Theistic Inclinations

[Whateverist]

I realize I've wakened the dead here, but have only come across this exchange and am now interested to see it continue and participate myself.  I wonder if the participants have any interest in returning to it now?

… I'm saying that each has their own domain and that the domain of internal experiences is the world of our shared psychology… The internal world of math and logic is mapped to the external world.  That's taking a piece of math or logic and using it to model the external world.  That is using math and logic as descriptors.  You won't find math or logic themselves in the external world…How do you know that math and logic aren't a part of our common psychology?

First there is a danger of falling into a semantic argument about the meaning and scope of psychology. If you mean a science that studies the qualities and characteristics of the human mind then we are in agreement at least as far as that goes. But the topic is deeper than mere psychology in the same way that the study of being-as-such is a more fundamental inquiry than the study of particular beings – not individual features of minds but the nature of mind itself. The attempt to reduce everything to psychology ignores the vital distinction between the essence of cognition, its intentionality (in the Brentano/Sartre sense), and the various contents of that intentionality.

Regarding my bolded, don't you think it useful to at least bear in mind that we carry our psychological limitations everywhere .. especially into our attempts to look beyond them?  I don't think it is reductionist to accept the provisional nature of any conclusions reached in such attempts.  It is merely prudent.

My rudimentary thinking on the matter is that logic and mathematics are indeed symbolic systems but that those symbols passively describe actual prescriptive principles that actively impose order. Such appear necessary to bridge the link between first-person conscious experience and third-person phenomena. For example, the Principle of Non-Contradiction is the antidote to solipsism since it is self-evidently true that whatever the PNC encodes linguistically would govern reality even in the absence of any finite minds to contemplate it. As such at least one immaterial object apparently exists apart from the mind that conceives it. My guess is that a radical skeptic could argue that what seems self-evident may not be so to which I would reply with respect to the PNC that position is self-defeating.

I can't help but wonder how you conceive the nature of these "actual prescriptive principles" and in what manner you think they exist in the passage I bolded.  What order we find is well described by these symbolic systems; but how do you infer agency in the establishment of that order, which you seem to be attributing to those principles?  Isn't that getting the cart ahead of the horse?  I suppose it is an expression of your theistic approach to the world to look for an order giver wherever order if found.  It is likewise an expression of my non-theistic world view to marvel at the inherent nature of things that they should interact as they do where I see order.  It is obviously a human trait -whether you see its inception as owing to God or evolution- to look for order and note exceptions.  It has mostly served us well.