The Ontological Status of Universals
One of the arguments for the existence of God Edward Feser offers, in *Five Proofs of the Existence of God*, which he calls “The Augustinian Proof”, relies on realism regarding universals. What I’d like to focus on is his argument that Scholastic (Thomist) Realism is the correct view of this ontological status. (I leave the analysis and critique of the actual argument for the existence of God for another thread.)
Traditionally, theories about the ontological status of universals have been categorized into three opposing groups: Realism maintains that universals are real and mind-independent; Nominalism maintains that universals are not real, but merely convenient fictions; Conceptualism maintains that universals are real, but are mind-dependent.
Feser offers six direct arguments for Realism and four indirect arguments. The six direct arguments he labels (1) the “One over Many” Argument, (2) the Argument from Geometry, (3) The Argument from Mathematics, (4) The Argument from Science, and (6) The Argument from Possible Worlds. His indirect arguments consist of two against Nominalism ((7) the Vicious Regress Argument and (8) the “Words Are Universals Too” Argument) and two against Conceptualism ((9) the Argument from the Objectivity of Concepts and Knowledge and (10) the Argument from the Incoherence of Psychologism).
Having determined, to his satisfaction, Realism regarding the existence of universals, he then claims that there are only three possible theories about how universals are real: Platonic Realism, Aristotelian Realism, and Scholastic Realism. He proceeds to argue that neither Platonic Realism nor Aristotelian Realism are adequate, leaving only Scholastic Realism as a viable theory of universals.
All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? It’s been decades since I have read any Metaphysics, but I cannot help but think that surely in the 900 years since Aquinas, other views defending Realism have been offered.
Traditionally, theories about the ontological status of universals have been categorized into three opposing groups: Realism maintains that universals are real and mind-independent; Nominalism maintains that universals are not real, but merely convenient fictions; Conceptualism maintains that universals are real, but are mind-dependent.
Feser offers six direct arguments for Realism and four indirect arguments. The six direct arguments he labels (1) the “One over Many” Argument, (2) the Argument from Geometry, (3) The Argument from Mathematics, (4) The Argument from Science, and (6) The Argument from Possible Worlds. His indirect arguments consist of two against Nominalism ((7) the Vicious Regress Argument and (8) the “Words Are Universals Too” Argument) and two against Conceptualism ((9) the Argument from the Objectivity of Concepts and Knowledge and (10) the Argument from the Incoherence of Psychologism).
Having determined, to his satisfaction, Realism regarding the existence of universals, he then claims that there are only three possible theories about how universals are real: Platonic Realism, Aristotelian Realism, and Scholastic Realism. He proceeds to argue that neither Platonic Realism nor Aristotelian Realism are adequate, leaving only Scholastic Realism as a viable theory of universals.
All this leads up to a simple question: is he right in claiming that there are only three possible Realist views: Platonic, Aristotelian, and Scholastic? It’s been decades since I have read any Metaphysics, but I cannot help but think that surely in the 900 years since Aquinas, other views defending Realism have been offered.
Comments (347)
Hm.
Being a universal.
Becoming a universal.
Existence of universals.
Do universals exist as they are prior to our awareness of them?
When I googled those 3 terms, I found them occurring together, without other alternatives included. But you already knew that.
Sometimes the possibilities that are acceptable and appealing to people are ones that were introduced long ago.
What's wrong with Platonic Realism? As described in the articles I found, It's the simplest.
How can anyone say that there aren't inevitably abstract facts, or that they, or inter-referring systems of them, need anything other than eachother (in the case of an inter-referring system) and the hypotheticals that they refer to?
Michael Ossipoff
My own view, is that consciousness, or a mind or minds is at the bottom of all reality. So whether we're talking about universals, abstract objects, particulars, etc, it all proceeds from consciousness. To be clear, I'm not coming from any religious point of view, only that consciousness is the unifying principle that unites all of reality, including the way we talk about reality. Since I haven't kept up with some of these theories myself, I'm not sure how my own ideas would fit within context of your question; and I'm not sure how modern my ideas are in terms of past ideas.
Pantheism? It seems to be making some inroads into Philosophy of Mind of late.
"What's wrong with Platonic Realism?"
Feser's objection focuses of Plato's postulation of a "third realm", transcending the physical and mental realms, in which the Forms exist.
That's not to say I would like it if nominalism were true. It would make things less oppressive, I think. For instance, Feser's argument "words are universals too" strikes me as imperialistic. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE UNIVERSALS, EVEN WORDS ARE UNIVERSALS TOO. At least some nominalists must have wanted to escape this metaphysical regime: see early Buddhist philosophers who argued for extreme nominalism in order to overturn the Hindu caste system. As do I, but unfortunately I don't know if it's coherent to deny that universals exist.
Implicit in Feser's (et al) approach to metaphysics seems to be the dominion of the Same over the Other, the desire to "fit" everything within a totality, the imperialistic urge to know everything. To which I typically say: no thanks.
So he was a Dualist?
For one thing, I don;t believe in Mind separate from body. You're your body.
For another thing, it sounds like you're saying that Plato believed that 1) metaphysics describes all of Reality; and 2) Metaphysically, there's nothing other than matter and Mind (if you believe in it as separate). Do you believe those things?
I don't believe in "realms".
If he said those things, then I'd better shut up about his position, because I must have bigtime misread those articles about it. So I retract what I said about "Platonic Realism", because it's obvious that I don't really know what he believed.
There obviously are abstract facts.
