Is there anything that exists necessarily?
I'm asking this to get a sense of what people think for another post I intend on making, where I realized I may have been making some controversial assumptions. So as the title asks: Is there anything that exists necessarily? By this, I don't mean to assume, if something exists necessarily, it must be a particular thing. Maybe something must exist necessarily, but we don't know what it is, or it's merely some "kind" of thing we can say must exist.
Obviously, God is a necessary being for most all theists, and so God exists necessarily. There's also a common line of thought with regards to "Why is there anything at all?" where the answer is "Because nothing is impossible", or, in other words, "Something must exist necessarily." In which case, that would also answer this question in the affirmative.
I feel like the only reason one would say there isn't anything that exists necessarily is to avoid God-like claims (even though that's petty) by way of claiming the universe is contingent, and could have failed to exist. Maybe one would disagree that there needs to be anything at all, there could have been nothing, but we just happen to exist.
Another angle I'm wondering about is the relationship between necessary existence and necessary truths. Most people seem happy to admit necessary truths, but would they say the same thing in terms of existence? Not sure, what do you think?
Obviously, God is a necessary being for most all theists, and so God exists necessarily. There's also a common line of thought with regards to "Why is there anything at all?" where the answer is "Because nothing is impossible", or, in other words, "Something must exist necessarily." In which case, that would also answer this question in the affirmative.
I feel like the only reason one would say there isn't anything that exists necessarily is to avoid God-like claims (even though that's petty) by way of claiming the universe is contingent, and could have failed to exist. Maybe one would disagree that there needs to be anything at all, there could have been nothing, but we just happen to exist.
Another angle I'm wondering about is the relationship between necessary existence and necessary truths. Most people seem happy to admit necessary truths, but would they say the same thing in terms of existence? Not sure, what do you think?
Comments (156)
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/15722/the-logic-of-a-universal-origin-and-meaning/p1
Essentially the universe is uncaused. And because of that, nothing that exists, except that the universe exists uncaused, is necessary.
Another way to look at it is is, "What is the definition of necessary?" Necessary implies some law that if this does not exist, then something which relies on that thing cannot exist. But is is necessary that the necessary thing itself exist? No.
No. Only [I]contingency[/I] is necessary (Q. Meillassoux's "Absolute") insofar as, [I]without exception[/I], every existing thing / fact (X) can be conceived of as not existing, or not being the case, (~X) [I]without contradiction[/I] (i.e. negating a "necessary thing").
Contra Meillassoux ( ): the claim "only contingency is necessary" is put forth as a universal and necessary truth about the structure of reality. Thus, the assertion of this claim implies its own denial and reveals an equivocation between logical conceivability and real intelligibility. That X can be conceived as not-X without formal contradiction implies absence of logical necessity not absence of metaphysical necessity. The very act of conceiving ~X presupposes a stable intelligible order (non-contradiction, being, negation, truth) none of which can be coherently negated without self-undermining. Universal contingency therefore parasitically depends on an unacknowledged necessity; the unconditioned ground of intelligibility. In other words, contingency only makes sense against the background of intelligibility and, therefore, cannot be absolutized.
Contra : the argument correctly shows that the universe cannot have a temporal cause (something earlier in time) or a compositional cause (something spatially outside the totality of things) , but it does not address the question of existential contingency per se. Scientific and descriptive causes explain how states of affairs arise within the universe, but they do not explain existence as such. The argument purports to address the question of existence as-such, but treats existence as if it were the last member of an explanatory chain (category error). Explaining existence does not mean finding an external producer in time or composition, but an unconditioned ground. Expanding explanatory “scope” to include the entire universe merely aggregates all contingent entities into a contingent totality, but does not address the question of why there is something (I.e. contingent totality) rather than nothing. Even an eternal or infinite universe remains a collection of contingent beings whose existence is not self-explanatory. This is a question of metaphysical grounding rather than causality and (in my opinion) is left unaddressed.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
What if the ground of intelligibility is itself groundless, as Wittgenstein and Heidegger maintain? And what is a groundless ground? It is performativity itself, becoming before being, difference prior to identity, intra-action before self-presence.
So to specify, for some individual, that there is no world in which that individual is absent, is to place a quite arbitrary restriction on the allowable domains. There is nothing in S5, modal logic, or rigid designation that forces this restriction.
Let's construct a model in which the individual a exists in every possible world:
w? ? {a,b,c}
w? ? {a,b}
w? ? {a}
Here, a "exists necessarily" - occurs in every possible world.
But we can always add
w? ? {b,c}
[hide="For those unversed in the shorthand..."]In word one the individuals are a, b, and c; in world two, they are a and b, and in world three, just a. Since to necessarily exist is to exist in every possible world, if this were all the possible worlds, a would exist necessarily. But we can always add a world, like world four, without a.[/hide]
Requiring an individual to exist in all worlds is a stipulated metaphysical condition, not a logical or semantic necessity.
Pretty much.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Nuh. Sure, all you have said is that if we are to be consistent, then we need to not be inconsistent. Well, yes. If you what to be inconsistent, go ahead, but don't expect to be able to do it consistently.
Again, nuh. An empty domain is consistent with possible world semantics and with S5.
It is so refreshing to hear someone who read and understand the premises!
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Correct.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I see what you are saying, but let me counter that slightly. The scope is not the entire universe, the scope is the totality of explanations for that universe. Meaning this includes all of the sub-causalities inside of it. When we trace backwards through these chains we either get a 'start' to the chain, or we see the whole chain in its totality. Either way, there is no cause at these points of reference. It simply is. It just so happens that these points of reference are the limits of causality for the causal explanations of that universe. And in either case, there can be no prior cause which allowed the causation of the universe to be.
There's a small notion of necessity as that which must be the case in order for something else to be the case - If you would read this post, it is necessary that you read English. There is a broader notion of necessity as what is true in all possible worlds - that two and two is four. They are not the same.
The advantage of the latter is that it avoids the contentious and irrelevant notion of causation.
(2+2)mod3=?
There are theorems in math having hypotheses that are both sufficient and necessary.
Just nit picking.
I consider this is a position worth taking seriously and part of why my "yes" is tentative, but ultimately I find it unsatisfying for the following reasons:
1. It's more of a refusal to ask certain questions than a rebuttal, casting intelligibility as an optional philosophical preference. This strikes me as untrue to the authentic spirit of the human desire to know, which continues to ask "why" until an answer is reached or inquiry is abandoned. Abandonment is a performative choice, rather than an explanatory achievement.
2. Groundless ground is, ultimately, a contradiction in terms. I don't think of this is a mere rhetorical point. A [I]ground[/I] is, by definition, that in virtue of which something is intelligible. Terminating explanation in a groundless ground is another way of saying "that which makes everything else intelligible is itself unintelligible", thereby affirming intelligibility everywhere except at the decisive point and exempting the most fundamental reality from the very standard it Is supposed to support.
3. If intelligibility is ultimately groundless, then the claim itself has no intelligible ground and cannot be rationally affirmed as true, only enacted as a stance. Perhaps this is what drove Heidegger into poetics and Wittgenstein into silence, but the moment it is offered as a philosophical claim - especially one meant to correct others - it implicitly submits to normative standards like coherence, explanatory adequacy and rational assent, thereby re-engaging the very operations it tries to overcome.
I'm curious to get your thoughts on this.
I just realized I didn't address this point:
I would say that these (performativity, becoming, difference, intra-action) are descriptions, not grounds. They tell us how discourse or reality behaves, but not why there is such behavior in the first place. For example:
In other words, I would argue that these smuggle intelligibility back in while denying it at the level of principle.
Again, I'd love to get your thoughts on this.
The point is not a trivial reminder that consistency is good, it's that the claim "only contingency is necessary" is being advanced as a true account of reality, not as a shrug or a stylistic preference. Once it's put forward as such, it implicitly claims universal scope, necessity and intelligibility. In other words, it depends on the implicit acceptance of what it outwardly denies. Once inconsistency is embraced at the level of first principles, rational discourse no longer functions as inquiry into reality.
Yes, this makes sense, but I don't think it fully evades the original objection. The original objection wasn't that you hadn't traced the causal chain far enough, it was that even if you trace every causal explanation available within the universe, you have still not explained why there is any contingent reality at all. In other words, the objection is distinguishing between causal explanation and metaphysical explanation. Causal explanation can explain one contingent entity by reference to another, but it can't explain contingent existence itself. Calling something "the limit of causality" does not show that it is self-explanatory, it only shows that a [I]certain kind[/I] of explanation has run out. The objection is saying that there is still more to be explained even after taking all causal explanations into account.
What do you think?
The original argument was not claiming that intelligibility is causally prior, instrumentally required or merely pragmatically unavoidable. It was claiming that the very meaning of contingency presupposes a necessary intelligible order (being, non-contradiction, negation, truth). These are conditions of the possibility of meaningfully asserting anything at all, including claims about contingency.
As such, the appeal to possible worlds semantics doesn't help as it already assumes a stable notion of truth, determinate identity across worlds, modal structure itself and the intelligibility of worlds as such. These cannot themselves be contingent all the way down. Modal logic describes relations between propositions, it doesn't explain why there is an intelligible order in virtue of which modal distinctions are meaningful at all.
The original argument was not about causation, but about explanatory dependence. Contingency implies intelligible dependence relations, intelligible dependence cannot be infinite or self-cancelling, therefore contingency presupposes something non-contingent.
Or so the argument goes...
Yep. There is always all sorts of presumed background. In Peno arithmetic, if you like, 2+=2=4. So supposing that something necessarily exists would be presuming just such a situation. What we might reject is the expectation that "Is there anything that exists necessarily?" has only one answer.
So yes, that should read "There is a broader notion of necessity as what is true in all accessible possible worlds", with accessibility conditions setting out the circumstances.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
If your account is inconsistent, you need a better account.
Do we agree on this, at least?
The job given modal logic is to provide a coherent account. If someone is happy with an incoherent account, then yes, they do not need modal logic...
And yes, introducing causality is a furphy.
My intention at that point is to note that there can be no logical reason for contingent reality. In the case where one reaches the end of the causal chain, there is nothing which explains the start. In the case in which one observes the entire causal chain as infinite, there is no reason why the chain exists either. Its not merely that I observed there to be no reason for the existence of a causal universe, it is that logically there can be no reason for a causal universe, and its existence is ultimately uncaused by anything else.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think I understand what you're saying, but let me repeat it from my viewpoint to make sure. Lets simplify with billiard balls. You're stating that Billiard Ball A can be explained by its current position because Billiard Ball B hit it 1 minute ago. But the existence of Billiard Bard B, independent of Billiard Ball A, cannot be explained by Billiard Ball A. Within that scope, you are correct.
But if we zoom in on Billiard Ball B, its existence is composed of many atoms. But of course, what composes those atoms? We zoom in further and find electrons and protons. So we continue to zoom in on the existence itself, finding that it is comprised of smaller and smaller things until either one of two things happen.
A. We find a 'smallest' thing. There is nothing smaller, no reason for its composition by outside forces or objects, no explanation for its existence besides the fact that it does.
B. We keep going infinitely. It turns out everything is always composed of something smaller.
The result is the same. In both cases, if the full chain or chains of causality are explored we arrive at a point in which there is no cause for the contingencies existence. In A, its because we've found something that provably has no other contingency for why it exists. In B, there is no contingency that explains the existence of the infinite contingencies all the way down. For if there were, it would be part of the infinite chain, and thus something outside of the chain of infinite causality cannot exist.
Thus there is no causal explanation ultimately for why there is existence. It simply is.
Doubtless.
“Only contingency is necessary” looks to be saying much the same as that for any individual we we might think necessary, we might posit a world in which that individual does not exist. That is, for any given individual, we might specify a world in which that individual is not in the domain.
I take the OP as asking if there are any necessary individuals - things. Not "are there necessary propositions?" or "Are there necessary truths?".
So set aside "Meillassoux's "Absolute" and look at Quoting 180 Proof
...which can be seen as an informal version of my more formal argument.
But the argument is not that modal logic forces us to accept a necessarily existing individual. Nor is It that there must be an individual whose existence is logically necessary in all possible worlds. You keep trying to reframe the issue as only about the modal status of individuals across possible worlds, whereas the argument concerns the conditions under which any such modal reasoning about individuals is intelligible at all.
To put it another way:
1. [I]There is no metaphysical necessity whatsoever; reality is absolutely contingent.[/I] (Meillasoux)
simply does [I]not[/I] follow from:
2. [I]For any individual object, I can construct a world where it does not exist.[/I] (Modal Semantics)
The former is a full-blooded metaphysical claim. As such, an appropriate rebuttal was given in equally metaphysical terms.
Ironically, Meillassoux himself explicitly rejects the application of possible world semantics to the problem of absolute contingency as methodologically suspect. I don't think he'd support your translation of his thesis into a trivial point about modal semantics.
So there are necessary truths, sentences and such. Are there necessary individuals?
Here's my observation, the contingency of particulars in the actual world; for any individual there is a world in which it does not exist: w? ? ?x?¬E(x).
But what Meillassoux wants is an application of this for every world, ??x?¬E(x).
Mine says that all individuals in the world are contingent. Meillassoux's is that all individuals in any world are contingent.
So to answer "Is there anything that exists in the actual world necessarily?" my contention will suffice; but if the question is "Is there anything that exists in any world necessarily? we'd need Meillassoux.
The conclusion is that the claim that some individual a exists necessarily, (?E(a)), is a stipulated constraint on the model, not something forced by the logic itself.
Meillassoux would rule out god as a possibility. My version just says he does not exist in the actual world... :wink:
Individuals - the person, the ego, individual self - are contingent as a matter of necessity. Interesting that the term 'individual' used to denote the person only becomes current in the 17th century. 'In the Middle Ages, you wouldn't call a person an individual. Instead, the term was used to describe things that were units of a whole. For example, the Holy Trinity was described as "individual" because its three parts could not be separated. To be "individual" meant to be unified with others, not separate from them.' The meaning was practically reversed in the Enlightenment.
Isn't "I" a necessary existence? I think, therefore I exist. That statement seems not quite logical.
I exist, therefore I think. This is logically correct. "I" is a necessary existence for my thought. Without "I", I couldn't have thought, or wrote this post. My existence or "I" is the logical necessity for my thought.
Thanks for the additional clarification. Your additional comments do a great job of hammering in the logic behind your argument. It seems like the question comes down to whether or not one thinks there is still an additional unanswered question lingering at the termination of the causal chain. You argue that once all contingent causal explanations have been exhausted, there's nothing left to explain. The residual worry is that this leaves the contingent totality itself unexplained.
Another way of framing the worry is that explaining each individual item within a contingent series by reference to its predecessor does not explain why there is a contingent series at all. The relations within the series can't be used to explain the existence of the series itself. The response "it just is" seems to arbitrarily terminate inquiry rather than satisfy it. I wouldn't argue that this is incoherent, but I might argue that it is unprincipled. To see what I mean, one might ask "why accept brute contingency at the level of the series but not at lower levels? If we accepted "it just is" earlier in the inquiry, explanation would never get off the ground."
What do you think? Is this a legitimate concern?
Since the post I originally responded to specifically referenced Meillasoux I think it is worth noting that Meillasoux would resist framing his argument in terms of modal semantics or (mere) logical conceivability. This deflates his metaphysical/transcendental meta-claim about the nature of modality itself into a question of technical formulation within modal logic. That said, if we’re content to set Meillesoux’s argument aside, then we can move on.
I would say that your claim that modal logic does not, by itself, compel the affirmation of a necessarily existing being is uncontroversial. What would be more controversial is the claim that metaphysical necessity is reducible to logical necessity. While you don’t seem to have explicitly stated this claim anywhere in your argument, I would say that it implicitly relies on that reduction in order to have any metaphysical force.
