"As structure" and associated ramblings while listening to Dreyfus

"No 'as-free' scene" -- referential ties that connect the world into a certain whole. The as-structure is structuring your experiences even when you are just coping - you don't see the fact of an "as-structure". The church, the type of car, the habit of speech all refer to the network of meaning, indicating other meaings - the type of car refers out to a certain type of person etc - "car" as "stance". This referential wholeness is knitted together in the daily socialization, which build these referential links. The links recede into the background as you get skillful, but they are even more active then: you automatically place a person based on the car he drives without wondering.

Do these links somehow stop linking when they hit FSW's, implicit stances on identity?

Affordances are linked similarly as the above evaluative example, and perhaps affordances are more important than evaluation. One can follow through with each affordance that is an affordance related to something, etc.

Witt might say that at the edges the referential whole unravels in the same way that the denotation of words unravels ("slab").

"Cultural predicates" -- Husserl. Nifty.

Important to separate "understanding" from circumspective seeing and thematic pointing. Start with this most basic understanding, then get to circumspect understanding, then to thematic pointing, etc. Descartes goes in the opposite direction.

Dasein finds itself already in a world of meaning -- don't ever build it up from pieces that don't have meaning. We form gestalts and meaningfulness from really bad and sparse data; the synthesis is prior to the analysis... I would agree (duh), and even extend it biologically -- the entire universe, and at least the planet have all evolved together, and we are prepared genetically for a certain network of meaning.

I am listening to Dreyfus talk about "the developmental story"; interesting.

As equipment moves into the background, it "adds to the referential whole". Is this whole in the background necessarily?

Meaning goes from something internal (Descartes) to being the basic character of the referential whole (Aristotle, Heidegger). So we already have it? It comes from the world, not from inside?

If that instinct for wholeness comes first, it seems like it might get thwarted often, since there is lots in our world that is impossible at first to explain, we might get Anxiety or something like it. (Cognitive dissonance.)

"Meaning most outer, most public phenomena there is ... it is this referential totality"

We hear motorcycles and wagons, not pure noise, because we can't help but knit together the referential whole. But even to hear pure noise is enabled by our knowing some other more "absolute" (say ... Cartesian!) reference system. Stitch together the phonetics along a time axis, instead of stitching them together according to what a person is trying to communicate. But even a Cartesian reference system is a contingent reference system, just like a meaning rich reference system; so we can't really get to an absolute place ever (though I think Dreyfus and Heidegger both believe that the Cartesian system is absolute in some way). And what about quantum physics!!??

Interesting that there is difference in the referential wholes overlaid together in a society. When you have no meaning for something, probably because you don't have a referential whole, you don't even see anything at all; so in many contexts, people are blind to what other people see. When and how do these referential wholes get shared? Entropy? Vygotsky and the orientation of the teacher? Why do they sometimes not get shared, if entropy / diffusion is always at work? This really matters if you want to do social work. One could write a whole thing about referential wholes. I don't know how I can write anything other than a theory of culture ... for demography. Semiotics might have some insights into the varied ways these referential wholes get knitted together, and how they get transposed.

Dreyfus speaks of the rich experience theory. Yes. I think the parallel character of it (Hanks on the communicative expericence) is hugely important.

Perhaps the return to Aristotle common in other philosophy is partly a return to a meaning-full world, that was done in via Descartes. Interesting - Heidegger, MacIntyre, etc all return to Aristotle. Weber's radical thing is to posit the importance of meaning in understanding society.