Michael Ossipoff
Quoting Mitchell
I don’t think you will find many defenders of (scholastic) realism outside (neo)Thomism. After all, despite the shortcomings of nominalism, the nominalists, who were important precursors to early modern science, actually won the day in terms of convincing the secular academy that their view was correct. Scholastic philosophy of whatever variety was only preserved in the Catholic system.
What I see as the problem, is that I believe universals (numbers and the like) actually have a different mode of existence than do particulars. That is to say, numbers, logical laws, propositions, and the like, represent a different kind of reality than do objects. (This is where the passage on Augustine and intelligible objects is useful.) When we know an intellectual object, like a mathematical proof, our knowing of it is immediate and direct in a way that is not the case with the knowledge of sensory objects (an understanding that is certainly preserved in scholastic metaphysics, where the 'intellect' perceives the 'intelligible form' of things, whilst the senses receive the 'accidents').
So the tentative understanding I am developing is that universals (like numbers) don’t exist in the sense that objects like chairs and tables exist. They're real, but can only be perceived by the intellectual operation of counting and calculating. But as the overwhelming tendency in modern philosophy is to equate 'what is real' with 'what exists' then there is no provision for the notion of different modes or kinds of reality. Something either exists or it doesn't: horses exist, unicorns don't; the sum of 2 and 5 exists, the square root of 2 doesn't.
That is why I think the usual understanding of the Platonic ‘third realm’ is misleading. There is no actual realm - in this case, the term ‘realm’ is being used metaphorically. But the very idea of ‘realm’ connotes some place, something that exists somewhere; the mind tries to envisage an ethereal realm, and can't do so, so it rejects the idea as absurd.
But if you think about the ‘realm of natural numbers’, then is something that is real - it has members, and also things that excluded from it. But it’s not an existent, in the sense that particular objects or even stellar ensembles (like galaxies) are existent. And actually many of the same observations can be made about natural laws - do the Laws of Motion exist? They're not 'among phenomena' but are said (following Newton) to 'govern' phenomena (although such language is nowadays deprecated because of its obviously theistic implications.)
In my view, all of this implies the notion of an hierarchy of being, with degrees of reality, within which intelligible objects such as number are of a higher order than sensible objects such as chairs and tables, which is in keeping with Platonic epistemology. I think that is very much what was lost in the transition from medieval realism to modern empiricism. That's my reading.
(About the only metaphysics text I have encountered which talks in terms of 'degrees of reality' is indeed a neo-thomist book, Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge. I borrowed it once, couldn't understand it, but might try again. Brief discussion here, 'Maritain's account presupposes that there is a metaphysical and epistemological hierarchy'.)
My take on this question is this:
However if we interpret Plato in a different light in terms of his "Time is the moving image of Eternity", then perhaps the differences are not so great. Eternity is not a "separate realm" but the 'other face' of time, just as generality is the other face of particularity, and transcendence the other face of immanence. In this view transcendence is not really transcendence as it is traditionally understood, because it does not posit any degree of separation whatsoever.
There is also what CS Peirce called his extreme scholastic realism, or realicism. That follows from Avicenna and Duns Scotus. And it fits with a modern systems science view of causality.
The way I would put it is that universals are our names for natural limits. They are the emergent regularities - the symmetries or laws - that emerge to bound nature.
So as Avicenna argued, the world in itself is not pre-divided into the general and the particular - some realm of matter vs some realm of form, for example - rather it expresses everywhere that potential to become divided in this fashion. It can become organised or structured in a way that is understood as a separation towards these two complementary poles of being.
So the particular and the general are both limits - the furthest that reality can go in these two kinds of opposed developmental directions. The limits are themselves thus also real. They actually do causally limit reality's development. Their existence is not fictional, just as the fence around a paddock is really there.
But also, these limits or bounds are not real in the embodied, substantial, hylomorphic fashion that most folk mean when they talk of the "physically real". In being limits - the place where reality finishes or completes the fullness of its "coming to be" - they are also exactly where substantial reality ceases to be. The line we draw to mark the circle isn't part of the circle. We can certainly give a name to a limit - an edge where things suddenly stop. We can point in a direction to where it lies. However the reality of the limit lies in this apophatic fact. It marks the edge, the boundary, of what you are calling reality.
To flesh this out further, in systems science or hierarchy theory, we would call the general and the particular, global constraints and degrees of freedom. So universals really refers to the notion that reality is organised by its emergent constraints. Restrictions arise that give form and purpose to substantial being.
Then particulars are degrees of freedom, or the material and efficient causes of substantial being. Constraints give shape to bare material possibility. And then having being shaped, this stuff can start to have constructive action. It becomes a substantial kind of possibility - a play of atomistic being - which combines and reacts in the familiar Newtonian mechanistic fashion.
The explanation gets confusing at this point because an atom is a universal term. Just like any substantial being, we can point to the form and the purpose that gives an atom its shape - its mode of being as a degree of freedom, as a primary material/efficient cause, with the "goal" of blindly and mechanically reacting so as to produce more complex constructions.
However this is consistent with Anaximander, Avicenna and others who say reality itself is just the potential to become organised by a separation towards the opposing limits of particulars and universals, constructive degrees of freedom and limiting constraints.
Atoms are a substantial expression of this ontology on the smallest or simplest scale - as modern quantum particle physics makes plain. But the same hylomorphic principle applies at every level of substantial being, including the most complex, as with life and mind.
So this extreme scholastic realism or systems thinking treats both the particular and the general as limits. Both are emergent from reality - this "reality" being itself the third more primordial thing of a not-yet-divided potential with a readiness to become structured by the division represented by the particular and the general.