The hidden premise seems to be something like “all genuine necessities must be expressible as necessities in modal logic”. This collapses a genuine distinction. Logical necessity is about entailment between propositions. Metaphysical necessity is about what reality must be like in order for there to be anything at all. The argument you presented does not address the latter. As such, the argument regarding stipulated constraints doesn’t have any force because metaphysical necessity is not merely stipulated as part of a model-building choice, it is inferred as part of an argument or discovered as the end result of inquiry.
Thoughts?
Thank you for the polite and well written inquiry! It is rare to not get angry pushback. Not that you have to agree with me as this continues, it is just nice to have a pleasant discussion.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
A very good approach. Lets imagine for a second that the logic is correct and it is the case that ultimately there is no cause for existence, and thus contingency itself. Does that shut down inquiry, or open new avenues for us to explore?
First, understanding this ultimate end result does not diminish our need to understand as much about the causal universe as possible. Understanding the universe allows us to make wiser choices, and potentially control outcomes favorable to the human race.
Second, proving, "This is the thing that has no causality for its existence," is nigh impossible from a practical standpoint. There is always the question whether we have arrived at 'the end' or simply the end of our capability to understand either through the limitations of knowledge, observation, or instrumentation.
So I do not see it as a discouragement to inquiry and exploration of understanding our universe as much as possible. If it is true that ultimately there is no cause for contingency itself, this would be a discovery of the truth, and therefore a further understanding of the universe. This allows us to push our exploration into realms we had not yet thought possible.
For example, if it is the case that there is no underlying reason for why existence is, besides the fact that it is, we can put forth new ideas that might help us as we continue to explore causal interactions. If there was no reason for existence to be, then there is no reason for any existence not to be. Meaning in the next second, something could appear in reality that wasn't there before. Or something that was there could disappear.
Further it seems that if something could appear in reality, it could be anything. After all, if there is no reason for existence, de facto there are no limitations as to what can exist. There would have to be something which would cause there to be a limitation.
Thus while the conclusion might appear limiting at first, it is actually one of the most freeing to give credence to infinite possibilities. Knowing this can let us look at the universe in a new light. Could we math out what 'anything being possible' would logically entail? I've done a few approaches myself as proposals.
For example, imagine that the universe is an infinite plane and anything could happen at any moment on that plane. We can break the plane down into a theoretical x/y/z. Then we can do a bit of cardinality comparison. If 1, is the smallest space and 'smallest' particle (of course smallest is a limitation, but just go with this for a second) then we have the highest growing infinite series.
First, we must assume that if anything is possible, everything has an equal chance of appearing, disappearing, or being as anything else. In one time unit, every x,y,z portion of the grid could have something happen, or not happen. What's the chance of there being something that is the same from piece to piece? Infintismaly small. But given infinite x,y,z, it will happen. But its likely not going to happen anywhere near another cluster of sameness. Further, even if something happens on this level, if it does affect something around it larger, its going to be imperceptible and nearly negligible. Essentially a random dice roll in the universe that introduces the concept that at a particular level of measurement there is a principle of uncertainty.
Let me stop here. I could continue on with more questions that this raises, but I want to give you a chance to think about this first and potentially come to them yourself.
I challenge the assumption that we should assume contingency unless proven necessary. I believe there are laws of nature, and that laws entail a necessitation: given a cause, the effect will necessarily follow.
The exception is quantum indeterminacy (most interpretations) but this still entails a necessary probability distribution. Still, it accounts for a restricted source of contingency: any specific quantum collapse could have come out differently. A specific instance of Quantum Collapse causes result X1, but it could have resulted in X2, X3....Xn.
Quantum collapse demonstrates how contingency works: X is contingent iff there is a C such that C accounts for X, but C could have accounted for Y. I.e. C contingently accounts for X. There is no other obvious source of contingency.
So suppose the past is finite. This implies an uncauses initial state (S0): that initial state was not caused and therefore there is no C that contingently accounts for S0. This would justify a claim that God exists necessarily, but it's more general - it doesn't entail a God. Whatever it may be,it exists necessarily.
My contention is that such a question is meaningless. There is no view from nowhere. All meaningful questions about possibility and necessity are "small" questions, as puts it. In other words, they are asked within the context of a particular framing and grounding assumptions. A first-person account implies the existence of the first person. Newtonian physics unfolds against the background of an immutable Euclidean space and an independent time dimension. In these examples, as in all meaningful examples, necessity is contingent, as it were, on how the question is framed.
Is there one ultimate, unconditional, necessary frame that would ground all inquiry? Only in the most general, Kantian sense in which our cognitive faculties are constituted in a certain way, and the way they are constituted conditions how we see and reason about the world. But there is a curious circularity here: we are embedded in and are shaped by that same world, which in turn conditions how we see and reason about it. We are not entirely free to choose our frame of reasoning, because we have always already been framed by the very subject of our inquiry.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I agree with this, with the proviso that the ground is implicit in and contingent on the explanatory structure.
But I think the subsequent discussion of "intelligibility" goes astray, perhaps confusing the map with the territory. I don't know what it would mean for the reality to be intelligible (or necessary, or contingent, for that matter), except in the obvious sense that making the reality intelligible to us is what we as intelligent creatures do. This framing already implies that a world in which intelligent creatures thrive exists, and is perforce intelligible to those creatures. Fair enough. But if we go on to ask whether it is necessary that such a world exists, the question loses its meaning. Necessary in relation to what? What is the framing theory and whence it came from?
Exactly. :up:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Btw, this (implicit) reification fallacy – ergo, substance duality – is merely reminiscent of Plato's question-begging (thereby unparsimonious and proto-Gnostic) "Theory of Forms" that as a consequence is imho more mythical than metaphysical.
This only esrablishes conceptual possibility, not metaphysical possibility.
Please clarify the difference between "conceptual" and "metaphysical" in this context.
Also consider @Banno's comment here ...
.https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/29/new-orleans-brothers-priest-killing-child-sexual-abuse
Its impossible to know with our current understanding. What I can claim with 100% confidence is that logically, either way, there is no cause which explains why the universe exists at all.
A pity, since his argument, and the the question of the OP, have model theoretical answers. We have in possible world semantics a clear and coherent grammar for modal issues. Ignoring it would be folly.
Your account seems to presume "logical necessity" concerns only entailment. Modal logic is not just concerned with mere entailment. It differentiates between and provides tools for considering nomological and metaphysical modality. There is, after all, an explicit distinction between ? and ?. And to that we can add model theory, including accessibility relations.
While we might agree that truth is not fixed by stipulation, the arguments of metaphysics should be coherent, and so constrained by a framework of logic.
Modal logic does not generate metaphysical necessity, but any claim to metaphysical necessity is accountable to modal logic.
So as I said,
Quoting Banno
First, I agree with your first two points: (1) Accepting a metaphysical limit does not shut down scientific inquiry, and (2) we may never know whether we’ve reached the ultimate explanatory limit.
Where I think the argument possibly breaks down, is here:
Quoting Philosophim
The absence of a reason for why anything exists at all does not entail the absence of intelligible constraints within existence. You are moving from “no ultimate explanation” to “no internal intelligibility,” but I'm not sure that follows.
In fact, the model you propose depends on there being constraints. You introduced theoretical constructs such as an infinite plane, spatial dimensions, time units, probability distributions, etc. But these aren't neutral, they already presuppose a highly structured and law-governed reality.
My worry is that if existence were genuinely unconstrained in the way you suggest, then there would literally be [I]no reason[/I] for persistency over time, stable entities, probabilistic regularities rather than total chaos, or even the continued existence of the probability space you are modeling.
Furthermore, saying "anything could happen" immediately raises a new question: why in fact does almost nothing happen that could happen? Appealing to brute contingency does not answer these questions, it intensifies them. The stability of reality that we manifestly experience becomes radically inexplicable.
This is why I’ve been insisting on the difference between exhausting causal explanations and providing a metaphysical one. Reaching “the limit of causality” only tells us that a certain kind of explanation has ended. It does not show that what remains is self-explanatory or unconstrained. An infinite regress of contingent explanations, or a probabilistic model of unconstrained possibility, does not explain why there is an intelligible order rather than none. It simply assumes that order while denying any ground for it.
So the issue isn’t whether inquiry continues, I agree that it does. The issue is whether intelligibility itself is ultimately grounded or ultimately accidental. And if intelligibility is accidental, then the success of explanation becomes a coincidence — which undermines the very probabilistic and mathematical reasoning your proposal relies on (and on which science itself is based).
To state my worry more cleanly: can we ground the intelligibility of being in a radically unintelligible foundation without undermining intelligibility itself?
Necessity is not causation.
I wasn't explicit enough yesterday, so I'll bold it, just to be clear.
Aristotle made the distinction. A triangle necessarily has internal angles summing to two right angles—but the triangle is not caused to have them.
The Scholastics blurred the distinction, wanting to suppose that if God wills X, then X necessarily occurs. Necessity started to look like something imposed by a prior condition.
Descartes and Spinoza made it worse, treating necessity as divine decree. Hume and Kant went along with them. The logical positivists more or less agreed, and concluded that necessity was trivial.
Kripke restored metaphysical necessity using the structure of possible worlds. Something is necessary if it occurs in every possible world, possible if it occurs in at least one world, impossible if it occurs in none, and contingent if it occurs in some but not all.
This is far and away the best account we have.
Necessity does not imply some casual law.
Far too broad. Every metaphysical inquiry stipulates a framework (language, identity conditions, modality), argues within that framework, and is answerable to coherence conditions expressible in logic.
In other words, whatever is "asserted ... relies on" grammar (Ludwig W., Freddy N.).
That word, "conceived".
What work is it doing here?
So... we agree that metaphysics requires a framework; but you don't see language and logic as a part of that framework but as the conclusion? I must be misunderstanding you.
Start with this nested view of logical, metaphysical, and physical modality:
The broadest is logical possibility: anything that doesn't entail a contradiction is logically possible.
The narrowest is physical possibility: only things that are consistent with laws of nature are physically possible.
Between these is metaphysical modality: anything consistent with metaphysical reality ("laws of metaphysics", if there are any). For a physicalist, like me, metaphysical possibility = physical possibility.
Now suppose you are holding an object in your hand at arms length, and you release it (also assume there's no obstructions). It is physically necessary that the object fall to the floor. However, we can conceive of the object floating upward, or vanishing when released. These conceptual possibilities are not physically possible. They are metaphysically possible only if there is some non-physical aspect of reality that can override gravity, or cause the object to vanish.
Yes, that’s a misunderstanding. I’ve already clarified the distinction I’m making a few times now, so I don’t think there’s much more to add. Thanks for the discussion.
That, being so broad, says very little.
So I'll go back to my original answer, and point out that if we define necessity as existence in every accessible world, then whether an individual is necessary is determined by the model’s domains and accessibility — it is stipulated rather than independently derived.
By carefully constructing a modal model, we can make an individual necessary or contingent entirely by stipulation of the framework — doing precisely what Videri says cannot be done.
Heidegger would agree that nothing exists necessarily. One happy moment of agreement between continental and analytic philosophy.
But in saying that, was he say that, of all the things that there are, none of them exist in every possible world? Or was he saying of nothing, that it exists in every possible world?
That's the trouble with continentals... so vague...
I think I see your issue now. To be clear, my conclusion does not violate the intelligibility of what exists. My conclusion is only noting the full scope. While yes, anything could exist, once it exists it is what it is.
What do I mean by this? An oxygen atom is an oxygen atom because of its composition. An oxygen atom is not a hydrogen atom because its composition is different. When something exists, it by nature has properties that react in particular ways to other properties. Our observation of how 'the atom' is composed, and how 'one oxygen atom' interacts with 'one hydrogen atom' are simple observation of stable structures.
You might say, "If anything can happen, how can we have a stable atom?" Its one of many things that could happen. And if we think about it, atoms can break down and reform, combing with other properties and resulting in new substances.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The irony is that if anything could start to exist, then there are still limitations given. There must be infinite space, or there would be a constraint. Spatial dimensions we know can exist because we are witness to them. Could there be higher or lower dimensions? Why not? Seems they would be possible. Time is also the relativistic tracking of change between two or more things, not an actual 'force' or 'thing' per say. Finally, while anything could exist without prior cause, we have the universe around us to see what actually appeared and ended up as. All of this lets us establish probabilities that I've noted without issue.
To be clear, the addition that anything can exist without explanation does not necessarily invalidate what has happened with explanation.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
No, there's not if we are considering all possibilities prior to one happening. But once it happens, it happens. Just as its likely that unstable entities could appear, then cease to exist after 10 seconds, existence could appear for 10 trillion years, then vanish, or even longer. When we encompass actual infinity, its quite possible that our universe that we know of has been what it is for billions of years, and will be what it is billions of years longer. The point to understand that existence can happen without a prior reason is only pertinent if something has not yet existed, or something will unexpectedly cease to exist. In both cases, neither are predictable and would be extremely hard to identify or test for, so for most things it is practical not to consider it.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Is it cheating if I say both? :) Existence is ultimately accidental, but what exists and co-exists with what does exist is grounded in those experiences. Thus if you have a situation in which a planet forms with all sorts of chemical interactions happening over time, life just happens to emerge from these repeated firings. The miracle of life seems impossible, and even more so its evolution into intelligent beings that can be aware of the universe itself lives in. Yet here we are.
We rely on the stability of the existence around us to continue. Life is in a constant state of trying to exist despite its constant crumbling. It learned to move around and sustain itself. It learned to think and talk using the atmosphere and the other things that formed around it like plants and other animals. Without this stable planet, it cannot exist. Step out into space and entropy takes us. We are an adaptability within a closed macro system with constantly changing microsystems.
Is there any other planet any human could live natively on? There are certain areas of our own planet we cannot live like deep under the ocean. We are a very specific adaptation to our very specific location and the existence which has stayed stable around us. The fact that there is no reason why this planet and everything ultimately existed is irrelevant for this.
Could at all end anytime? Possibly. But is that really that much different from life's daily struggle? Does that stop us from exploring and further trying to understand and adapt to the existence that we are and is around us? No. Maybe it will help us if we do discover a limit. Maybe the speculation on what is possible with math could glean possibilities we had not thought of. And maybe the possibility of endless possibilities, while terrifying, can also be wonderful. I do not see it as an end to discovery, but an opening up of a new avenue to explore.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I believe we can. But please let me know if I'm being naive and missing something.
No, causation ultimately leads to a necessary conclusion. My ultimate point is not to claim causation was necessary. In fact the opposite. It is necessary that if we examine the full chain in the scope of causality that ultimately we will arrive at the necessary conclusion that it cannot be caused by anything else.
Quoting Banno
This is fair. Kripke would agree with my conclusion then. It is true for all possible worlds.
Thanks for the incisive reply. To clarify, I don’t mean “intelligibility” as a feature of our representations but as a condition of the possibility of inquiry itself. If reality were not intrinsically intelligible (i.e. constrained independently of our cognitive activity) then the distinction between correct and incorrect explanations would collapse.
When I speak of an unconditioned ground, I’m not asking what is necessary relative to a theory, but whether a totality of conditioned explanations can be intelligible without something unconditioned. A ground that is itself contingent on the explanatory structure is not a ground but another explanandum.
So the issue is not anthropocentric but structural: contingency presupposes intelligibility, and intelligibility cannot be wholly contingent without undermining explanation itself.
I don't know if that fully addresses your questions, but I'd be happy to try to clarify further if necessary.
