditional arguments for the existence of God, particularly as put forth in the work of William Paley. But developments in the empirical sciences and in the empirical type of philosophy which dominated British thought during this period challenged these arguments and led to widespread religious (...) skepticism. Thomas Reid and William Hamilton were two Scots who had sought to overcome the religious skepticism of the empirical age, but the appeal to common sense belief on the one hand and to an unknowable absolute on the other hand provided little comfort for many who were dissatisfied with the options of religious scepticism and doctrinal orthodoxy. A new philosophical spirit, however, was making itself known. This is suggested in a note to the 1877 edition of David Masson's Recent British Philosophy, first published in 1865. (shrink)

Moritz Schlick was the leader of the Vienna Circle, that distinguished group of analytic thinkers who played such an important role in the second quarter of this century that in the words of Sir A. J. Ayer "no subsequent work of any philosophical interest has been unaf fected by it. " Inspired by the unparalleled achievements of the natural sciences and of mathematics Schlick and his colleagues strove to bring about through new and exacting methods of analysis a revo lution (...) in philosophy which would be crowned with accomplishments that would parallel those of the sciences. Such a revolution did take place - not in Vienna but in the English speaking world and elsewhere. At its base lay the discovery (due to Gottlob Frege) that logic is neither tied to thinking nor to natural language and Schlick had correctly identified the turning point in philosophy as the mo ment in which this discovery was made and exploited. Henceforth the key-problems in philosophy of science, epistemology, ethics and philosophy of language were to be stated with maximum preci sion, their central concepts subjected to careful analysis, the results rigorously systematized and, wherever possible, axiomatized. The authors who followed the invitation to celebrate the Cen tennial in these pages, have been in one way or another affected by the Vienna Circle. (shrink)

The author is a historian of religion, one accustomed to trying to understand the meaning of sentences in religions which appear in cultures different from our own. From this perspective he attacks linguistic philosophy, arguing that it does not take adequate account of the systems within which sentences in religion are used, that it fails to understand the personal dimension of religious utterances, and that the tendency to treat religious utterances as propositions to be believed is the result of a (...) narrowness of vision resulting from a development in western culture in which we have come to look to the sciences for our models of understanding and speaking. Faith, not belief, Smith argues in these Richard Lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, is the central religious category and statements which arise from faith are personal statements, statements about man and his relations to the world and God. That the modern era talks so much about religious belief rather than faith is said to be the result of a turn which has taken place in our uses of "faith" and "belief" and this turn, which is indicative of a change in the world view of western culture, is held to have been aided and abetted by theologians. (shrink)

The first collection of Gendlin's groundbreaking essays in philosophical psychology, Saying What We Mean casts familiar areas of human experience, such as language and feeling, in a radically different light. Instead of the familiar emphasis on the conceptually explicit in an era of scientism, Gendlin shows that the implicit also comprises a structure available for recognition and analysis. In the tradition of American pragmatism, Gendlin forges a new path that synthesizes contemporary evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and philosophical (...) linguistics. (shrink)

'Implicit understanding' is much wider than what we can attend to at one time, and it is in some respects more precise. Examples are examined. What is implicit functions in certain characteristic ways. Some of these are defined. They explain how new concepts come to us in a bodily process that goes beyond previous logic but takes implicit account of it, without new logical steps. All concepts can be considered 'explications' of implicit body- environment interaction. 'Explication' provides an overall model (...) within which the objectivity of logical concepts can be explained and preserved. Section III concerns new kinds of operational research. Section IV shows how a theory of logically connected terms can always be formulated from something known implicitly. Section V shows how the explication model affects the theory of language. (shrink)

Gendlin proposes experiential concepts as bridges between phenomenology and logical formulation. His method moves back and forth, aiming to increase both natural understanding and logical formulation. On thesubjective side, the concepts requiredirect reference tofelt orimplicit meaning. There is no equivalence between this and the logical side. Rather, in logical explication, the implicit iscarried forward, a relation shown by many functions. The subjective is no inner parallel. It performsspecific functions in language. Once these are located, they also lead to developments (...) on the formulated side.To show some of this, Gendlin modifies Lakoff and Johnson ''s theory of metaphor, and expands it into a theory of all language use. He denies that a metaphor consists of a pattern or image, shared by two situations. There is only one situation — the metaphoric one. The original situation is actually a family of many uses. As in all speech, a word makes sense only as its use-family crosses with an actual situation in the actual spot in a sentence. Subjectively, a metaphor means this crossing. From it, long chains of new similarities and differences can be generated. Ways to study the functions and features of thiscrossing are proposed. (shrink)

The uniqueness of logic is upheld and contrasted with twenty roles of a wider responsive order that includes us and our procedures. Empirical responses are precise, but different in different approaches. Procedures and findings are independent of (not separable from) their concepts. Two-way feedback obviates a top-down derivation of findings from assumptions, hypotheses, history, or language. The postmodern problems of interpretation, conditions of appearances and relativism involve the ancient error of making perception the model-instance of experience. Instead, bodily interaction functions (...) in language and precedes perception and interpretation. Logic, space time locations and individuated referents involve positional relations derived from comparing. Beyond Kuhn, Feyerabend, Newton and Einstein, if we can give interaction priority over comparing, the responsive objectivity of both can be upheld. A new empiricism, neither naive nor constructivist, uses the words order, explication, truth, and exactly to build on Wittgenstein and on Dilthey's hermeneutic. Natural language is metaphor-like, originally crossed. Logic must ignore its assumptions. It must render everything as a machine and drop humans and animals out. A new discipline is proposed, to move between the logical and the responsive orders, to deal with the machine/human interface and the social uses of science such as bioengineering. (shrink)