Reality thus - as Peirce put it - comes with an irreducible complexity. No one part of it seems actually real. You have a primordial potential that lacks either the particularity or generality of actual substantial being. And then the particular and the general are our names for the complementary limitations on actual substantial being. They are not "real" in the conventional sense either. They are just the two extremes of causal action - the emergence of regularity or law into the developing world, and the matching emergence of concrete or material degrees of freedom into that world.
Actuality or substantial reality is what you finally get out of this triadic or hierarchical process of development. It is the structured result - or at least our snapshot view of whatever degree of definite hylomorphic development has occurred by that point.
Again, it is all a flow, all a process of coming to be. The idea of arriving and becoming completely fixed in a classical physical fashion - a world of definite objects - is itself an illusion, not "real" in the usual way people want to mean it. Like Heraclitus and his river, it looks like an actuality, but actuality remains only relative.
To be actual would be to actually arrive at the limits we encode with the notions of constructing particulars and bounding generals. And achieving that would negate the fact that they are "the limits". If you could arrive at the edge of being, it would no longer be the edge. It is like claiming to have arrived at infinity having done enough counting. Finitude can't touch the infinity that bounds it, though it can strive endlessly to reach it.
To sum up, a long line of "systems" thought argues that the dualism or dichotomy of the universal and the particular can only be resolved triadically.
The usual view of realism seeks to make it a monistic choice - one or the other is the real "real". Atomism was the creed that material particulars are the primordially real. Platonism was the creed that formal generals are the primordially real. Then most folk get stuck with the feeling that both seem kind of real, and so some kind of confused dualism must be tolerated.
The way out of this is to go for the holism of a three-way developmental story. Which - being what we find right back with Anaximander - is also a pretty ancient metaphysical position.
Now we have an emergent systems view where in the beginning is just a bare potential - an Apeiron, a Firstness, an Ungrund, a Vagueness. That's not really real. But it can be logically divided. Dialectically, any potential harbours its complementary opposites. And so within the barest notion of the potential lies the possibility for a dichotomy of the general and the particular. You have two logically matched limits in terms of matter vs form, local constructive action vs globally constraining action.
These are not really "real" either. They are the ultimate limits on being as a possibility. They are the two directions in which a potential can be divided. They exist only as the ultimate extremes of those contrasting directions of development.
However together as a triad, these three can be seen as the fundamental aspects of a holistic reality within which hylomorphic substantial being emerges as an ontically structured state. A world of objects is what we arrive at.
So in the end, nominalism starts to look the correct view, the classical physics view, as we seem to exist in a static Universe ruled by abstract God-given (or mathematics-given) laws and composed of atomistically material particulars. (That is, if we can ignore the reality of bounding laws of physics, we can pretend that material particulars are all we need to consider as "the substantially real".)
You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that seems to suggest laws or regularities are 'consequent to' - that first of all there's material bodies, then the laws 'emerge'. Whereas I had thought that in modern cosmology, something like the dimensionless constants (which might correspond to constraints) are real prior to the particulars, and that when laws to emerge, it's because these latencies are now being actualised - 'what is latent becomes patent'.
Quoting apokrisis
This is confusing, because nominalism is 'names only' - i.e. that what realists think are universals, are really just names for similarities.
I don't know. But I'm willing to give the thought a gander.
What would you count in the category "universal" that you would also count as real?
And so nominalism depends on an ontology where everything is a material particular. The differentiation of being is the primary fact. The integration we see and give name to is entirely secondary. It is not recognised as something that is equally real.
As I argued, a triadic metaphysics accepts that the integration, or the constraining top-down causes, are "merely" emergent and not primary being. But then so also is any local individuation or differentiation. The particulars are just as emergent, so have the same ontic status. Neither are "real" in that sought-for sense.
And even the primary reality is just a primordial notion of bare potential. It ain't "real" either.
Quoting Wayfarer
Development proceeds from the vague to the crisp. So from the first moment, both the universal laws and the concrete instances have only the haziest existence. The first act - the Big Bang moment - counts as no more than a fluctuation, a fruitful suggestion, the right start to a proper separation.
And we see this in the quantum physics of the Big Bang. It begins as a hot soup of radiation, an undifferentiated mess of potential being. There are no local definite particles. It's too hot and small. There is no organised physics of constraining forces. Again, it's too hot and small.
The strong force, the weak force, electromagnetism, even gravity - none of these clearly exist at the first moment. The familiar laws of physics have not yet emerged. It takes cooling and expansion to allow the familiar laws to condense out and start organising the initial maelstrom fluctuation.
So electrons and electromagnetism are both emergent features of our classical reality. The particulate matter, and the laws that rule them, have to pop-out in mutual fashion due to developmental symmetry-breakings or phase transitions.
We can of course look back and read their future existence into the white hot and formless first moment of the Big Bang. The mathematics of symmetry now account for how they were inevitable as the way things would eventually get structurally organised. But properly speaking, both the matter and the form only emerged into actual substantiality when the Universe had developed enough to make another break in its initial state of high symmetry.
Physics already takes an emergent view of law as well as matter. Although it is true that most physicists wouldn't put it that way.
Quoting Wayfarer
The terminology here is confusing. Physics calls things like the various coupling constants of the forces "dimensionless". But the truly fundamental constants - the "dimensional" ones, the foundational triad of h, G and c - seem more properly the dimensionless as they are only measured against each other. They are bootstrapping in that they don't require measurement against some further external dimensioned backdrop. You can just set their "strength" to 1 and get on with it.
So the dimensional constants - h, G and c - are the properly latent ones as they encode the very fact of a "reality forming dichotomy" in my view. They are what I would rather call "dimensionless" precisely because they only stand in an inverse or reciprocal relation to each other. All the basic aspects of the Universe are a playing off of h vs G (that is: the quantum action vs the gravitational action).