Sorry, I think the point was missed again. I would distinguishing modal/metaphysical necessity (what must be the case) from causal dependence (what brings something about).
You appear to treat necessity as something derived from examining causal chains, sliding back into the old mistake: equating necessity with the inevitability of causal sequences.
Necessity does not require a causal history. A triangle has its angles sum to two right angles whether or not any triangle is ever drawn or exists physically. The fact that you can trace a causal chain for some contingent phenomenon does not make the phenomenon itself necessary.
To be sure, some folk posit a reduction of causality into modality - that in some form, "A cause B" means that in every case in which A occurs, B also occurs, and so that B necessarily follows from A. It's a not unproblematic account. And the revers of what is suggested here.
As am I. You might want to read the paper that I linked in this instance.
Quoting Banno
No, that's not what I'm stating. I stated that if we examine the entirety of the causal chains we arrive at a necessary conclusion that there can be nothing outside of it all that caused the entirety of the causal chain.
Quoting Banno
I agree, and that's not what I'm saying.
I don't want to derail this thread from the OP about my paper. If you wish to further discuss the conclusions of the paper, it might be better to take it there to reference it directly. Then once we figure it out, we can come back here if you would like.
That paper relies on treating necessity as causation. It moves from a causal argument about the universe being uncaused to saying nothing is necessary and nothing has “prior meaning”.
The paper essentially equates metaphysical necessity with causal self-sufficiency, claiming that because the universe (taken as a whole) has no cause outside itself, there is nothing necessary outside existence.
In other words, it treats uncaused = contingent, and assumes that necessity only arises via causal explanation.
No, it notes that we can draw a necessary conclusion by examining causation. I wrote it Banno, so if you want to dispute it lets go there. Again, if you have issues with what I'm saying about the paper, lets not bog down another person's OP on it here.
Quibble: they are physically possible, under certain conditions: you're in a simulation, you're a Boltzmann Brain, the laws of nature, for whatever reason, suddenly change, some magic-seeming alien technology is at work
Hmm. Quoting Philosophim
Good question. The ancient Greeks couldn't accept the idea of nothing. As a result, they didn't have the idea of zero and their math was limited because if it.
Zero was invented by the Babylonians.
Banno, I have an 8 year old nephew that I've helped raise. Now he's an excitable little fella and sometimes doesn't understand social graces in public. One of the things we're working on is saying please and thank you to waiters. He gets two warnings from me before I get serious with him. I've asked you two times to politely not derail this person's OP with a debate about my paper, and go to that topic to discuss. You have not.
I don't debate with rude 8 year olds. If you want to straighten up, stop being rude, and post that in the paper's thread to debate what I'm saying in the paper, I'll respond happily. But you're being rude to the OP at this point and I will not be part of it. I've given you my response as the author, and that is all I need to give in another person's thread.
This pretence of victimhood you adopt when challenged is unbecoming.
Cheers.
Your possition is philosophically deeper than I initially recognised. You are arguing that the formal apparatus (modal logic) only works given certain unconditioned norms, and that we can't use that apparatus to demonstrate that everything is contingent, because doing so relies on non-contingent structure. But the weakness there is whether some "ground of intelligibility" constitutes a thing that exists necessarily (which is what the OP asks about) or just refers to conceptual/logical structures that don't "exist" in the relevant sense.
Cheers.
Yes, if one of those logical possibilities is true, then it is physically possible.
However, if we're going to judge what is physically possible - we need to make some justifiable assumptions, otherwise we're only judging what is logically possible.
You’re proposing a two-level view:
(1) Existence as such is accidental - there is no reason why anything exists.
(2) Once something exists, it has determinate properties and behaves intelligibly.
I agree completely with (2). My worry is that (2) silently presupposes more than (1) can support.
Saying “once it exists, it is what it is” explains why given an oxygen atom, it behaves like oxygen. It does not explain why there are enduring, repeatable, law-governed entities at all rather than momentary, non-repeating flashes.
Appeals to infinity don’t solve this. Infinity guarantees abundance, not structure. An infinite range of brute possibilities does not explain why stable probability spaces, mathematical describability, and persistent laws are instantiated rather than not.
This is especially clear in your appeal to probability. Probability only makes sense relative to a stable sample space and enduring rules of combination. But on your view, there is no reason for the sample space itself to persist, or for its rules to remain fixed from moment to moment.
So the question isn’t “why do oxygen atoms behave consistently once they exist?” The question is “why is there a reality in which consistency itself is instantiated rather than not?” Saying that we are adaptations to a rare pocket of stability explains our survival, not the intelligibility of the pocket itself. Anthropic reasoning explains selection, not grounding.
This is why I keep pressing the grounding question. You’re not denying intelligibility, you’re localizing it. But the existence of localized intelligibility without any intelligible ground still makes intelligibility as such accidental. And that is the worry: can intelligibility be ultimately grounded in what is itself unintelligible without undermining intelligibility altogether?
I’m not claiming that this position is incoherent. I’m claiming that it leaves the success of explanation (including probabilistic and mathematical explanation) as a cosmic coincidence. That’s the precise point where I think the metaphysical question remains open.
It may be that we've reached a principled stopping point here, as I think the issue has boiled down to a question regarding the criterion of adequate explanation. I would frame this in the following way:
(1) If the highest criterion is coherence and parsimony, then I think your position holds
(2) If the highest criterion is explanatory adequacy and intelligibility, then I think my position is stronger
Obviously, I feel that my position is on firmer ground overall (or I wouldn't still hold it), not because yours is indefensible by any means, but because I think yours leaves too much unexplained while still subtly relying on what it refuses to ground.
What do you think?
Likewise! Also, I have to compliment your mastery of the written word. Your use of higher level vocabulary in intelligible and clear in ways beyond my crafting capability, and its both impressive and fun to read.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Correct.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think you've summarized your issue clearly. Let me see if I can return the favor.
First, some background. How I view knowledge is by anthropic reasoning, not grounding on an outside law. If you would like to read, here is a link with a follow up summary from the next poster down that did an excellent job. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
Of course its an optional read, but it may indicate what motivates my thought process and why I ultimately lean in this direction. None of us are free of bias, and I feel its important to have that on the table in case its a blinder on myself.
Second, your remarks on probability lead back to the classic problem of induction by Hume. The basic summary is that we cannot rationally justify why we infer that an outcome in the past will repeat or stay the same in the future. I won't go into too much detail as I assume you know of Hume. If not, I'll cover it.
My inability to prove that the universe will continue to be stable does not demonstrate the conclusion is irrational. On the contrary, I run into the same problem Hume does. Not only do I coincide with Hume's conclusion, I seem to add weight to its truth. It doesn't mean the conclusion I've wrought here is wrong, its that its uncomfortable. But perhaps with a few more examples I can remove this discomfort.
I agree that probability relies on stable rules, but its use is in relating those stable rules to variable ones. Analyzing probability in infinity is not very intuitive, can be easily misunderstood (I do not pretend to be immune to this) and literally an infinite number of variables. For higher level infinite comparison, we likely need cardinality, a mathematical subject beyond me. But we can simplify some of the approaches to see the reason why it is very possible that we can randomly have a universe with consistent laws over billions of years.
The first step is to isolate our certainties. If anything is possible, then if something forms it could persist as it is anywhere from the shortest perceivable time measurement to being an immortal object. Since this is true randomness without limits, any 'point' on the line can be picked and be as equally likely as the other to be picked. While, "lasts several billion years" seems impressive from our end, on a truly infinite scale its no more or less impressive then a googolplex number of years and beyond. Considering the amount of numbers that extend past 1 billion vs the amount of numbers after1 billion, its not inconceivable at all that things would form with stable structures as long as ours.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
But is the idea that there is no prior cause for the scope of caused existence unintelligible? Its a new concept for sure, but I believe its simple enough to understand once explored. As I've shown above, I see no harm to the intelligibility of what we know now vs what we knew before we realized. We still had the problem of induction. We still understood that at any minute life could end unexpectedly. We just now have that on a much larger scale. But if we start looking at that scale we realize that everything we have is still possible and explained.
To challenge the conclusion is to fall into reducto ad absurdum. Can we have an intelligible universe in which there is an underlying reason why the entire causal chain exists? Its impossible. In the case of a finite chain of causality, its obvious. The infinite chain is less so, so I'll give another example. Sorry if this is unneeded as I might be repeating myself.
If it is the case that we discovered some underlying reason why existence persisted, there would still be the question of, "What is causing that underlying reason to persist?" In other words, can you propose a situation that does not end up falling into this same question? If the conclusion I've written is the same within a finite chain of causality as an infinite chain of causality, what other possible alternative is there? In my mind, the only intelligible solution that avoids this trap is if there is no underlying reason for existence to be and is simply random. As I've noted above though, if you start to explore the idea of true randomness, you see our universe is not at all implausible, but just as likely to have been as any other thing that could exist.
Only if we understand exist to mean ‘subsist in itself’. If instead we empathize the EX in exist, then existence means transit and esctasis rather than self-presencing.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Only if we assume that there must be identities first (a‘something’ that either changes or stays the same) and differences secondarily.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Do meaning and intelligibility require a pre-existing ground , or does the exact repetition of a meaning destroy its intelligibility?
Thank you for the generous compliment! I admire the clarity and sincerity of your writing as well. It's been a pleasure reading through your replies.
I think you’ve articulated your position clearly and consistently. I don’t think the disagreement is due to misunderstanding, but to a genuine philosophical divergence.
First, I agree that your view is internally coherent. You’re explicit that existence as such is accidental, while intelligibility is local and conditional. Once something exists, it has determinate properties and stable relations. That position does not undermine science or everyday reasoning, and your appeal to Hume makes clear that you’re comfortable accepting limits on justification without succumbing to irrationality, which is a serious and well-established philosophical posture.
Second, I also agree that appealing to infinity can deflate certain intuitive improbability worries. On an infinite scale, long-lived stable structures are not mathematically shocking. So I don’t think your view collapses into obvious absurdity, nor do I think it’s refuted by simply pointing at order and saying “that seems unlikely.”
Where I think the issue remains, however, is that your response declines a particular explanatory demand rather than answering it. My question isn’t whether brute contingency is coherent, or whether we can live with it pragmatically. It’s whether it is explanatorily sufficient once we take intelligibility itself as an explanandum.
In particular, appeals to probability, infinity, or randomness all presuppose a stable framework within which those notions apply. Infinity can explain why something occurs given a space of possibilities, but it doesn’t explain why there is a persisting possibility space, or why law-like regularity rather than total non-repeatability is instantiated at all. Treating that framework as brute is consistent, but it is exactly the move I’m questioning.
Similarly, I don’t think the regress worry touches the position I’m gesturing at. I’m not proposing another conditioned cause or another link in the chain. The claim is that causal explanation and metaphysical grounding are different kinds of explanation, and that running out of the former doesn’t show that the latter is illegitimate, only that it isn’t causal.
So I think the disagreement now turns on the following question: is intelligibility something that can be ultimate yet ungrounded, or does its very presence place a demand for a non-derivative explanation? You’re comfortable saying the former; I’m not persuaded that doing so leaves intelligibility fully intact rather than merely assumed.
That’s where I still see the question as open, not because your position is incoherent, but because it seems to me to stop one step earlier than the explanatory demand itself invites.
3 dimensions are necessary for the manifestation of energy to take form.
Unfortunately, we can not use AI, which explains why Sumerians and Mayans had a symbol that served as a space holder, but the symbol did not serve us as we use the zero today. The modern concept of zero began in India.
The rest of what you said is correct. The space holder became a meaningful number, making today's use of zero possible, in India, where there was a concept of nothing. That is a mind-blowing concept, and we would not be where we are today without it.
Just imagine what the concept of nothing could do to our understanding of everything. We might even become humble about what we think we know. What if we didn't put on our boxing gloves and come out fighting like Teutonic Knights defending their belief in God, or us fighting over scientific truths?
Perhaps without the concept of nothing, we could not think about fluctuations of the quantum vacuum? Perhaps zero, as a concept of nothing, is necessary to our modern thinking process.
No it didn't.
Would you please share your source of information so I can think about it?
Here is one source of information that is respected.
First, I do see your viewpoint and think its a very fair question. It may be that this is a misalignment of philosophical comfort, and I understand that well. I personally don't like Hume's problem of induction. I accept it, but begrudgingly as I'm sure many do. Combined with my own viewpoints on knowledge, I begrudgingly accept the viewpoint I've posted here as well. If it helps, I was not happy with its conclusion. :) I'm so deep into it at this point however, that I personally can see no way out. As you noted, the disagreement at this point is not going to be whether the idea is coherent, but whether its an idea that helps further humanities progress or restricts it.
There are some people who see a universe without ultimate guidance and think, "Nothing matters. I don't matter. Why search, why question, why do anything?" Then there are people who think. "Nothing matters. That's why we have to find meaning. We should explore to make the limited time we have here better. Lets try to conquer the universe and see what can come of it!"
If my proposal caused the majority of humanity to lean toward the former, I would scrap it. I am a firm believer that our viewpoint about what we know, and how it leads us into the next steps of our lives, is just as important as the knowledge itself. If the conclusion destroyed real intelligibility, it would be useless. After all, its how we arrived at the conclusion to begin with, and its how people function daily. Any philosophical conclusion which invalidates the current realities of the world is circumspect and likely wrong.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I will again cheat and say the answer is both. :) It is ultimate and grounded in the logic of what 'existence can be without prior cause'. This is a shift from, "existence must always have a prior cause'. To my mind, it is the only conclusion we can reach, but surprisingly for almost cases, the latter still applies.
The reason is that the above conclusion I've made is logical. It is not proven by application. We have never yet observed and proven something appearing from nothing. We have never provably found a 'smallest particle'. The existence of the conclusion of ultimate non-causality doesn't absolve anyone of proving that they have discovered something uncaused in reality, because the burden or proof is practically impossible to meet.
If it is the case that there is an infinite chain of prior causality, then logically, we'll never realize it. Does that mean that we stop trying to figure things out? No. As long as we exist, we live and must make sense and shape of our surroundings. In the case that someone purports to find something that appeared without prior cause, they would need to demonstrate that there was no prior or outside force which caused that thing to be. This is also virtually impossible.
1. There is always the question, "Was it uncaused, or did I not detect something?" How do you prove that you didn't detect something?
2. If there was something that appeared uncaused within existence that is caused, we would attempt to explain it in terms of the forces around it. As we should. We would have to eliminate that every single force which could impact that lone uncaused existence, had no hand in its existence.
3. If something did appear from nothing, how do you test or prepare for that? I'm quite confident that if one does the math on it, its likely an unfathomably low chance of happening. Have we been able to create a space that is a pure vacuum? Can we set up something that eliminates all outside forces? Its impossible.
So what use is it? At this point, the conclusion does not change how we would conduct science, and the addition of this as a new variable is practically impossible to use in application. As Hume noted, we cannot prove that what has happened prior will happen again, but we also cannot function without induction.
Ultimately the fear of undermining what we have should not be a motivator in an ideas discouragement. It should be that we explore it to its fullest, and realize that if it does undermine what we know, its because its what can best be known. Generally such an undermining benefits us as a species because its a more accurate look at reality. People were afraid that denying a God would cause humanity to descend into wanton murder and destruction. It turns out that viewpoint was limiting us in many ways, ways we didn't realize until we let go.
Currently, the idea I've put forth would only practically be useful in the domain of math and probability. I would be curious what a mathematician who understood cardinality would come up with on the likelihoods of existence appearing or ceasing to exist without cause. To your point earlier about "Persisting probability spaces", the conclusion is that is existence can happen without prior reason, that is the one consistent probability space. It means on a naive level that 'anything can happen'. But I'm curious on a more refined mathematical level if that means that some things are more likely to happen than others given relative cardinality.
