Resistances in Ropes and Nets but Without a Rigid Fix-Point
It's a long way and walk to Tipperary indeed! The surveying of the epistemological and methodological as well as anthropological areas of recognition, cognition in general and acting as well as deciding, valuing etc.
from the vantage point of an interpretative pragmatic realism and methodological schema-interpretationism leads to a rather multi-leveled and manifold picture: We have no last, ultimate foundation which cannot be doubted at all, which would render a conceptual or linguistic formative basis to build a safe intellectual construction on it. We however do not operate like a rope artist without net, but we ourselves—on the basis of biological fixed genetic dispositions and formal-operational necessities (for example involved in the fundamental rules of logics as methodologically interpreted by Lorenzen (1955)) we ourselves would knit or construct our nets in which we try to catch or capture elements and parts of the world. Thus, we elaborate our own net including the rope on which we try to balance ourselves. These nets and ropes may be extended and modified. We work to a large extent with self-constructed or culturally “given” classifications, shapes, symbols, representational instruments and in most (not all!) cases rather flexible possibilities of “grasping” external phenomena and objects we are confronted with—and also reflecting ourselves as subjects, bodies and persons. We know that the nets are means and instruments of schematizing and ordering as well as of structuring and reshaping; they are interpretation-engendered as representative media and instruments, constituted on different interpretational levels, in a last analysis “deeply” socially conventionalized and linguistically or symbolically differentiated. Any form of “grasping” the world is unavoidably and indispensably deeply per se interwoven with interpretations— including not only elementary and refined schematizations, but also theories, everyday theoretical—and practical!—pre-suppositions as well as conceptual and linguistic “colouring”, if not even soaking. Nevertheless, from any necessarily interpretation-laden perspective it is practically inevitable (in order to avoid pragmatic performative paradoxes and contradictions) to hypostatize “the world” independent of us as “real”—even if we may not be able to objectify and identify elements in it independently of any pre-schematization or interpretation. Any identification of objects is per se already interpretative. To repeat the obvious for a last time: Any “graspability” whatsoever is interpretation-laden. The world is real, but (any description and action of) “grasping” the world is always interpretative, i.e. only conceived of and formed by scheme-interpretation. It is furthermore internally action-bound and deeply societal.We have to reject all full-scale interpretational idealisms, absolutisms or even imperialisms as well as the so-called ‘direct’, allegedly interpretation-free realistic objectivisms of, say, naive naturalistic or other provenance. We have good practical, pragmatic and theoretical reasons for this rejection. The argumentation in this respect can-as any possibility of “grasping” and representing—of course only be performed within the “universe of interpretations” and meta-interpretations (over interpretations) themselves.
Moreover, this is also valid for our subjectivity proper: We have to understand ourselves as acting, as “real” beings, as responsible and even causally manipulating beings always by way of working out conceptions and interpretations. We are necessarily and all the time interpreting and meta-interpreting beings. In any case, even the subject as such—in experience and as a center of agency as well as in its being “grasped” as an epistemological subject from a methodological point of view—is to be conceived of, methodologically speaking, as an interpretative construct: Even here we cannot evade interpretativity. Any “grasping”, action and understanding—even of our own selves or subjects—is (scheme-)interpretation- dependent, can only be performed and designated in and by interpretative constructs.
However, as repeatedly stressed this does not mean that everything being interpreted would merely be a product of our interpretations. “Reality in itself” and “objects” or “things in themselves” would exist independently of our interpretations, even if we know that we can only “grasp” them within the realm of our interpretative nets and constructions of conceptual and theoretical provenance and in (as well as under) action constellations. We finally gained the insight that even this process of interpreting does not capture reality in a sufficient and absolute manner. We also found out that the very model of realistic and pragmatic interpretations from an epistemological perspective is itself an interpretative conception. This would in a sense even apply to the self-understanding of man by the philosophical anthropological model of man as the ever-interpreting and meta-interpreting being (Lenk 1995b, 2007 chap. III, 2010, 2013).