The quantum action stands for a primordial notion of differentiation. The gravitational action stands for a primordial notion of integration. And then c - the speed of light - captures the universal "rate" at which they interact to form a substantial state of being.
So the dimensional constants are certainly latent in the potential that became the Big Bang cosmos. They are our most naked description of the fact that reality exists because any naked potential is a potential for just this kind of differentiation~integration kind of world-making dichotomy. If there is causality, it must take this logical form - material particulars vs global constraints.
Again, h scales the bare act of differentiation. G scales the bare act of integration. Once you have these two polar tendencies in operation - the "accident" of a Big Bang fluctuation - then you get the third thing of a rate, a universal speed, at which they mutually develop into increasingly concrete being.
The big question then is what to say about the dimensionless constants - all the further couplings strengths of the various forces and masses that become "exposed" due to further symmetry breakings as the Universe cools and expands.
It could be that they are mathematically hardwired as well. There may be a fundamental geometric explanation - a mathematical constraint that lurks and gives a constant its necessary value. Or it could be that we have to accept some kind of multiverse scenario where a random range of these dimensionless constants could be expressed. They themselves might be a "degree of freedom" within the bigger cosmos-forming picture.
The jury is out. But I obviously favour the simpler idea that all the constants will turn out to have a sufficient mathematical necessity so that our Universe can be understood as a single unitary "mathematical event".
Traditionally the problem of universals is:
Regarding the second question, the transcendent realist says "yes" while the immanent realist says "no".
As Boethius put it, "Plato thinks that genera and species and the rest are not only understood as universals, but also exist and subsist apart from bodies. Aristotle, however, thinks that they are understood as incorporeal and universal, but subsist in sensibles."
That exhausts all the possibilities, so the question is really which of those two positions Scholastics subscribed to.
Quoting SEP - The Medieval Problem of Universals
The "agreed on the existence of universals before things" indicates the Scholastics essentially rejected immanent realism in favor of regarding mind (in this case the divine mind) as the realm where universals reside.
So to answer your question, there are various realist views even within Scholasticism. But I think they ultimately boil down to either transcendent or immanent realism.
"What would you count in the category "universal" that you would also count as real?"
Mathematical concepts & truths; Scientific Laws, (at least) terms for Primary Qualities. Note that 'real' here simply means "not mind-dependent".
They are true. They are mind-independent. And they are social products -- like toasters, legal precedents, and money.
Without us they would not exist. And yet in spite of that dependency they do, in fact, exist -- the same as rocks and beans.
Not sure where modern metaphysics would lead us. I am not educated enough to adjudicate that boundary. But those are my first thoughts.
But immanence needs to account for itself by way of some inner mechanism. And Aristotle rather danced around on both sides of the argument.
Quoting Andrew M
That is a familiar framing of hylomorphism that lends itself to a fairly nominalist reading. Actuality is substantial being. Potentiality is the properties that can be predicated of substance. Materiality becomes some sort of passive brute existence. This is an ontology of a world of already given objects, not one that is in fact a story of immanent development - a process with a self-structuring flow.
To be fully immanent, a tale of prime matter and prime mover is not enough. This is an ontology targeted at recovering the physics of a world already gone cold and congealed - a classical realm of atoms blundering about a void.
It is presumed that substance is ideally understood as a passive, enduring, solid, bounded, state of "matter with properties". That is certainly the world that is most immediately familiar to us, as humans, with human purposes. Our interest in reality revolves around how we can use the world to build things and regulate things. We are looking for the "secrets of construction". And so the idea of a stack of bricks and a set of architect drawings strikes us as the most natural image of natural causality.
But metaphysics has to step back and understand immanence in terms of actual developmental processes. It has to be more like Anaximander and Heraclitus. So bricks are mud that has ceased to be muddy. They are substantial only because they have approached the limit of a process - the entropy dissipating one of drying out and forming tighter mineral bonds.
A truly immanent metaphysics sees the material parts as much emergent as the "immaterial" whole. And so this requires a triadic framework. The part and the whole, the matter and the form, the physical degrees of freedom and the physically constraining laws, must co-arise out of a primordial vagueness or chaos.
Aristotle rather dismissed Anaximander and Heraclitus on this score. And he was right in a way.
There is a secondary story of actuality yielding potentiality in that once the world is substantially formed - once it is a realm of cold and congealed stuff, a clutter of material objects - then constructive causality really becomes a big thing. You have a foundational simplicity - some range of stable substances with their stable properties - that can then start to generate an emergent complexity. You have your world of atoms that start to combine mechanically and build more complicated designs.
So Aristotle is quite focused on that secondary tale - the one where constructed complexity becomes the further possibility immanent in any stable substance. Once you have a lump of wood, you can start thinking about fashioning a table. But give a carpenter a bucket of water, and the lack of inherent stability in the water means there is not a lot of furniture immanent in it. A water bed at best.
There is nothing wrong with telling this follow-on story where potentiality gets switched to become a predicate of substantial actuality.
But true metaphysical immanence is about how the potential produces the actual. And that requires a bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality.
But what ‘being’ is there, in the absence of humans? I think the answer according to evolutionary bioogy is - none that we know of (other than the higher animals.). The aperion is not posited as a being, or pure being, or a divine intellect. So prior to the emergence of human being, if there is simply matter, or matter~energy, or electro-magnetic fields or plasma or whatever - there is no being as such. And the only kind of differentiation could be that which occurs through stellar processes.