As for law-like regularity, we take the same line of possibilities as time. Its quite possible that something without law like regularity can appear, but equally as likely that something with regularity can appear. It may very well be that there are instances of law-like irregularity that come and go in such small areas or spurts of time that they have negligible impact. Also consider that matter and energy is moving at an incredibly rapid pace through space. If something appeared, it would also have to match the velocity of the things contained in the galaxy to be something we would even register. More of a side note there, but the point is that there is nothing in the conclusion here that makes our current situation impossible. The question is more about the probability of what this means going forward. And intuitively I feel that someone with the match skills to properly explore this idea would find something interesting.
So in sum:
1. The conclusion is only logical, and the standard of proof for asserting that any one thing in practical application is uncaused, is practically impossible to meet. To be rational must first still treat the universe as "Everyting has a prior cause" and can only conclude something is without cause with almost impossible effort.
2. As such this idea is most practically used as theory, and likely needs advanced cardinality to fully explore its consequences.
I do understand and respect your disagreement with this viewpoint, but I hope this at least explains why I am ultimately comfortable with and hold it.
Potentially. I responded to Esse in the post above going over that idea.
From my side, reason is intrinsically normative. Inquiry involves judgments of coherence, adequacy, and sufficiency, and those norms are internal to questioning itself. On that view, asking “why?” isn’t a metaphysical excess but an expression of an unrestricted demand to understand. If that demand is legitimate at all, then a purely groundless intelligibility, one that can never answer whether it is sufficient even in principle, looks unstable.
From your side, as I understand it, that very demand for sufficiency already presupposes a metaphysics of grounding or presence that you want to resist. Intelligibility is enacted in use, difference, or repetition rather than secured by an underlying ground, and the refusal of a final ground is a principled stance, not a failure of explanation.
My concern isn’t that such accounts are incoherent, but that they remain descriptive with respect to the normativity we rely on when we argue. Even to say that repetition both generates and destabilizes meaning presupposes criteria for recognizing when meaning is generated rather than lost.
So the real question may be this: are the norms implicit in inquiry (coherence, adequacy, explanatory sufficiency) themselves intelligible and binding, or are they contingent products of practice with no further warrant? I don’t expect that to settle things, but I think it names the divergence more precisely.
This has repeatedly happened throughout history, and I feel very angry about that. We all know Galileo's struggle to increase our knowledge of the university and "reality." There are far fewer known searchers of truth who have been silenced by the "experts" who were silenced by those wanting to protect their own careers and felt threatened by the new information. It was Galileo's colleagues who were his worst enemies. Anna Sofaer, discovered the sun dagger in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, in 1977, and it was her colleagues who totally disrespected her discovery and tried to silence her because of career prestige and competition, which continues to this day.
I do not know why Oregon Public Broadcasting promotes Christianity. I suspect it is the bottom line of the dollar. But this glaring prejudice shines a light on the importance of not only the story that is told but also how it is told. I tried to watch the history of Christianity, and it left out so many facts and created such a biased picture of history that I couldn't continue watching.
Sadly, we need to question why a story is told and what is the interest of the story teller. We are so proud of our intelligence, and we want to believe that knowledge will always make the future better, but that takes a lot of work!
"Is there anything that exists necessarily?" For sure, it is the truth that is necessary for good judgment, but how can we be sure we know the truth and enough of it to matter? Studying the Bible and only the Bible is not good enough for today's reality of sharing the planet with many people who have different customs and different beliefs, and who look different. This calls for the highest morality and perhaps the learning of all gods and traditions.
I want to slam in here, it is not just what we know that is important, but also how we feel. Increasingly, colleges have added classes about emotional intelligence and what it has to do with our judgment.
With this question I highly encourage you to read my paper on knowledge that I linked prior. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
As I keep saying: both :) The norms in intelligent inquiry are intelligible and binding because they are contingent products of practice.
Is that explained in your paper?
For so many years, we specialized and lost the benefits of knowing a lot about many things. The different sciences are starting to work together, and I think that is essential. I think it is our job to learn all we can from geologist, archeologist and related sciences to rethink everything! Especially history. We are birthing the New Age, a time of peace, high tech, and the end of tranny. Those who follow us will not be able to relate to our understanding of reality.
Of course, avoiding a nuclear war and the destruction of our planet seems essential to the New Age. But how do we get everyone on board with all the thinking that is required for better judgment?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The pragmatic contingency of history and time imply a tripartite structure of temporality ( past-present- future) which repeats itself ‘identically’ every moment. One can consider this structure to be an absolute and binding ground, but it maintains its identity, absoluteness and bindingness only by changing itself. According to this ground, no experience is ever absolutely coherent nor absolutely incoherent, but involves a play between presence and absence, recognition and novelty, intelligibility and excess.
The placeholder symbol they're talking about came from the Babylonian practice of recording abacus results onto clay. Where there was no bead on the abacus, they would put the symbol for zero.
What follows isn’t a point-by-point rebuttal (that would take more time than I can reasonably invest), but an attempt to explain how I understand your position, how it responds to my concern, and why I still think the central metaphysical issue remains open. That said, I also want to apologize for the length of what follows. I’ve really done my best to try to understand your perspective and, in the process, have probably spent more time on this than I should have :smile: .
1. How I understand your account of knowledge
As I read you, your framework rests on several key claims.
First, you explicitly frame knowledge as instrumental rather than truth-constitutive. Knowledge, on your view, does not aim at grasping reality “as it is in itself,” but at arriving at the most reasonable orientation toward reality given our goals, limitations, and need to act. Rationality is therefore practical before it is metaphysical.
Second, you ground knowledge internally in what you call the “discrete experiencer.” Instead of beginning with a claim about existence or truth, you begin with the indubitable fact that experience can be partitioned into identities (this rather than that) and that thoughts, memories, and distinctions arise within that partitioning. This capacity is taken to be deductively certain because any attempt to deny it already presupposes it.
Third, you distinguish between two kinds of knowing. What you call distinctive knowledge is simply awareness of discrete experiences as experiences. Applicable knowledge arises when those distinctions are applied to experience in such a way that, given the current context and available distinctions, they are not contradicted by reality. The sheep, goat, and hologram examples are meant to show that identities depend on chosen essential properties, and that knowledge is always indexed to a context of application.
Fourth, you treat induction as unavoidable once deduction, so understood, reaches its limits. You accept Hume’s critique but argue that inductions can still be ranked by cogency: probability being strongest, then possibility, then plausibility, and finally irrational belief. Rationality, on this view, consists in managing these inductions responsibly rather than eliminating them.
Finally, you extend this framework to social knowledge by introducing negotiated “distinctive contexts.” Language, mathematics, and shared standards allow multiple subjects to coordinate their distinctions and applications. Objectivity becomes a matter of convergence within agreed contexts, rather than correspondence to a context-independent ground.
I take all of this to be internally coherent, and I don’t think it collapses into skepticism or trivial relativism.
2. How this reframes the question of necessary existence
Where I think our disagreement sharpens is when this epistemological framework is brought to bear on the question of necessary existence.
My original concern was not simply whether we can justify claims about necessity in practice, nor whether science or everyday reasoning can proceed without positing something that exists necessarily. It was whether intelligibility itself - the fact that there is a stable, law-like, and explanatory order at all - can be ultimate yet ungrounded without remainder.
Your response effectively answers a different question: how a finite subject should reason once deductive justification runs out. From that standpoint, positing a necessary being or necessary ground appears either (i) inapplicable, (ii) merely plausible, or (iii) unjustified relative to available distinctions. That is a coherent epistemic verdict.
What remains unclear to me is whether this epistemic verdict is meant to settle the metaphysical issue, or whether it simply brackets it.
If intelligibility is treated as a brute feature of reality - that is, something we manage, but do not explain - then the denial of necessary existence is not so much argued for as presupposed. The framework shows why we cannot establish necessity deductively (as you have defined it) within experience, but it does not show that necessity is unnecessary.
3. Where the grounding question reappears
This becomes especially clear when we consider several features of your account that seem to rely on what they officially set aside.
3.a “Contradiction by reality” presupposes a non-derivative norm
Your framework repeatedly appeals to the idea that beliefs must submit to contradiction by reality. But the authority of contradiction is not itself explained in instrumental terms. To say that belief ought to yield to reality is already to invoke a norm that is not merely convenient, but binding.
In the context of grounding, this matters because binding norms suggest something non-arbitrary at work. If intelligibility were wholly brute, it becomes unclear why contradiction should have this authority rather than being just another contingent feature we happen to accommodate.
3.b Elective distinctions sit uneasily with necessary structure
You emphasize that the selection of essential properties and identities is up to the subject, and that distinctive contexts are not dictated by reality itself. Yet the success of application, the hierarchy of induction, and the very notion of “better” or “worse” reasoning presuppose a stable background structure that constrains which distinctions work and which fail.
From my side, this looks like a tacit appeal to something like necessity: not a necessary entity perhaps, but a necessary order or intelligibility that is not reducible to choice or practice.
3.c Redefining deduction deflates necessity rather than refutes it
By treating deduction as “what cannot be contradicted given current distinctions,” necessity becomes a local epistemic status rather than a metaphysical one. But that redefinition does not show that there is nothing that exists necessarily; it shows only that necessity cannot be established by the methods you allow.
That is an important result, but it does not settle the ontological question. It changes the standards of admissibility rather than answering the original demand.
3.d The dynamism of inquiry points beyond brute fact
Your account presupposes an ongoing drive to refine distinctions, improve applicability, and prefer explanations that are more coherent and comprehensive. This dynamism is difficult to understand if intelligibility is merely accidental. It suggests that inquiry is oriented toward something more than survival or local success, but toward understanding as such.
If that orientation is legitimate at all, then the question of whether intelligibility has an ultimate ground reasserts itself.
4. Bringing this back to necessary existence
With that contrast in view, the issue can be stated more precisely.
Your framework shows, convincingly, that if deduction is understood as you understand it - namely, as what cannot be contradicted within a given context of distinctions and applications - then we cannot arrive at the conclusion that something exists necessarily from within finite experience. On those terms, necessity cannot appear as an admissible conclusion, since it cannot function as a candidate alongside contingent possibilities. But this limitation follows from how deduction is defined, not from the structure of inquiry itself.
The question of necessary existence, as I understand it, is neither empirical nor hypothetical. It is transcendental: it asks what must be the case for intelligibility itself to be possible. It does not arise from extending classifications further into experience, but from reflecting on the conditions that make any classification, correction, or application intelligible at all.
On your account, deduction is essentially contextual and negative: a belief counts as deductive insofar as it is not presently contradicted by reality, given a chosen set of distinctions. That is a coherent and useful standard for managing belief within experience. But it is not a standard designed to address metaphysical sufficiency. It tells us when a claim is undefeated; it does not tell us whether intelligibility itself is ultimately grounded or merely assumed.
A necessary judgment, as I am using the term, is not reached by adding premises or narrowing context. It arises when reflection shows that denying a certain conclusion undermines the very norms one relies on in inquiry. The issue is not whether necessary existence can be applied without contradiction, but whether treating intelligibility as wholly contingent is coherent given the binding role intelligibility plays in reasoning.
This is why I think your framework, while successful on its own terms, does not close the door on necessary existence. It shows that necessity cannot be established by contextual deduction; it does not show that necessity cannot be known through reflection on the conditions of intelligibility itself. The binding force of the norms you rely on (non-contradiction, rational preference, hierarchical evaluation) already presupposes that intelligibility is not merely accidental.
If intelligibility were brute all the way down, its normative authority would be inexplicable. Contradiction would lose its force, coherence would become optional, and better or worse explanations would collapse into preference. Yet your epistemology depends on the opposite: that intelligibility obliges assent when conditions are met.
So when I resist the claim that intelligibility can be ultimate yet ungrounded, I am not proposing a rival empirical explanation or a speculative add-on. I am making a transcendental claim: that finite intelligibility, precisely as conditioned and corrigible, points beyond itself to something non-derivative. That “beyond” is what I mean by necessary existence, not an object within experience, but the ground that makes intelligible experience possible at all.
5. Divergent accounts of inquiry
Before closing, I think it may help to explicitly thematize the fact that we are working with two very different conceptions of inquiry. On your account, inquiry is fundamentally corrective and managerial: it begins with distinctions, applies them where possible, and revises them when contradicted by reality. Its norms are procedural, context-relative, and justified by their success in navigating experience. On the view I am working with, inquiry is not merely corrective but also intrinsically oriented toward being in-itself: questioning itself carries an unrestricted demand for intelligibility, and the norms of coherence, adequacy, and sufficiency are immanent in the act of understanding. I think the disagreement about necessary existence may ultimately turn on which of these conceptions is taken as prior.
6. Where that leaves us
At this point, I think the disagreement is clear: you offer a powerful epistemology of how inquiry proceeds under constraint and uncertainty. I’m asking whether that epistemology presupposes, rather than replaces, a deeper transcendental/metaphysical account of intelligibility itself.
If reason is merely a tool, then necessary existence will always look like an overreach. If reason is intrinsically normative and oriented toward unrestricted intelligibility (being in-itself), then the question of grounding (and with it, the question of necessary existence) cannot be dismissed without cost.
That, I think, is the real point of divergence, and it explains why we’ve been circling the same issue from different sides.
Thank you, it is always humbling to have someone read a piece of work I've written and enjoy it. I suspected this might be the source of our differences in this thread, and I'm glad that was confirmed.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
No apology necessary, I do not mind a good post from a thoughtful person.
First, your summary is spot on. I'll go into your concerns now.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I hope I've put forth enough reasons why the first portion is still reasonable to hold. If that is so, I will focus on trying to answer the latter part, which I feel is the crux of your concern.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Correct. In the interests of the focus on the paper's length and scope, I dropped an analysis at the end which explored this very question. The reason is because this ends up exploring a moral notion of knowledge or, "How should we use it". If of course a person does not first understand how knowledge works within the paper, in the past introducing such questions can complicate the initial understanding and can lead to confusion. You have an appropriate grasp on the fundamentals, so this should not be a problem to explore.
Starting within the the self-context, why should we care about contradictions in our beliefs?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I'll start with what I will conclude and explain why this is so. Knowledge as a tool at its base is about giving a person the best chance for survival. Knowledge as a tool is also the best way of finding out the truth through inquiry. Like a master survivalist with a multi-tool, precise and careful use can get a result that cannot be easily gotten without it. But holding a multi-tool does not make one a survivalist, nor mean the person has any motivation to master the tool if they are not in a situation where every aspect is demanded. The base of intelligibility is applying discrete experiences without contradiction for survival, but it can be used for far more than that.
What is truth? What 'is'. This is what exists despite our applications of discrete experiences. This is the first ultimate grounding of intelligibility. This starts from a very young age of figuring out what will kill you and what won't. If you eat a rotten apple, you'll get sick. Eat a delicious one, you don't. As such its beneficial to survival to construct an identity of food, an apple, and whether that apple is safe to eat or not.
The second ground of intelligibility is the ability to discretely experience. If you noticed while reading, its the foundation of math. Our ability to create a discrete, the mental establishment of 'one'. Math is the logic of discrete experiences combined with the notion of what contradicts them. 1 = 1. 1 does not = 2 because one discrete experience is not the same as two discrete experiences. This can be applied in blades of grass. I have 1 blade of grass, and the application of one blade of grass twice is 2 blades of grass. They cannot be equal, as reality contradicts the fact that one discrete experience is the equal in contextual quantity to the other.