One point all the traditional realists agreed on - whether Platonist, Aristotelian, or scholastic - was that matter was the furthest from the real source or origin of being. To Plato, the Idea of the Good was the fundamental reality. In Neoplatonism, is was the One, flowing down to the World Soul; in Aristotle the First Cause. That was the animating principle. But what you’re looking for in ‘immanent metaphysics’ is a self-animating universe, matter that somehow knows how to organise itself without the organising principle that the ancients thought must be behind it.
So, again, the question that occurs to me, is that if there is a top-down organising principle, as systems science seems to be saying, what is responsible for that, because the ‘immanent metaphysics’ model seems very bottom-up, as far as I can understand it (which I readily admit might not be very far.)
Oops! I was in a hurry when i replied earlier, and I've just realized that I misunderstood, and thought that you were quoting Plato, when you were really quoting Feser.
Evidently Feser is one of that large group, the Theists who believe in Materialism, but with human souls, and in which God created a Material world that's really the same as that of the Materialists.
So of course he doesn't like the Plato version of Realism, if, as you said, Feser doesn't believe that there's anything other than Mind and Matter.
Myself, I don't understand that belief. But when I criticize a metaphysics, I save the criticism for plain Scientificist Materialism. No time to criticize all metaphysicses that I don't agree with.
I don't think the world is fundamentally material, I don't believe that God is a being, or an element of metaphysics, "Creation" is an over-anthropomorphic notion. ...as is much of what a lot of Theists, including. Literalists of various kinds, say about God.
Michael Ossipoff
You seem to be conflating 'being' with 'conception of being'. Prior to humans there was no conception of being (obviously assuming that it is true that no other animals conceive of being). There would also have been no conception of "matter-energy, or electro-magnetic fields or plasma or whatever", and yet all of those things, if they have been independent realities (i.e. if they have, independently of us, been) since the advent of humans would have been prior to humans as well.
Of course, you could object that all of those including being are relational realities that 'exist' only relative to human experience. Will you say that there was then literally nothing prior to humanity? If not, then you must at least admit being as prior to any " matter-energy..." and so on.
(Note: 'being' should be understood as both verb and noun; which allows it to include becoming).
Not at all. Humans are designated ‘beings’, and other types of things are not, according to naturalism. In ordinary English, whenever we use the noun ‘being’ we refer to human beings, and sometimes to higher animals. If SETI had found evidence of ‘beings’ elsewhere in the cosmos it would be a scientific breakthrough and an enormous news story. But to date there has been no such evidence; to our knowledge, the cosmos does not contain other beings. It does seem to comprise mainly matter (matter-energy, electromagnetic fields, stellar objects and so on) with nary another being in sight.
The nature of being qua being - what the word ‘being’ means - is indeed the subject of the discipline of metaphysics. What I’m drawing attention to is that using the term ‘being’ to signify the domain which is the subject of study by the natural sciences, contains an implicit assumption about the nature of being which I have challenged. If one talks about ‘differentiation in being’, sans reference to human beings, what is actually being talked about, if not simply physical transformations, such as those that take place via stellar explosions, or during the expansion and cooling of the Universe? How does that amount to a ‘differentiation in being’, as distinct from ‘differentiations In the states of matter and energy?
I think there are two distinct domains being conflated which is in line with the ongoing effort to arrive at what is considered a naturalistic explanation of consciousness. So again it is treating the nature of mind or being in terms of phenomena - or at least, that’s what it seems to me.
The Peircean position which I take would see this matter - like a plasma - as the simplest form of actualised substance. Then human being stands at the opposite pole in being the most hierarchically complex form of actualised substance that is currently known by us.
So plasma is animated by top-down telos and order, as you would put it. It is hylomporhic substance. It is not bare stuff but stuff shaped by entropic purpose and lawful structure. Both a plasma and a human are fully developed, fully actualised, fully hylomorphic, substances. They just stand at opposite ends of a spectrum that defines the fundamentally simple and the massively complex.
So far, so Aristotelian. The physical difference between a plasma and a human is one of degree, not kind.
The Peircean twist would be then to question what makes life and mind distinctive. A human is not merely just more complex. A human is semiotic - a living organism in a modelling relation with its world. So there is this extra symbol~matter twist - the epistemic cut - that goes now to a difference in kind.
However then - a further now metaphysically speculative slant, as it is not quite yet mainstream science - we could see all nature ruled by semiosis. Even a plasma may have this irreducible structure in some meaningful sense. And so we would be able to track a continuity of kind (to some degree) as we go from living organisms back across the epistemic modelling divide to regard the simple material world again.
The advantage of this pan-semiotic view is that it would properly ground the phenomenon of living being in the world. It would articulate both what is the ontic difference, and also what is the basic dynamical causal mechanism “all the way down”.
Semiosis explains immanence or self-animation through an appeal to the dual reality of both matter and symbol. And it is nice if we can understand the symbol part as being there at the fundamentally simple level too - as we discussed in your thread on physics’ turn towards information theoretic descriptions.
"In ordinary English, whenever we use the noun ‘being’ we refer to human beings, and sometimes to higher animals"
So there is no such thing as inanimate being?
Sure you can identify being with mind, consciousness or spirit if you are asserting ontic idealism. But the metaphysical understanding of “being” is the general one here. Idealism is just one of the possible ontic positions.
Humans are designated as "human beings' in distinction to other kinds of beings. Stars, galaxies, planets, are all different kinds of beings; they are usually considered to be non-living beings as distinguished from living beings. In any case this is not relevant to what I said, because I said you seem to be conflating being with the conception of being, and this would extend to conflating beings with conceptions of beings, and you have failed to address this criticism.
Being is not the object of study of the sciences, obviously, but beings, both non-living and living, are. Of course "differentiation in being" (producing all the different kinds of beings, both living and non-living) is an idea of "physical transformations"; what else could it be? I am not seeing how anything you have said addresses, even remotely, my previous points.
Also, it's not clear on what basis you equate the "nature of mind" with "being".
This idea of matter/symbol as fundamental certainly has appeal. Substance, then, would not be matter or mind but matter/mind (where mind is understood not as a kind of empty 'container' of symbols, but rather constituted by symbolic function or process?
So, the reader or interpreter of symbols, and thus of form and matter, is herself exhaustively constituted by matter/symbol ('symbol' here understood in the broadest sense as inclusive of sign, icon and symbol). Matter/ symbol reads itself?
I'm becoming increasingly interested in biosemiotics and just acquired Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer, so hopefully reading that that will help me increase my understanding. :)
How would it be possible that 'being is not an object of the study of the sciences', if there were no difference between 'being' and 'beings'? What is it about 'being' that makes it NOT the object of study of the sciences? And if it's not the object of the sciences, then what discipline does it concern?
'Being' is a generalization from our perceptions of beings. Science studies perceived beings; particulars and their attributes and relations (i.e. it is empirical). It certainly generalizes, but it does not study generalization. The study of generalization could be part of linguistics or analytic philosophy. Science also does not study generalities; that would be the province of metaphysics and ontology. The tools of metaphysics and ontology are imagination, intuition and logic.
I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be his meaning. As we've discussed, he seems to have acquired this idea from Emerson, Schelling, Kant, and others of that ilk. He is also invariably categorised as an idealist philosopher - actually as an objective idealist.
Quoting apokrisis
And if were a duality of matter and mind, then we wouldn't have an argument. I'm saying that the concept of symbol doesn't make a lot of sense without there being mind. But that's the conclusion you're wanting to avoid.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I'm making a point with reference to definitions.
Quoting apokrisis
In other words, make it potentially available to objective analysis - an object for the sciences. It's still essentially reductionist, in that the principle you're looking for is 'beneath' you, in the sense of being 'something that you explain'. In classical philosophy, the principle is 'above you', in the sense of being 'what explains you'. But I'm afraid this will always be an impasse as far as our discussions are concerned.
Quoting Janus
Which is the precise point that I made.
But it is just stating the obvious. What is the point of that point? I don't think anyone has been claiming that science just is metaphysics. On the other hand can any relevant contemporary metaphysics happen in a vacuum isolated from contemporary science?
It seems an oxymoron to me. Would you refer to the proverbial chair or table as 'a being'? Is a piece of fruit 'a being'? I suppose, arguably, a tree might be an 'insentient being'. But in normal English, humans are generally designated 'beings'. God is designated 'a supreme being'. I don't think this is coincidental - I think the use of the word 'being' is indicative of a genuine ontological distinction between 'beings' and 'objects'.
That was the point I was making and as far as I'm concerned it hasn't been rebutted.
See my response to apokrisis above. The point is that the concept of mind doesn't make any sense without there being matter and symbol. It's a matter of interdependence between elements that constitute reality that only appear to be separate due to our discursive limitations. You seem to be forever locked into your unjustified prejudice that mind (in some vague, imagined "unadulterated" sense) must be fundamental and prior to all else.
The problem is that no cogent argument for your point has been given; and until then any rebuttal would seem to lack an object.
Quoting Wayfarer
You're just expressing your uneducated prejudices, as you even seem to admit at the end of the quoted passage above.
It is both. Aristotle's hylomorphism was, in part, a response to Parmenides. A substance may change while retaining identity (accidental change). Also substances may come into and pass out of existence (substantial change). But in this latter case they are generated from other substances, since nothing comes from nothing.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. And that is because prime matter and prime mover mark a departure from hylomorphism. If, instead, Aristotle's first cosmological cause is hylomorphic then there exists a prime (ground) substance with cosmic potential. This is the universe, the nature of which can be investigated as with any hylomorphic particular.
Quoting apokrisis
So with prime substance we have true metaphysical immanence. That bootstrapping or self-structuring view of causality just is the universe actualizing its own potential.
How would 'investigating the nature of the Universe' in this manner, be any different to what science is actually doing?
Quoting Andrew M
Again - is this something which can be detected or known by empirical science? In other words, is there anything which might be used to convince a scientific sceptic that there is such a substance?
One more try.
I'm one who uses the term "universal", and it seems that I use it in an unconventional manner. So, I'm actually wondering, after having briefly glanced through an SEP article, what counts as being a universal?
I mean, what is the criterion which when met by a candidate(s?) counts as being a universal?
Doesn't answering that answer the OP's question? What is the ontological status of universals? Furthermore, is there any way to further discriminate between different criterions; senses; and/or notions thereof?
It needn't be. It just characterizes it in hylomorphic terms.
Quoting Wayfarer
The universe is something that can be detected or known by empirical science isn't it? If the criteria for a substance is that it exists (materially) with an investigable nature (form) then the universe meets that criteria. So it's a logical implication. Presumably a sceptic would reject that criteria or otherwise challenge it.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Aristotle - On Interpretation, Part 7
Quoting creativesoul
I would say so.
Hey Jeep!
Nice. I find little to disagree with in that. The relationship(s) that subsist(exist) prior to our awareness in particular. Of course, Russel is an influence on me.
So then, we could take the position that being a universal is determined by how the word is being used.
Is there another method of discrimination possible? Can we further assess the different senses of universal in a sort of comparative/contrast way? Can we be wrong, not in the sense of using the word incorrectly, but can we both - use the word sensibly and say false things about universals?