These two things, discrete experiences and not being contradicted by reality are the necessary foundations of intelligibility. If a person could not discretely experience, I doubt they would be able to comprehend the world. Existence would be a sea of unfathomable separation. Having seen reports on acid trips where everything seems to become 'one', intelligibility begins to vanish with the final grouping of everything into one discrete.
But does a base of intelligibility require us as people to use it to its utmost potential? Not at all. Once basic survival is obtained, the incentive to spend time and energy on refining or furthering knowledge to discoveries outside of immediate practical use requires some other drive or goal. I believe it is an artifact of survival and later the adaptations to the complexities of being social creatures. Some of us are pushed further in our energy and attention in understanding our world beyond basic needs which has lead the the discoveries we have in modern day society.
But I am veering off from your points, so let me return to those.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I hope my point above leads to what this 'better' and 'worse' is. Since we have shown where math comes from, we can use math to see why.
First, lets start with deduction. Deduction relies on only what we can know (when I say 'know' it combines the distinctive and applicable together), and cannot rely on what we do not or cannot know. One important reason for this is that we have all encountered situations in which there was something outside of our personal knowledge that contradicted what we expected. Yet this can also happen with induction. Does that mean deduction is useless?
Lets say that I am aware of everything needed for a proper conclusion about reality. My discrete experiences have covered everything that is needed in truth to come to a conclusion without contradiction. If reality is concurrent with this, then I have made the right judgement. To put it another way, if I have all the information to apply to an object and say its a sheep, and it is a sheep, I will have been correct through careful reason that lead me to only one outcome being correct.
Let compare this to induction.
Induction like probability is an educated guess based on known knowledge deficiencies. When a person flips a coin by hand without trying to get it to land with any particular side, its not that there isn't a set of forces which will necessarily lead to it landing heads or tails. Its that we are unable to measure and know those forces prior to it landing. Meaning when we take everything into consideration, we deducae at best there's only a 50% chance that we can predict the correct landing side of the coin. Yet even with this deduced guess, the person is still in the same risky situation as the person using pure deduction. There can always be a missing experience or something outside of our knowledge that could reveal our cogent inductive claim is not going to have the outcome we predict.
Lets call this common uncertainty 'Doubt'. There is always Doubt in any claim, deductive or inductive, that the context has properly captured a complete enough understanding of reality that would not be contradicted if that full understanding were complete. Now lets look at comparing the two with doubt involved.
If a deduction removes doubt, it has a certain outcome of 1. In the most cogent induction, probability of the outcome not being contradicted by reality is always less than 1, as a probability of 100% is essentially a deduction. Since Doubt is equivalent in both the deductive and inductive case, when comparing the two for what is 'better' (to have a more reliably accurate outcome), we can remove Doubt as the common 'x' on both sides. 1 > Anything less than one.
Thus if one has the time and energy, it is more reasonable to favor deductions than inductions if you want the most consistently accurate outcome. A stable conclusion backed by the stable foundations of the ability to discretely experience. This is necessarily true no matter the viewpoint of the discrete experiencer.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Looking at this now with the analysis above, is this a metaphysical conclusion of necessity? That a deduction, given the elimination of doubt, will necessarily be superior to an induction with the same given knowledge and removal of doubt?
Is it a necessity apart from discrete experiencers like us? No. There is no necessity for intelligibility apart from how perceive and exist in reality. Intelligibility is born of the necessity to survive in a world by using our ability to discretely experience most accurately in regards to its application beyond itself. it also turns out its our best tool at understanding and mastering the world with the greatest chance of accuracy.
Think about a bacterium. Its a purely reactionary chemical construct. It does not think intelligibly. Its an enclosed chemical reaction reacting to the environment around it. Intelligibility is not necessary to itself or most of life in general. It is only important and useful to us because we have the capacity to use it to understand and live the way we want to most successfully.
But again I might be getting off point.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I hope I have explained the ultimate ground of intelligibility, and what could be considered necessary in such a system. The final point which I have briefly touched is motivations beyond survival. If one is surviving comfortably with their world view, for most people there is little incentive to change it. Yet despite this, I believe there is a variability in what people consider a 'comfortable' level of distinctive and applicable knowledge. The social interactions of the species can produce a peer pressure to pursue goals beyond survival. "Yes, life is nice now, but what if it could be better?" Beyond survival comes convenience, entertainment, and the desire for a more comfortable life style. In any case, once a person desires something more than basic survival, the tool of knowledge is still their best recourse to success in understanding and acting in reality to get what they want.
The problem is that if one has no motivation beyond survival, there is little use for knowledge as a tool beyond sustaining that. Not every person who uses a screw driver becomes a mechanic. It might be nice to have to pull the tool out in certain situations, but if one's life is set in a way where the inductions one has to make are basic and low risk, there is little need to spend time and energy for accuracy. This is how ideologies like religions can thrive. While the ideology itself isn't rational when examined closely, the benefits to the individual often outweigh the risk of being wrong. People tend to leave a religion not because of the fact that it is an inductive enterprise that is low on the inductive hierarchy, but usually leave when the religion becomes more of a burden than a benefit, both personally and socially.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Now to bring it back to your main point. Have I successfully shown you necessary judgements that can be reached within the knowledge theory? Is intelligibility coherent within this system? In all possible worlds in which discrete experiencers exist, are the requirements for intelligibility the same? Is a deduction necessarily the more reasonable action to take over induction in one wants accuracy? I leave that for you to consider.
If it is the case that I have sufficiently answered your points, then I feel my point here about the necessity of existence ultimately being uncaused is a distinctive conclusion, and not one of application. It is at best, a plausible outcome, but one that I do not find is reasonably countered by any other inductions of the same or higher hierarchy. I believe this does not rule out intelligibility itself, only the conclusion upon which intelligibility is grounded on.
I hope I've addressed your points adequately. Please point out if you think I've missed anything or have not fully answered the questions you had. Also, if the discussion on the knowledge theory goes much longer I suggest we port this over to that thread in particular. I don't want to derail the OPs original point over a separate thread.
@Esse Quam Videri
'Nothing' cannot be, for 'it' has no it - no properties; therefore 'it' cannot even be meant and so 'it' isn't an option.
Therefore, since there is something, the base uncaused existence is ever, this meaning that it is eternal and still here. It is the Fundamental One, for if it had parts then those parts would have been even more fundamental.
Therefore the Permanent One can only give rise to the basic temporaries such as electrons by rearrangements of itself. Yes, this seems akin to quantum fields, but perhaps not quite, as there are 25 fields all atop one another.
This is all fine, but to go further we must suppose what the nature of the One could be, since there would be no 'when' that any specific design could have been imparted to it. No cause, no certain form.
Must it be a superposition of everything at once, such as in Eternalism, or everything in some linear way, such as in Presentism? We don't yet know the mode of time.
Thoughts?
Where I hesitate is when that play is treated as sufficient on its own. My concern isn’t that experience is never absolutely coherent (that seems obviously true) but that inquiry is more than the mere description of experience. In practice, we don’t just undergo intelligibility; we assess it. We ask whether an account is adequate, whether it explains more than it leaves unexplained, whether it’s better than its alternatives. Those questions don’t arise from play itself; they introduce a further irreducibly normative dimension to it.
So while I can agree that intelligibility maintains itself only through change, I’m not convinced that this exhausts what it means for intelligibility to be binding. The fact that understanding is always provisional doesn’t remove the orientation toward saying this is so, however revisably. And without that orientation, it’s hard to see how philosophical disagreement remains anything more than a contrast between different enactments rather than a rational engagement over what is actually the case.
So I don’t take judgment to abolish play or excess. Rather, judgment iteratively perfects it by securing what has been authentically understood and making it available for further, and often more imaginative, insight and inquiry. Judgment is not the end of play but the condition of its cumulative depth.
Finally, acknowledging the reality of play and excess doesn’t settle the metaphysical question of whether intelligibility itself is conditioned or unconditioned; it only describes how intelligibility is encountered, not what ultimately makes it possible. This is where I think we may ultimately diverge.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Hegel believes that intelligibility is not given as an unconditioned starting point, and contra Kant, he doesn’t believe that intelligibility is merely conditioned by subjective forms, categories, intuitions, or epistemic limits that stand over against an unknowable thing-in-itself. Intelligibility is unconditioned only insofar as it is self-conditioning. Intelligibility is therefore not externally conditioned, as in Kant, nor immediately unconditioned, as in some rationalist metaphysics, but dialectically unconditioned through the immanent development of concepts. My own position follows phenomenology and hermeneutics in deconstructing Hegelian dialectics, but it follows Hegel in basing intelligibility in a self-reflexive
movement that is both subjective and objective rather than to Kant’s ahistorical grounding of intelligiblity. Where do you stand with respect to Kant and Hegel?
An excellent and thought-provoking reply. I think it succeeds in clarifying your position even more sharply than before, and that helps a great deal.
I want to begin by acknowledging and briefly recapitulating what I take you to have shown successfully. You’ve given a detailed and coherent anthropological and pragmatic account of intelligibility. On your view, intelligibility arises from the capacity for discrete experience and the need to avoid contradiction in order to survive and pursue desired ends. Within that framework, deduction is necessarily preferable to induction when accuracy is the goal, and norms of reasoning are justified by their success relative to those goals. I don’t think that picture is confused or incoherent, and I agree that it explains a great deal about how inquiry functions for creatures like us.
Where I think the remaining disagreement lies is not about whether intelligibility works, but about whether its norms are merely useful or are genuinely binding.
You consistently explain the authority of intelligibility (i.e. why contradiction matters, why better reasoning should be preferred) in terms of motivation: survival, comfort, social pressure, or desired outcomes. That explains very well why people care about intelligibility. But my question has been about something slightly different: why incoherence counts as error rather than merely inconvenience, even when nothing practical is at stake.
To put the point as cleanly as I can: suppose a discrete experiencer knowingly affirms a contradiction in a case where there is no survival cost, no practical downside, and no motivational penalty whatsoever. Is the judgment simply impractical, or is it incorrect? If it is incorrect, then intelligibility has a normative authority that is not fully exhausted by its usefulness. If it is merely impractical, then what drops out is truth as such, not just metaphysical grounding.
This is why I continue to think the question of grounding reasserts itself. You have shown that intelligibility is not necessary for all forms of life, and I agree. But the issue was never whether intelligibility is universally instantiated; it is whether, when intelligibility is operative at all, its norms are contingent products relative to particular forms of life, or universally undeniable constraints built into intelligibility as such. From my side, the binding force of contradiction, coherence, and explanatory sufficiency points beyond instrumental success to a non-negotiable (transcendental) condition of inquiry itself.
If we differ there, then I think we’ve probably reached a genuine and irreducible philosophical divide; not about induction, causality, or even necessity in the abstract, but about what reason is and what ultimately obliges assent. I’m happy to leave it there, with much appreciation for the care you’ve brought to the exchange, unless there’s anything further you’d like us to address with respect to these topics. I'm content either way.
I think you’re right that “nothing” isn’t a genuine option. In my opinion, absolute nothingness isn’t just empty, it’s unintelligible. The real contrast isn’t between something and nothing, but between what exists conditionally and what exists without conditions.
Where I’d draw a line is in how we understand the role of that unconditioned ground. I don’t think it should be treated as a kind of ultimate physical stuff that rearranges itself into electrons, fields, or other entities. Those belong to empirical explanations, which already presuppose conditions, laws, and structures. The point of an unconditioned ground isn’t to compete with those explanations, but to explain why any such conditioned explanatory order exists at all.
For that reason, I’d also be cautious about applying theories of time like eternalism or presentism to the unconditioned. Those theories concern temporal realities. Presumably, the ground of existence wouldn’t be “spread across time” or “located in the present,” but not temporal in the first place.
So I'd likely agree with you that explanation must terminate in something simple and unconditioned. I just don’t think that termination belongs to the same explanatory level as particles, fields, or models of time.
It seems to me that @Philosophim's analysis is implicitly Darwinian in character in assuming that the ground for the faculty of reason is successful adaptation to the environment. Take for example this paragraph:
Quoting Philosophim
There are two things to say about that. The first is that it is true that bacterium and other single-celled organisms do not think 'intelligibly'. It seems to me that language and symbolic representation are essential to whatever we call 'intelligibility' (hence mainly restricted to h.sapiens notwithstanding the rudimentary reasoning abilities shown by some other species). However, science has shown that bacteria can learn - which is something no inorganic product does. Minerals simply react, whereas any form of organic life seeks to maintain itself in distinction from the environment. (This goes to @Joshs 'enactivist' view as it is a fundamental point in phenomenology of biology.)
The second and more relevant point is the belief that rationality is something that can be understood purely in terms of successful adaptation. Which is understandable to the extent that in today's cultural landscape evolutionary biology is the default 'theory of everything' when it comes to human capabilities. But notice the implication that in this view, reason is valued because it is useful or practical, not for its own sake.
An essay that comes to mind is Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion (). In that essay, he invokes 'the soveriegnty of reason', ostensibly one of the hallmarks of Enlightenment philosophy, where it was intended to displace the sovereignty of imperial power (i.e. the aristocracy) on the one hand, and of religious revelation on the other. Nagel notes that rationalism has a "religious flavor" because it suggests a "natural sympathy" between the human mind and the deepest truths of the universe (Galileo's 'il lume naturale'). However, he then defers to "the sovereignty of reason" to argue that reason must be its own final authority, independent of both religious belief and the "fear of religion" that he says drives the huge popularity of naturalistic accounts (hence the title of the essay!)
Nagel criticizes a book by Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, which attempts an evolutionary explanation of reason, similar to what is being discussed here. He cites Nozick’s proposal that reason is a "dependent variable" shaped by evolutionary facts, where reality selects for what seems "evident" to us. Nagel finds this problematic because it suggests that what we find self-evident might only be a contingent adaptation to approximately true facts rather than a grasp of necessary truths. Nagel argues that such an explanation is "necessarily incomplete" because it cannot underwrite our use of reason. He contends that we must be justified in trusting reason "simply in itself" before we can accept any evolutionary story about its origins. '
In other words, when asked to justify a rational proposition, such as 'if all humans are mortal and Socrates is a human, then Socrates is mortal,' then we ought not to have to invoke an external reason (such as evolutionary adaptation) in defence of that justification. There are, says Nagel, 'thoughts we cannot get outside of' - we can't justify them with reference to something else. And the insights of reason are exemplars of such thoughts.
[quote=Thomas Nagel]The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.[/quote]
I think that is the nub of the debate between Esse and Philosophim.
Yes, not temporal, since Eternal, and it perhaps has the ultimate lightness of being, as it appears to have to be the simplest possible in order not to be composite. A problem here to be resolved is that how could it be limited to be the smallest - what decided that, as there can be no deciding for the uncaused eternal.
It seems we can also banish 'Stillness', which is kind of a cousin to 'Nothing', since naught could happen if it were completely still; movement has to be.
So far…
Of Necessity: Ground of Existence, Movement, One (as continuous - gaps of 'Nothing' impossible), unconditioned/undesigned, Eternal, Simplest, causeless, energetic, permanent, forms temporaries.
Impossible: 'Nothing', 'Stillness', Composite, 'Designed/Conditioned', Temporal, 'Infinite Regress', 'God', cause, doesn't do anything.
Perhaps further clues to its nature can be found in the temporaries that the Permanent spawns…as if it ever seems to have broken symmetry as it being the perfect instability…
The basic temporaries, such as the elementary 'particles', form in pairs - matter and anti-matter, as well as the positive kinetic energy of stuff countering the negative potential energy of gravity overall, and more.
The base Something appears to be a Sum-thing.
Any more clues?