Notably... I'm not an Aristotle scholar.
The problem with this pan-semiotic view is that it is completely unsupported by evidence, and is actually contrary to the evidence. The need to assume such a principle, that plasma employs semiosis, which is contrary to the evidence, points to bad metaphysics. Even metaphysics which requires the assumption of God is better metaphysics, because at least God is supported by the evidence rather than contrary to the evidence.
So where exactly did Aristotle spell out an argument for prime substance? Do you have a reference in mind?
Did you mean something like an Apeiron? I agree that nothing comes from nothing, but also it can't be the case that immanent being is an efficient/material tale of how something comes from something. That way lies only infinite regress.
So the Peircean take is that something definite arises semiotically from a "something" that is its radical "other". A Firstness, a logical vagueness, a bare potential. If the crisply existent reality we now see all around us is composed of a variety of hylomorphic substances, then logic can say that how that state of affairs developed was by some first act that is hylomorphism at its most decomposed. :)
So the first substantial act or occurence would be the least possible state of being in terms of being en-mattered and in-formed - some kind of spontaneous fluctuation.
This Peircean notion most resembles Aristotle's talk about prime matter. But I don't recall there being a reference to prime substance as such.
"at least God is supported by the evidence rather than contrary to the evidence."
Whoa! Although this is a topic for a separate thread, I certainly would disagree with this claim!
(I don't seem to be able to create a link) SEP, "Form and Matter", section 2 "Prime Matter"
I'm not sure that I agree with the last statement, particularly the part about "like the terms it relates". It has to do with Russel's use of "fact" I think...
SEP article Form vs. Matter
[quote=“Bertrand Russell”]Hence we must admit that the relation [‘north of’], like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.[/quote]
Crucial point. This is something that almost nobody gets. The way thought operates constantly relies on such judgements, that are not dependent on a particular mind, but only perceptible by a mind. They are rational relations and the basis for inference and judgement, and are real, but not physical, in that they’re prior to judgement.
It's a crucial point that has been lost ever since the mind has been reconceived as "constructive" by the neo-Kantians - in that they took the mind's function to be adding form onto sense impression, instead of perceiving (the form).
In a way, it's funny (to me) that you have both Plato and Kant as favorite philosophers, because in many ways, they are opposed to each other.
Quoting Wayfarer
There we go, this is a realist position and is opposed to the Kantian. According to the latter, "north of" is dependent upon the mind, since it is the mind that adds spatial form to the contents of sense impressions - that gives the experience of whatever is perceived as "in space". It is also this spatial form that puts sense impressions in relations of "north of" etc. to each other.
Plato's position differs from this in that Plato (and Aristotle, and the Scholastics) takes "north of" to inhere in the things themselves. We don't only perceive sensible qualities in things, but also relational ones.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Janus
The pansemiotic claim is tricky. I readily admit that it is a speculative project. So I will try to explain it better.
Straightforward semiosis is no problem. Humans use language to regulate social behaviour. It is just taken as obvious that language is a symbolic activity where tokens or symbols are used so that a realm of ideas can interact with a world of material dynamics.
Then Peirce sought to define what was the "core machinery" by which language could gain this meaningful "modelling relation" with the world. He drilled down to describe it in epistemic terms - understanding semiosis as the logical act of reasoning. So words have their purchase over reality because of a triadic sign relation. There is the world. There are the signs we form that "represent" it. There is then our habits of interpretation - the understanding we form by virtue of a sign-mediated relation with the world.
This is pretty much straight linguistics. It is a more sophisticated take than Saussurean semiotics in being triadic rather than dyadic. Peirce makes the Kantian point that the sign stands between us and the world. And so the sign represents not just the world, but also "us". The signs we form are inherently "self-interested" in that they represent the world in terms that are pragmatic or purpose-imbued, not nakedly of "the thing in itself". So the mediating level of sign - the "umwelt" that forms our "state of sensation" - is a representation of our state of being, our wishes, desires, interests, and history, as much as it purports to be a representation of the world beyond.
Another important wrinkle of the Peircean approach is that he saw sign as itself having an immanent developmental story. It begins as merely a potential relation - an icon. Develops to become an indexical sign. Then only ultimately reaches full-fledged status as a symbol. So first it is just a picture that can be recognised as involuntarily predicting some state of affairs. Then it becomes a more deliberate pointer - like a dog's wagging tail or a road sign. Only finally is there a full "epistemic cut" where the relation between a token and what it stands for becomes arbitrary and therefore a wholly voluntary, or "self-produced", communicative act that requires interpretance.
The word "apple" - either as a spoken sound or scribbled writing - and an apple have no necessary connection. Therefore the habit of understanding the physical mark to mean something becomes entirely "mental". Mentality begins definitely at that point.
So semiosis is straightforward and uncontroversial. Peircean semiosis is pragmatic as it is clearly tied to an epistemology of the self. The sign relation makes us as much as it makes the world that exists for us. It is an understanding of language use and human reason that gets Kant and manages to accept the key part of idealism without rejecting what matters about realism.
Then armed with an understanding of the triadic semiotic relation, we can see that it applies to life as well as to mind. We can see that brains use neurons to encode the world, form a modelling relation with the world based on sign. And the immune system is semiotic. So is the gut. They use a system of molecular receptors to decide what is self and what is non-self. Then the genes of a cell are clearly a coding machinery, embodying a model of the self in a world in their ability to interpret the signs they are getting in terms of the states of being they are trying to achieve.