Fantastic, I think we've explored down to the nub at this point. Again, thank you for your pointed questions and follow ups. Let me pose another question to you: What is the definition of incorrect that can be applied without contradiction? Since the term "incorrect" is a definition, it is formed by a discrete experience, and then must be applied outside of itself without contradiction.
We've defined intelligibility within the context of a discrete experiencer not being contradicted by the application of their discrete experience. Therefor a correct application is one that passes this, while an incorrect application does not.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It is incorrect in terms discrete experience application. The failure state for being incorrect might not be punishing in this particular instance, but the person still did not correctly create applicable knowledge.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
We don't have the context of all forms of life to see. We do not have the context of universal experience. We only have the context of us as discrete experiences. And for any discrete experiencer with the intelligence to allow intelligibility, a correct or incorrect application of knowledge would be the same given the knowledge process is followed.
If you are asking if there is some universal apart from the discrete experiencer and contradiction of one's actions by reality, I don't know. Such a question is very like asking if we are a brain in a vat. You can only know what is within the scope of knowledge, not anything outside of it. Perhaps there is some other intelligent life that does not have discrete experiences, but a state unlike we could imagine. Within that state, intelligibility might or might not be possible. Perhaps it is an intelligence that morphs and changes instead of being contradicted by whatever it encounters. Our version of intelligibility would necessarily be different.
We cannot claim a universal apart from context. If we could extend our context out to observe and understand everything, then we could probably establish universal laws. But it would still be within the context of a being that discretely experiences and is looking to not contradict itself.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Same. Fantastic conversation. I'm always grateful to have encounters like this where its just about the subject material and both parties are being reasonable. Thank you again for an excellent discussion.
Not only our environment, but our personal reality. You might be interested in reading the theory for yourself. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14044/knowledge-and-induction-within-your-self-context/p1
I believe I also adequately answer this part:
But I'll leave you to judge after reading if you think this is the case.
I would place my position as neither Kantian nor Hegelian, though it takes something from both. Against Kant, I don’t think intelligibility is imposed by fixed, ahistorical subjective forms set over against an unknowable reality; the norms of knowing are discovered in inquiry itself, not legislated in advance. Against Hegel, I’m not convinced that intelligibility can be unconditioned simply by being self-conditioning through dialectical development, since conceptual self-mediation explains how intelligibility unfolds but not why inquiry is answerable to reality rather than merely to its own coherence. Where I differ from both is in locating the issue primarily in the structure of inquiry rather than in the structure of concepts: inquiry is historically conditioned in its unfolding, but it is driven by an unrestricted demand for understanding that implicitly appeals to a standard of sufficiency no merely conditioned or purely self-reflexive process can finally supply from within itself. Intelligibility, on this view, is neither an externally imposed framework nor a closed dialectical system, but something that unfolds in response to reality while always pointing beyond any given set of conditions.
It starts with:
Quoting Philosophim
Which is the target of Nagel’s criticism. But I guess if you don’t see that, there’s no point repeating it.
I acknowledged that already. Not a worry if you're not interested in diving in.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Certain authors come to mind here who may share your view. I’m thinking of Schelling, Peirce, Charles Taylor and John Mcdowell. I don’t know if you’ve read any of them, but a post -Hegelian critique of their work would look something like this:
A residual metaphysics of grounding in your position can be put into question. Despite your rejection of Kantian a priori form and Hegelian closure, you continue to assume that normativity must be underwritten by something more fundamental than the practices in which it is exercised. You suggest that intelligibility’s norms must be explained in order to be binding, that unless non-contradiction, coherence, and explanatory sufficiency are grounded in something non-contingent, their authority becomes inexplicable. But from a Wittgensteinian point of view, norms are not the kind of thing that gain authority by being grounded in something else. Their authority consists in their role within practices of giving and asking for reasons. To ask for a further ground is not to deepen the explanation but to change the subject.
Normative authority isn’t a causal force that needs metaphysical backing; it is a status conferred within a space of reasons. To demand a further metaphysical explanation is to assimilate normativity to the wrong explanatory model, one appropriate to causes, not commitments. Chess rules are binding even when nothing practical is at stake; their bindingness does not require an ontological ground beyond the practice of chess. Anything that purports to ground the norms of intelligibility would already have to be articulated and assessed under those very norms. The grounding project therefore generates an infinite regress or a pseudo-foundation.
Unrestricted intelligibility isn’t a coherent ideal. The demand that intelligibility be grounded “without remainder” is not simply reason being faithful to itself; it is reason overreaching its own conditions. Finitude isn’t a defect to be compensated for by grounding, but a constitutive feature of understanding. For instance, Robert Brandom argues that the force of norms like non-contradiction arises from their role in inferential articulation. To contradict oneself is not to violate a metaphysical law but to undermine one’s own standing as a reason-giver. That is a genuine error, not a mere inconvenience, but its seriousness is pragmatic in the space of reasons, not metaphysical in the space of being. The normativity is real, but it doesn’t point beyond itself to a necessary existent; it points sideways, to the social and inferential structure of discursive commitment. What drops out isn’t truth, but the idea that truth needs a metaphysical guarantor.
Transcendental reflection can clarify what we are committed to when we reason; it cannot deliver an account of what must exist in order for those commitments to be valid. From this vantage, your appeal to necessary existence is unnecessary.
Quoting Philosophim
My sense is that, given all that you’ve said so far, you would be willing to say that normativity is reducible to instrumental success. Assuming this is an accurate portrayal of your position, the consequence is that it places a substantive restriction on what your theory can accomplish. Specifically, it cannot now function as a standpoint from which to make claims about the structure of inquiry as it really is. This, in turn, has the effect of deflating its normative authority over competing epistemological theories, even those that make use of thicker accounts of normativity, truth and grounding. Once this deflation is acknowledged, the disagreement between us is no longer about which theory is true in a thick sense, but only about which stance one is prepared to adopt relative to their own internal criteria of success.
Quoting Philosophim
I take your point, but here's my difficulty: that very claim - “you can only know what is within the scope of knowledge, not anything outside of it” - presents itself as [I]unscoped[/I] with respect to any particular context. When you say we cannot know anything apart from the scope of discrete experiencers, you’re (presumably) not offering that as one more application that might be contradicted tomorrow, but as a reflective insight into the intrinsic structure of knowledge as such; one that you expect me to grasp as unconditionally valid, not merely as your particular contextual commitment. If I asked "could that claim be contradicted by reality?" I don't think you'd say "perhaps, let's wait and see." You'd say something like: "No, because any contradiction would itself presuppose discrete experience, so the point stands necessarily."
But if that's right, then you're already operating in a register your framework doesn't officially acknowledge; what is typically called transcendental reflection, or reflection on the conditions that make any knowledge possible at all. And once that register is admitted, the question becomes whether other transcendental claims might be equally legitimate, thereby dropping us back into our discussion of grounding and necessity.
Yes, I was waiting for you to say something like this. But the clarification transcendental reflection can give must be cast in terms that stand outside of the contextual limits of meaning making. How is this explained? As i see it, one then has to move into talk about intuitions, intimations of a nature that is not "reasons given" but something else, something "behind" rules, notwithstanding that the term 'behind' is itself rule bound. When I examine causality as such, I am first, prior to even knowing the term, forced to yield to something that is insistent absolutely, even though the language used to say this can taken up into contextualizations in which doubt occurs. In others words, doesn't language, when analytically brought to bear on its own nature and limitations in the world, have to yield to something that is simply NOT language at all, and if this is allowed, then the delimitations you refer to above, which I take to be essentially a denial of what I will call "linguistic absolutes" entering into explanations, "absolutes" that can be tossed about freely in doubt and suspicion simply because they ARE language, and language possesses nothing stand alone, nothing that stands as its own as its own presupposition, as Kierkegaard put it, these delimitations face a ground for acceptance and denial that is not contingent, for it is not realized IN conditions in which it can be gainsaid.
So when you talk about truth needing a metaphysical guarantor, I am suggesting that there is something oddly Kantian about truths as propositional structure. After all, the ground of reason as reason is first something given prior to its being called reason, and prior to all of this talk about inferences, entailment, soundness, validity, and so on.
:100: Excellent! I've never agreed with you more, sir.
I agree that norms don’t gain their authority by being “grounded” in something else in the way empirical claims are justified. I’m not suggesting that non-contradiction or explanatory sufficiency need an external metaphysical backing in order to be binding. My question is different: what are we already committed to when we treat these norms as binding rather than merely operative within a practice?
Practices of giving and asking for reasons don’t just apply norms; they also criticize explanations as inadequate, confused, or insufficient. That critical stance presupposes that norms function as standards by which practices themselves can be assessed, not merely as habits internal to them. My worry is that if normativity is exhausted by practice-description alone, it becomes unclear how this critical dimension (distinguishing genuine understanding from merely stabilized discourse) remains intelligible rather than merely procedural.
So the issue isn’t whether norms need a further ground to have authority, but whether a practice-only account fully explains why inquiry continues to treat sufficiency and adequacy as more than local conventions.
Quoting Joshs
I agree that normative authority is not a causal force and does not need metaphysical “backing” in the way explanations of events do. I also agree that any attempt to ground norms would already presuppose those norms, and that a foundational grounding project would either regress or collapse into pseudo-foundation. That’s not what I’m trying to do.
Where I think we still diverge is on whether a practice-only account fully captures the scope of normative authority involved in inquiry. Chess rules are binding conditionally—if one is playing chess. By contrast, the norms of intelligibility do not present themselves as optional in that way. Even critiques that historicize, deconstruct, or pragmatize reason rely on coherence, non-contradiction, and sufficiency as standards that cannot simply be suspended while inquiry continues.
My question is not what grounds these norms, but why inquiry treats them as unavoidable once questioning is underway. That reflective question is not an attempt to step outside the space of reasons or assimilate normativity to causality; it is inquiry turning back on the commitments it finds itself unable to disavow without self-defeat. If normativity is exhausted by practice-description alone, it’s not clear how this non-optional, critical dimension of inquiry is anything more than a contingent feature of a particular language game.
Quoting Joshs
I agree that finitude is constitutive of understanding and not a defect to be overcome, and I’m not committed to an ideal of exhaustive or remainder-free intelligibility. By “unrestricted,” I mean only that inquiry does not acknowledge a principled boundary beyond which further questioning is illegitimate; not that it ever achieves total understanding.
I also agree with Brandom that norms like non-contradiction function through inferential articulation, and that contradiction undermines one’s standing as a reason-giver. What I’m less convinced by is that this exhausts the normativity involved in inquiry. Inferential role can explain how commitments and entitlements are tracked within the space of reasons, but it does not by itself explain why inquiry is answerable to truth rather than merely to discursive propriety or mutual score-keeping.
The fact that we can criticize entire practices, communities, or inferential frameworks as mistaken suggests that correctness outruns social endorsement, even ideally regulated endorsement. That “beyond” need not be a metaphysical guarantor in any crude sense, but it does mean that intelligibility cannot be fully accounted for by sideways reference to practice alone.
In that light, my appeal to necessary existence isn’t meant as an extra metaphysical posit, but as a way of naming the fact that inquiry treats intelligibility as finally answerable to what is the case, not merely to the conditions under which reasons are exchanged. If that orientation is illusory, then truth itself becomes internal to practice; if it isn’t, then intelligibility points beyond practice, even while being exercised within it.
Quoting Constance
I see a number of issues wording their way through here. There is the issue of the pre-propositional and pre-reflective, which Henry formulates as immanent self-affecting. And the. there is the question of ether language has to be understood in terms of a space of reasons based on the logic of predicational grammar. In responding to Esse Quam Videri, I offered a non-foundational grounding of intelligibility that I thought he might related to better than introducing phenomenological language. My own preference is to move in the direction of Wittgenstein and Husserl in bracketing and reducing propositional truth.
@Esse Quam Videri's account amounts to the argument that discourse requirers words.
The topic has moved from that there exists a necessary being to that discourse presupposes a world-structure in which claims can be true or false.
@Wayfarer, the issue is much the same as in 's Absolute Presuppositions of Science thread, in that it confuses the domain of discourse with the language being applied.
Davidson might point out that a discussion already supposes a shared world within which agreement is the constant that permits interpretation.
I as well! Continue as long or as little as you want.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't think its simply about instrumental success. What if I told you this knowledge theory shows the structure of inquiry as it really is? Recall that in the beginning there is one thing that we could absolutely know, and that is discrete experience. Only you can experience discrete experience. Its the one thing that there is nothing behind it as it really is. Discrete experience, as you experience, is truth. To be clear, not our interpretations of it. Not our application of it. The experience itself is 'what is'.
The nature of inquiry is to take a discrete experiencer and try to see if we can discover the truth of something. We are able to conclude the truth of our own discrete experience. But can we know if there is truth outside of our immediate experience? Or is it that we interpret our discrete experience in a way that allows us to accurately capture the world?
Logically and by application, we can never know anything 'behind' discrete experience Can we ever know what a rock on the ground is apart from our discrete experience of it? No. Does that mean the rock doesn't exist if we don't discretely experience it? No to this as well. We know there are things beyond our will to discretely experience, because despite the desire for our interpretations to hold or to apply, we keep having something that interferes with them called contradictions. If that rock hits me in the back without me first being aware of it, it will still harm my body. Do we know what that is in itself? We can't. Just like I can't know what its like for you in particular to discretely experience in itself. Nothing can. Only you can.
But can this theory of knowledge make claims about the discrete experience as it is in itself? Yes. In fact, it has to. Knowledge as a whole cannot be gained without first having a discrete experience of something like an experience, feeling, or identity. That is what it is in itself. And inquiry simply is taking our discrete experiences and seeing if its application or interpretation is contradicted by something outside of itself. It explains all the fundamentals. There is not any need for anything more, as there is nothing that can be gleaned from outside of the context of a discrete experiencer.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Since the theory is laid on the foundation of an actual truth, your personal discrete experience, its actually the strongest theory of knowledge that I know of. There is an epistemological ground, the 'assumption' that one can start with, and prove without contradiction or circularity. Feel free to post any theory of knowledge you wish, and I'll almost certainly be able to point out its fatal flaw. I won't say this one is 'the' theory, but it is a vast improvement over all other theories of knowledge and should be a standard comparative measure upon which new theories are founded.
The idea that there are limits in knowledge is not a criticism against it, only a note that we should be aware of those limits and not attempt to assert what we cannot. Knowledge is a tool, and all tools have effective, ineffective, and limited use. Lets go back to probability for a second. Every good induction is a prediction of the unknown with as much basis on what is known as possible. To know the probability of a coin landing heads or tails, you need to know what a coin is, a flip, and what each side is. What we know, is that we can not know what the forces of each flip will be to predict the landing. That knowledge of limitations allows us to create a probability that, given enough flips over time, is remarkably accurate.
It is not that my knowledge theory has no answer to 'what is something in itself'. The answer is we can only know a discrete experience in itself. Logically then, we can not know something outside of the ability to discretely experience. It is both a logical and applicable assertion. Try not to discretely experience and know some (a/one) 'thing'. See the contradiction?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Correct. Do you see above as a discrete experiencer why that is now?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think the knowledge framework allows reflection on itself perfectly. But please, feel free to disagree and point out if I'm missing something.
Ok. Yet that is how your argument appears.
In my , I showed that requiring an individual to exist in all worlds is a stipulated metaphysical condition, not a logical or semantic consequence.
I take that as pretty much setting the OP.
There is a different question, concerning intelligibility, that you raised. It appears that you are making some sort of transcendental argument, along the lines that we have an ongoing discourse; that the only way in which we could have an ongoing discourse is if the world is intelligible; and that therefore intelligibility is necessary.
The following appears to be making exactly that argument:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Being intelligible is not a feature of the world as such, but of our practices within the world. That's the point makes.
Interpretation depends on some sort of triangulation involving the speaker, the interpreter and a shared world against which the interpretation occurs. That shared world is a part of the practice and amounts to what is the case - what is true.
Perhaps this shows that there isn't any real tension between you and @Joshs. We should however recognise that talking of intelligibility in terms of necessity and existence risks conflating two very different language games, one concerns the semantic and pragmatic conditions for discourse (the shared world, interpretation, triangulation); the other concerns ontological or metaphysical necessity (existence in all possible worlds).
Yeah, I think I agree. the problem is common to the two threads. I can express it most clearly, at least for me, in terms of the difference between the formation rules and the domain of discourse in a formal language. In natural language that'd be the same as distinguishing what we say from how we say it. In Wittgenstein's language it might be the difference between playing the game and setting up the rules.
The problem is how we might deal with treating the formation rules as a part of the domain; treating how we talk as what we are talking about; mistaking putting the pieces on the board for playing the game.
You will recall the game I sometimes try to play in which players take turns to make up a new rule. That's a joke on the same theme. Playing the game involves changing the way the game is played.
And the answer, it seems to me, is that we are always playing the game, that putting the pieces on the board is as much a part of the game as is moving the pawn two squares forward.
@Esse Quam Videri would have us seperate out, as a preliminary, a prior, that the world is necessarily intelligible, before we can start to talk about the world. But does it work that way, or is part of talking about the world making it intelligible?
Well, it's not unintelligible...
Let's set out a plausible argument so that we have it out were we can see it and talk about it.
1. The world is intelligible.
2. Hence something made it intelligible
3. And this we all call...
Now we agree as to (1), and I think we agree that (3) doesn't follow.
What of (2)? Why should we think of intelligibility as in need of explanation?
Actually, thinking further about that, one of the reasons this seems so inscrutable, is that reason itself is not visible, so to speak. It is another instance of the 'reflexive problem of consciousness' - the mind can't see itself reason. But that's precisely why reason is 'transcendental' in the Kantian sense. Hence also subject to the implicit animus towards 'the transcendental'.
Yep!
Good response.
And this is why, going back to the thread, answering "Is there anything that exists necessarily?" with "Yes - intelligibility" is disoriented.
The something in (2) is not a thing.
Thanks for the chat - it helped my articulate what we troubling me about the posts hereabouts.
I'll take some issue with Quoting WayfarerIn so far as the mind is singular that might be so; but at least a part of discourse is one mind seeing the reasoning of another.
The transcendental answer to "Why are things so-and-so?" is "In order for things to be so-and-so, it must be the case that such-and-such".
The Wittgensteinian answer is more "Because that's how we do it"
Will bafflement suffice?
...which I much prefer to bafflement... :confused:
Crossed two versions of that post... I'm baffled as to how.
I must have had two windows opened, unawares.
There has been a lot of drift in the discussion since the opening replies to the OP, so I'm going to try to recapitulate my stance by gathering the loose threads and tying them back to the original question asked by the OP. Sorry for the length, but there's a lot to consolidate.
In my exchange with @Joshs I've been trying to clarify a persistent misunderstanding. I’m not treating norms, intelligibility, or truth-conditions as items in the domain, nor confusing formation rules with what those rules are about. The issue isn’t ontological inflation. The point is that modal semantics already presupposes truth-apt judgment; the distinction between being right and merely being coherent within a framework. My original objection to Meillassoux’s “absolute contingency” was that it relies on that distinction while denying that anything non-optional obtains at the level of reality itself.
So @Banno, I was not asking modal logic to generate metaphysical necessity, nor claiming it forces a necessary being. I was questioning whether modal frameworks can underwrite the metaphysical thesis that nothing whatsoever must be the case (per Meillasoux), given what they presuppose in order to function. That’s a methodological disagreement about what modal structure tracks, not a confusion about grammar or model theory.
I think part of the difficulty here is that we’ve been talking a lot about norms and practices, but not enough about the act of judgment itself. In inquiry, there’s a real difference between continuing to ask questions and reaching a point where no further relevant questions remain without undermining the reasons already in play. To judge that something is the case is not merely to conform to a practice or stabilize commitments; it’s to take responsibility for the claim that the relevant conditions have been met. That’s why judgment is truth-apt in a way that rule-following alone isn’t.
While judgment doesn’t require a metaphysical guarantor in the sense of an external foundation, it also isn’t neutral with respect to necessity. When we judge that something is the case, we commit ourselves to the claim that, given the relevant conditions, it cannot be otherwise without error. That is a minimal but genuine sense of necessity; one that arises from inquiry itself rather than being imposed from outside it. Practices can explain how we arrive at judgments; judgment explains why certain denials are no longer optional once understanding has been achieved.
If we take judgment seriously in this way, it doesn’t just commit us to particular necessities (“given these conditions, this must be so”), but raises a further question about the totality of conditions themselves. Inquiry doesn’t only ask whether this or that claim is adequately grounded, but whether reality as such is intelligible or merely a brute fact. If everything were conditioned without remainder, then the responsible affirmation of any claim as finally true would be undermined in principle, since further conditions could always be demanded. Yet inquiry does make such affirmations, not dogmatically, but as answers to questions that have been adequately satisfied.
That commitment points beyond any particular conditioned object or causal explanation to something unconditioned; not as an entity within the universe, nor as an empirical cause among others. This “beyond” is not introduced as a further hypothesis or item in the domain, but as what inquiry already relies on when it affirms that its judgments are answerable to how things are, rather than to nothing at all. To deny this would not simply revise our ontology, but would undercut the very distinction between getting things right and merely going on coherently. In that sense, the unconditioned is not merely thinkable or regulative, but real; not by possessing existence as a further attribute, but by not being the sort of thing whose existence could be contingent on conditions. Its reality is inseparable from its role as the ultimate term of judgment, rather than an object among objects. My suggestion is that inquiry can bottom out here without incoherence, without a priori posits, and even without appeal to a cosmic mind/subject.
But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. That is, the judgement that such-and-such is true commits one to denying that it is false; but it doens;t commit one to saying that it is true in all possible circumstances. Yet this is what would be required in order to move from "such and such is true" to "such and such is necessarily true".
That is , this "unconditional" truth is a step further than is justified by the commitment to such-and-such being true.
That is “If everything were conditioned, final truth is undermined” - perhaps; I'm not sure what final truth might be. but not truth per se.
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
Yes.
Quoting Banno
The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all.
If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled.
This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised.
Now consider what it means to assert that the denial of a claim is truly wrong. It means something like “even given all relevant considerations, ¬p fails to answer to how things really are”. That requires an implicit commitment to (1) their being such a thing as “all relevant considerations,” at least in principle and (2) that p is settled by how things really are, not just by where we happen to be currently situated within inquiry.
If we say that there is always a further relevant condition that could overturn p, then we must also accept that denial is never truly wrong, but only premature. But this implies that denial can never be truly incorrect in the robust sense that we all presuppose when we tell someone that their claim is really-and-truly wrong (much as we all are constantly doing to each other in this very forum).
To give a concrete example, suppose we judge that “Water is H?O”, and suppose someone here on the forum denies this. Why do we treat the denial of this claim as wrong, not just awaiting further data? It’s because we take ourselves to have reached a point where all the relevant conditions have been satisfied and no further conditions would overturn the claim. By contrast if our operating notions of reality and truth were radically unconditioned, we could never say that the denial is wrong in the robust sense, because we would have to presuppose that every fact always depends on further, undisclosed conditions; indefinitely.
One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in every act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement.
But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that the very act of judging each other's claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder.
This is a valid concern. Forgive me if you're already replying to my last post. I figured this would be a good summary.
1. That we discretely experience is an actual truth. The act itself, not what we think about it. Factually, there is nothing more that can ever be discovered that would undermine it.
2. There is always a question about our application using discrete experience. Its unavoidable as we are applying one experience and truth we directly have, to something else that we do not have full control or potential comprehension over.
3. In theory, one could arrive at the truth of everything if one had full context. So if we could sense it all from a bird's eye view, and be able to perceive and sense everything that was possible to perceive and sense, what is deductive and what is reasonably inductive would be true, but it would still be within the context of a perceiver.
So, the only context of truth which we are privy to discover is that we discretely experience. Everything else is built on this, and the fact that our application of them can be contradicted. Thus full knowledge is a blend of a true foundation, and rational approaches to attempting to understand the world outside of that true foundation. This would not change given more information or findings, this is also a truth. One way to think of it is, "I can be me. But I can never be anything else. And to know something else in itself fully, I must actually be that thing fully."
I don't think there's any possible way to know what is true outside of ourselves, but it is true to know our own experiences in themselves. I hope that summarizes the point I was trying to make in my last post.
Not so sure about this. Necessity is presuppsitionlessness, something that cannot be denied, and since anything spoken at all can be undone by something else, other thinking that looks to the fragile contextuality the thing is constituted by, necessity can only be found outside of language, that is, outside of representational structure of language. Consider the affective dimension of our existence, or more broadly, the value dimension, and ask a question like, Can searing pain, say, be gainsaid? Note, you are not asking about the logic of the idea that brings the pain to propositional understanding, and anything that may be brought against it as a challenge to the pain's "truth" has no bearing at all.
Pure necessity? Yes, there is such a thing. It lies with what lies outside of the contingency of the saying of what a thing is.
Not at all! I'm glad that you jumped in with a response.
Quoting Philosophim
Yes, it does, thank you. I actually agree with you on this; we do not have access to a god's eye view that would enable us to exhaustively answer all possible questions. But the notion of a "fact-of-the-matter" that I’m working doesn't require this. It requires only that judgments be answerable to how things are, independently of whether we ever fully grasp them. When we say that a claim about the world is wrong (not merely incomplete or misapplied) we are [I]presupposing[/I] that there is a determinate way things are that the claim fails to answer to.
So it’s not a question of whether the results of inquiry are always provisional or contextually-scoped in practice, but whether the act of inquiry (especially in acts of judgement) itself presupposes that reality is unconditionally determinate independent of our provisional conclusions about it, thereby preserving robust notions of truth and error.
So what I'm looking for in your response is "what judgment itself presupposes" so that a judgement can be true or false.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Is this concerning the branch of Agrippa’s trilemma that results in an infinite regress? Ok.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
So your trilemma is set up like this, using the language you are adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they are able to state the conditions under which they so judge; but then they must either again explain their judgement as to the truth of those conditions; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.
And the conclusion is that "...no fact of the matter... could ever settle a judgment as finally correct".
You then spend a few paragraphs explaining much the same thing for negation. If someone were to deny that water is H?O, we would never be in a position to say in some absolute sense that they are wrong, because there would always remain some conditions that are not judged to be true... or something along those lines. We could never say their denial is wrong...
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
So now you have two notions of truth, ordinary and robust. Ordinary truth is "what's best so far" and robust truth is "how things really are". You worry is about losing the ability to tell which we have.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
So now you have along side the two notion of truth, two notions of explanation, one of which is "authentic" in that it commits one to saying how things are "unconditionally".
Now I think your have drawn yourself a nice picture here of how you think epistemology works, but that there are fundamental problems in the way that this picture has been set up that lead you to a sort of absolute conclusion that is erroneous.
Let's start with an example. I think that if I ask you if you are reading this post, here, and now, you would quite rightly judge that you are. Now on your account, since you so judge, there must be "conditions" for that judgement. And the condition for it being true that you are reading this post, here, and now is just that you are reading this post, here, and now. So here, the condition and the judgement are the very same.
I'm not suggesting that your judgement is based on some observation of yourself reading, but that what you are now doing counts as reading. It is what we mean when we say something like "EQV is reading". To deny that you are reading this, here, now, would be to deny the whole practice that underpins the use of sentences like "EQV is reading here, now".
If we go back to the Trilemma, the leg we are on now is in effect that of circularity: we judge that you are reading because we judge that you are reading.
It might help at this stage to review the fact that a circular argument is perfectly valid, just potentially unsatisfactory. So it is not an objection to point out that the justification is circular.
And this is part of the appeal of practice. The justification here is that this is just how we use the words "EQV is reading" and their correlates. To deny that you are reading is just to step away from that practice. So someone who denies that you are reading isn't mistaken as to the facts, but as to the words we use to set them out.
And here we have avoided the picture of "conditions all the way down". Our justification is this is just what we do.
Notice also that it's not some "fact of the matter" that settles the discussion. We've sidestepped that, too, by since we do not here point to a fact about the world, but to our practice within that world. In these sort of circumstances, we say things like "it is true that EQV is reading this post".
And we've dropped any need for splitting truth into absolute and relative truths. Our sentences are just true when the practice is coherent.
I'll stop there. That's enough for now.
And what we have instead is small steps, ad hoc hypotheses, little critiques of piecemeal ideas.
Two ways to philosophise.
For @Esse Quam Videri there must be something that exists necessarily. But trouble is, it's very hard for such a view to survive critique. Every time the absolute is found, it turns out to be just another posit in the ongoing discussion. Every necessity on examination becomes contingent on it's context.
Perhaps this should not surprise us, since we know that at least for the case of a simple formal system that is capable of doing counting, it might be consistent but it can never be complete - that is, whatever foundation we build will never give us every truth. The best we can hope for is to add a little bit more truth to that consistent system.
And if that's the case for simple formal systems, why should we then expect our natural languages to be any less complicated?
That would be what a contradiction is. A contradiction is the world telling us, "Our idea about reality is wrong." We cannot will a contradiction away. If I jump out of an airplane without a parachute, no matter how I perceive the world or will it, I will fall to my death. Contradictions are proof that there are things outside of ourself and our own willpower.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Because at any time we could be contradicted, we are reminded of a potential unconditional independent of our conclusions about it. The truth is that you will be contradicted, and that contradiction to your idea of the world is an undeniable error in your judgement.
Does that cover it? I'm not sure what else you would be looking for at this point, but please continue if there is.
I’ve already addressed this point several times. Briefly: judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error. I don’t think restating this again in detail will move the discussion forward.
Quoting Banno
No. I’m not concerned with an infinite regress of reasons, but with an infinite regress of conditions—conditions of being right rather than reasons we happen to give.
Quoting Banno
I’m not introducing two notions of truth or explanation. What I’m saying is that if we deny that truth involves answerability to how things really are, or that explanation aims at getting things right about how things really are, then what remains is no longer recognizable as truth or explanation. Instead we are left with weaker surrogates (endorsement, acceptance, coherence) that cannot carry the same epistemological weight within inquiry.
Quoting Banno
I don’t think that follows. The condition is a state of affairs; the judgment is an act of affirming that state of affairs. They may coincide extensionally in this case, but they are not identical in kind.
Quoting Banno
Practice determines what would [I]count[/I] as being right, but it does not (and cannot) itself [I]make[/I] a judgment right.
Quoting Banno
That may be right for this particular case, but it doesn’t generalize. In many cases of disagreement—scientific, historical, or ordinary—we treat people as mistaken about how things are, not merely about how words are used. Reducing error to misuse doesn’t capture that distinction.
Quoting Banno
Appealing to “what we do” avoids conditions all the way down only by treating truth as exhausted by acceptability within practice. But acceptability cannot do the same epistemological work as truth.
Quoting Banno
If no fact of the matter ever settles anything, then the distinction between misrepresentation and mere misuse disappears. That distinction is doing real work in inquiry and cannot simply be set aside.
Quoting Banno
This mischaracterizes my position. There’s an important difference between (1) trying to build inquiry on an absolute foundation and (2) reflectively identifying what inquiry itself presupposes in order to function as inquiry.
Quoting Banno
I agree that we shouldn’t expect completeness, and I haven’t suggested otherwise. But invoking Gödel here actually cuts against a practice-exhaustive conception of truth rather than supporting it. Gödel’s result shows that (1) truth outruns formal derivability, (2) consistency does not collapse into completeness, and (3) there are truths that hold even though they cannot be proven within the system. Notably, this presupposes a notion of truth that is not exhausted by system-relative coherence.
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I think we have reached the point in the discussion where further clarification is unlikely to be productive. Thank you for the interesting discussion.
My point isn’t just that we can be contradicted, but that when contradiction occurs, we take it to show that our judgment was wrong about how things are, not merely overridden by a new experience. That normative force doesn’t come from the contradiction itself, but from the fact that judgment already aims at a determinate way things are.
Put differently: contradiction doesn’t create objectivity; it reveals a failure relative to an objectivity that judgment already presupposes. Even in cases where no contradiction ever shows up, we still take our judgments to be answerable to how things really are, not merely to what has survived so far.
So I think we’re actually very close on this issue. I’d just want to say that the possibility of contradiction has its significance only because judgment is already oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs, not merely because we sometimes get corrected by experience.
I don't have a definite answer at this point, but its something to think on. Do we by default take our judgements as answerable to how things really are, or do you think most people simply assume their judgements are the way things are?
Put another way, I think there may be a personality difference here. There are some people who are constantly questioning whether their judgements are concurrent with reality, and those who are constantly surprised when its not. Some people get angry that their judgements are not being respected by reality, and others who are flexible and respectful of the outside forces that impinge on their judgements.
What I'm describing is the factual way I see people form knowledge. What I can't describe is the feeling a person has while doing it. I can describe that water is di-hydrogen monoxide. I can't describe what its like to feel it on your skin as you swim through it. A person could feel like they are pushing the water out of their way as they swim, or feel that the water is propelling them as they push against it. A person can feel hot, or 'not as cold'.
There are people who feel that the loch ness monster is real because of a few pictures. "See? That's all the proof we need." Their lives are in the affirmative of their judgements as being real, and reality is there to affirm them. Others will say, "Is that really enough evidence to claim that its real?" Those 'Debbie Downers" to the believers seem to lack wonder or 'openness' to the wonder and imagination of the world.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think this is a personality difference. I think many of us have a will towards our own judgments first, then learn about an independent world because life contradicts us. Perhaps studying babies and kids would help us see this more. Kids aren't born with the notion of object permanence. Its only around 4-7 months of living that kids finally start to realize that things can exist outside of their immediate perception.
A large point about judgement is to recognize the world for action. When you go up to a door, do you carefully examine its hinges and structure to make sure its a door, or do you make a snap judgement to open it and move about your day? What if the door actually contained spy equipment that monitored your every action, but you would need to take it to a special lab to find out? We cannot go about our day constantly fearful that the next step we take will send us through to a hidden dimension where we will never return. So while when we're carefully thinking about something logically we might look for contradictions, in general this is a halting and inactive viewpoint as a person tries to reason through everything they can possibly think of.
Is the glass half-full, half-empty, or 'in the middle'? This is a feeling about the fact that the glasses' volume is divided equally between compact air and water. As I mentioned earlier, a person can view the universe as having no God with despair, or retain their curiosity and wonder about it. I feel the same about the knowledge theory here. I can only conclude at this point that we affirm the reality of our own experiences, and logically are only aware of there being something outside of them by contradictions. Some might be more inclined to feel we're lead more by affirmatives about the world instead of contradictions. But does that change the underlying logic of how inquiry and rationality works? I don't think so.
But what do you think? Is it more than a feeling?
The distinction I am trying to draw is a little different. It’s not about the different ways that people can come to recognize the independence of reality, or the temperamental and development differences that lead them to engage with reality in different ways. It’s about what commitments are implicitly presupposed in the act of inquiry itself.
Consider the act of asking a question. It might seem at first that there’s not much to such an act, but I would argue that there is a lot that is implicit within it. For example, asking a question presupposes that there is something to ask about. It presupposes that we already know [I]something[/I] about it, but also that we don’t yet know [I]everything[/I] about it—otherwise there would be no point in asking.
In other words, there is a logic and a set of commitments that are implicitly presupposed in the act of asking a question. To say that these things are “presupposed” is to say that the act of asking a question would be incoherent without them; they are constitutive of what it means to ask a question. To say that they are “implicit” is to acknowledge the fact they generally remain out of conscious awareness while performing the act. It is only through philosophical reflection upon what it is we are doing when we ask a question that these presuppositions are made explicit.
So what I am arguing is that robust notions of truth, error and reality are implicitly presupposed within inquiry as norms governing correctness, and that these are not reducible to weaker notions such as endorsement, misuse or coherence without loss. When we engage in inquiry we are intrinsically oriented toward a reality that is determinate independently of our beliefs. If we weren’t, notions like truth, error and reality would lose their meaning and inquiry would become unrecognizable in comparison to what we actually do and say in practice.
If this is still unclear, no worries. I have really enjoyed our conversation. It has given me plenty to think about, and I hope it has for you as well.
Yes, you did. I marked "what judgment itself presupposes" specifically because of the central place you give it.
I'm concerned to make sure I am using your somewhat difficult language, so as to be sure we are not talking past each other. So let me adopt your language yet again, and go over what seems to me to be a central difficulty with your account:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
and your concern with:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
So let's set the trilemma up again, using the changed language you are here adopting: we suppose that if someone judges something to be true then they presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, in order to so judge; but then they must either again explain that presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error; or they must take them as fundamental; or they must rely on circularity, where judgements form the conditions for themselves.
And your answer is that there must be something that exists necessarily in order to ground judgement.
Now my rejection of this framing is based on an example of a judgement that does not fit that framing. First, I assume that you will judge with me that you are reading this post, here, now, and that this can act as a point of agreement. The question, then, by your account, is what that judgement presupposes, by way of answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error, and how it avoids an infinite regression.
Now I don't see how we can make sense of being wrong about your reading this post, here and now. There is no possibility of error here, apart from our being mistaken as to the use of words like "EQV, reading, here, now".
So were you say Quoting Esse Quam Videri I would instead point out that the example shows that the practice counts as making the judgement. Your reading this thread counts as "EQV is reading this tread" being true.
If you like, the extensional equivalence overrides any difference in intensionality. But that's not a very clear specification.
You take yourself as
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Perhaps we agree that there are things that are taken as granted in order to enact an inquiry. But were you say these things exist of necessity, I point out that they are instead aspects of our practice.
Gödel, of course, is used metaphoricaly. But
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
is not quite right, since the underivable truths are true within the system. Truth is a part of the things we do with language.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Cheers. You are of course under no obligation to respond to my posts.
Let me ask you this in response. If there was nothing to inquire, would inquiry exist? At a more tangible level, if an intelligence didn't invent cell phones, would they exist? No. Meaning that inquiry must necessarily involve some thing doing the inquiry. That is why it varies from person to person. There is nothing necessary in an inquirer. Some people ask a question rhetorically. Some inquire and seek personal validation in their predetermined conclusion.
The only thing I can give is that there is a way that we can inquire which logically leads to the truth rationally if what we are looking at is true. The other method of inquiry, induction, can also be categorized cogently. Meaning if someone decided to inquire using plausibility, "There's a magic unicorn in the forest," I can return with, "Magic isn't possible, its never been shown to exist" and dismiss their induction as less cogent than mine. I can create a system of inquiry that rationally, leads to the correct outcome based on rational justification instead of belief or guess work.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't think we can find a universal implicitness that impacts all inquirers. I think we can establish a means of inquiry that is most rational, identify means of inquiry that are less rational, but I don't think there is a universal implicit expectation from every inquirer when they ask a question.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Perhaps if we added an adjective like 'rational inquiry', this could be narrowed down a bit more? At that point we can use the theory to demonstrate what a rational inquiry is, and this would be rational for all discrete experiencers who can comprehend contradictions. Beyond this, I'm not sure what else to add.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
If we say "Rational inquiry", I think I can agree. Inquiry in general has no such requirements.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Same! I too have enjoyed your writing, your questions, and your genuine points. Whether we agree or not at this point, you are a credit to these boards, and I hope to have more discussions with you on other topics in the future. Thank you for lending your view point to this.
I don't think the “reading” case provides a counter-example to my claim that judgment presupposes answerability to how things are. On the contrary, even here the judgment is true because things are a certain way, and would be false if they were not. What the example shows is that there are cases where answerability is immediate - leaving no room for representational error - not that answerability is absent altogether. I take these as a limit-case, not a counter-example.
As soon as we move beyond such limit cases to claims about past events, theoretical entities, or explanations of why things are as they are, the distinction between misusing words and misrepresenting reality explicitly reasserts itself. In those cases, practice can fix criteria for correct application, but it does not itself make the judgment correct.
You could argue that all discourse can be inferentially grounded in limit-case claims, but since inference preserves only entailment rather than fulfillment of conditions, this wouldn't address worries about the regress of conditions.
My point is that inferential articulation does not exhaust the normativity of judgment. Inferential articulation explains how judgments are connected; it does not explain what it is for an inferentially licensed judgment to be wrong about the world.
That is why I resist the claim that practice can exhaust the notion of truth. The “reading” example merely shows what judgment looks like when answerability is transparently fulfilled, not that answerability can be replaced by practice. Inquiry in general presupposes that there is a way things are that judgments answer to or fail to answer to, and it is such failure that we mean by "error".
I think that’s a helpful way of putting it. If we restrict the discussion to rational inquiry - inquiry aimed at truth rather than persuasion, expression, or validation or anything else - then I agree that we’re talking about something governed by norms of rational correctness. That’s the sense of inquiry I’ve been trying to isolate.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
You are welcome, as Americans say, but I didn't do any more in that last post than repeat myself.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I'll try one more time. You are reading this now. We ask, "what is presupposed by the judgement that I am reading?" And the answer is, exactly and only, that I am reading. What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same. No explanation has been provided that was not already at hand. Also, you said previously that "judgment presupposes answerability to how things are and the intelligibility of error.". I'll italicise the latter. Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility.
If the answer is the same as the question, no "presupposed answerability" has been provided.
It will not do to try to maintain all judgment presupposes answerability to how things are by saying "limit cases" are simply trivial instances; that's indulging in special pleading. That you are reading this now is not obviously a limiting case in any special sense.
And indeed such are not limiting cases so much as constitutive cases. What you are now doing counts as reading, now. If what you are now doing is not reading this, then what could we mean by "reading, now"?
You are assuming that fulfilment of your conditions requires something outside the judgment itself but this is precisely what is being questioned by the reading example.
Truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice. But it seems that practice alone can provide the criteria that constitute correctness. This is a fairly direct consequence of Wittgenstein's considerations of rule-following.
You say: "What is judged to be the case and the presupposition are the very same."
I say: "The judgment and the fact that satisfies it are still distinguishable [I]in kind[/I]."
You say: "Now how can one be in error about your reading this, here, now? There seems to be no such possibility."
I say: "Error is only impossible in this case because answerability is immediately fulfilled, not because it has disappeared."
You say: "Calling it a limit case is special pleading."
I say: "Calling it a limit case is correctly identifying it for what it is."
As explained in my previous reply, it is a limit case precisely because the answerability relation is immediately fulfilled - not eliminated. I explained how the representational gap widens again as you move away from the limit case. This is precisely how we would expect a limit case to function.
You say: "If you were right, truth would be normatively grounded in reality, not practice."
I say: "Norms of truth are constituted in practice [I]as[/I] norms of answerability to reality."
Norms are [I]made[/I] by practice, but are [I]about[/I] getting things right - [I]which is why practice can fail[/I].
Practice and reality are not competitors here. They play different roles.
Special pleading. The judgement and the fact are the very same.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
An answer that repeats the question is not an answer.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Such judgements appear to be a limiting cases because they are constitutive of the background that makes judgement possible.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Norms are constitutive of what is the case as much as what is the case delineates norms, as is shown by "what is right" being itself a judgement.
Practice and reality are mutually dependent and inseparable.
My resistance isn’t to circularity, constitutive cases, or practice-based explanation — I accept all of those. It’s to the consequence that misrepresentation reduces to misuse and that inquiry no longer answers to anything beyond its own norms. That’s a coherent position perhaps, but it’s one that reshapes the notions of truth and error in a way I ultimately can’t accept.
At that point, the disagreement isn’t about regress, limit cases, or examples like “EQV is reading.” It’s about whether truth is exhausted by practice or essentially involves answerability to how things are. I don’t really see a neutral way to adjudicate that any further.
Of course that doesn't follow. Our language games are embedded in the world, not determinate of it.
Your proposal is something like, reality ? judgment. I'm not proposing judgment? reality, so much as judgment ?? reality. This mutual dependence does not collapse misrepresentation into misuse
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think we can proceed by looking at the best theories we have of truth. And that's Tarski. We know that the semantic theory of truth is coherent. It also holds for any of the other more substantive theories. '"p" is true IFF p' is pretty much undeniable without a loss of coherence.
So the question is, is it complete?
And now our differences centre on, "does truth require more than what our best semantic theories already provide?"
Now this was Davidson's program, half a century ago; and it gave way to various forms of deflation concerning truth, together with what have been called "pragmatic" views, although they differ greatly from the substantive views of the early pragmatists.
For the purposes of this thread, what we might reject is a recourse to the necessity of judgements matching reality. That Great Juxtaposition of how things are against how we say they are has been shown wanting.
I agree that our practices are world-embedded and constrained by reality. My worry isn’t about whether reality plays a role, but about [I]how[/I]. On your picture, reality constrains judgment only through the evolution of norms internal to practice. On mine, judgment is essentially answerable to how things are in a way that allows us to say that a practice-embedded, norm-governed belief nevertheless misrepresented reality. That’s the asymmetry I’m trying to preserve. If one accepts mutual dependence, that asymmetry disappears, and with it the distinction between being wrong about the world and merely revising our norms. At that point, the disagreement really is about whether truth outruns even world-embedded practice.
Quoting Banno
I don’t disagree about Tarski or Davidson. The semantic theory of truth is indispensable and coherent, but it answers a different question than the one I’m raising. Tarski tells us how “true” functions in a language, but he does not explain what it is for a judgment to misrepresent the world rather than merely fall out of favor within a practice. If I recall correctly, even Davidson explicitly acknowledged this gap: semantic theories of truth explain meaning, not epistemic success.
Rejecting a heavyweight correspondence theory doesn’t eliminate answerability; it only eliminates a particular metaphysical picture of it. My concern isn’t with “matching” reality as an external comparison, but with preserving the asymmetry that makes shared error intelligible. That judgments answer to how things are in a way that practices themselves do not exhaust. If that asymmetry is rejected, then error collapses into norm change. If it’s preserved, then truth outruns practice. That’s the divide I’ve been pointing to.
This discussion reminds me what Wittgenstein said in On Certainty 505, “It is always by favour of Nature that one knows something.”
That said, in light of some recent exchanges elsewhere, I suspect that @Banno and I may be closer in substance than it initially appeared, even if our vocabularies and points of emphasis differ. Terminology is always a challenge, and I’ve spent most of the last few years working in a more Continental register, which no doubt shows. I’m trying to correct for that in recent posts.
We might sort all this by introducing triangulation, alla Davidson.
In that framing, I interpret your beliefs not just in relation to my own, but on the presumption that your beliefs are pretty much the same as my own - the Principle of Charity. So my interpretation is triangulated with your utterances, and my beliefs as to how things are in the world.
Are you familiar with it?