So science has no problem seeing Peircean semiosis as a completely general account of life and mind. It describes a triadic "world-making" relation that run all the way from the first biological act - the first time a molecule functioned as a message - right up through complex bodies, to bodies with brains, to brains with language, to languages that were logical, mathematical, and capable of "total reasoned abstraction".
Then we can start to talk about pan-semiosis. This would be a continuation of the story beyond the kind of complexity we recognise in living and mindful systems.
Now Peirce did attempt this with his Cosmological semiotics. He described the triadic relation in a way where the Universe's coming into being as a realm of definite law could be understood as the psychological development of habits of regulation.
As Wayfarer notes, late in life, Peirce did become overtly religious - or at least "spiritual". But how seriously should we take that, given that his semiosis arose out of a scientific psychological model, and then out of a logical generalisation of that psychology?
Wayfarer keeps returning to the one quote that is his convenient hostage to fortune. But it is unfair on Peirce to read his incredibly broad-minded approach to a "philosophy of nature" in such a narrow and self-serving fashion. His semiotics provides an intelligible bridge between the divided camps of physicalism and idealism. To claim Peirce is then just an idealist is cheap and slipshod.
Anyway, Peirce's cosmological semiotic is more a "logical poetry" than a physics-based theory. It was inspired by the dawning thermodynamic understanding of his time. It did foreshadow quantum physics in its emphasis on indeterminism and the observer-depend nature of reality. Peirce even foreshadowed general relativity in proposing that an evolving universe might show curvature over cosmic measurement scales - his early career as a scientist meant this kind of measurement issue was exactly his forte.
So the context of Peirce's cosmological argument was that he was fully up to date with the science of his age. And he could see that the Newtonian notion of an eternal Comos with fixed God-given laws was pretty "unnatural" in a world where mind, reasoning, growth and evolutionary development were a central fact.
Thus Peirce created his theory of an immanent pansemiotic cosmology where hierarchically complex existence was formed via a "universal growth of reasonableness".
The story went that in the beginning was a Firstness, a bare potential of spontaneous fluctuation or tychism. The sporting of absolute chance. So there was a vagueness with no particular matter or form. But then that meant there was nothing to prevent accidental fluctuations that were some kind of context-less event - a bare action with a direction of some kind.
Then if something could spontaneously happen once, it might happen again. With nothing preventing it, you would have a host of fluctuations and so now the Secondness of some more definite act of interaction. One fluctuation would react with another. The possibility of a history of collisions, deviations, agglomerations, deformations, etc, could start to form.
Then once you have this random play of interactions, regularities would start to emerge. Over time, a history would start to exist in a way that became generally constraining. A habit or state of equilibrium would result.
This was straight thermodynamcs. Inject a hot particle into a tepid gas standing at equilibrium and the particle will eventually knock about in a way so that its momentum converges towards the general average. A cold particle will get bumped and jiggled to heat it up to the average. So the laws of nature can be understood as nothing more than the kind of rational patterns that emerge as the "sum over histories" of a set of interaction - a prevailing statistics.
The Universe would have been born of unbounded fluctuations - the primal chaos of a Firstness. But it then could not help but to self-organise in the fashion described by both thermodynamics and quantum physics. The first random actions might have any direction, any strength. But then their interactions would thermalise them, tame them, bring them towards some common equilibrium that gave the Universe an overall direction or developmental flow. A collective history become a collective constraint. Existence becomes a single universal habit.
So Peirce's semiotic - the triadic system of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness - is the ontological version of his epistemic triad of world, sign and interpretance. Semiotics in the linguistic or psychological sense is about the symbol~matter distinction - the epistemic cut by which a realm of ideas can come to regulate a world of material dynamics. Now Peirce was using the same causal machinery to explain the physical world as if it had "a mind".
The metaphysical question becomes how much is this just a nice analogy and how much a proper theory of nature and existence? So pan-semiosis would be showing how it is actually a theory more than an analogy.
Well if we look at the way physics went after Peirce's time, we can see how the observer issue moved back to centre stage.
Newtonian physics was reductionist in being a realist physics based on just observables. Basically, humans believed they were looking at reality with a God's-eye view of it. There was no issue about where to place the epistemic cut between the observer and the world observed. Naive realism applied. Then came Kant to show the psychological problems inherent in that. And then Peirce - whose career as a scientist was all about science's fundamental issue of how to make an "objective measurement".
But the observer issue became central to modern physics in the 20th century. Quantum mechanics showed something really "weird" was going on as humans just couldn't seem to disentangle themselves from the world they wanted to measure. But relativity was just as weird. Again, an observer was only relatively disentangled from what they meant to observe. And even eventually thermodynamics returned the same metaphysical shock. Chaos revealed the initial conditions measurement issue for describing dynamics. The Newtonian approach to entropy turned out to be also the inverse of a measurement of observer uncertainty - the metaphysical twist that turned physics towards its new information theoretic perspective.
So nature really seems to be trying to tell us something. To understand it, we need a semiotic lens. A fundamental theory of nature will have to include the observer along with the observables in some formal fashion. We can't pretend to have a simple God's-eye view like Newton. The "mind" itself must be reduced in some completely general fashion. And Peirce offers the most general story on how observers and observables - selves and worlds - are developed through the mediation of the third thing of the signs that connect them.
So the metaphysical project is clear. Physics is already charging down that road. But there are still some paradigmatic shifts in thinking that are a long way off for virtually everyone. We can't "get" pansemiosis until we have made some quite significant changes in orientation.
The key one that currently interests me is the importance of material instability to the whole picture.
The usual assumption is that the material part of the story must be about stability, definiteness, concreteness, persistence. It just make sense that the material foundations of being must be sturdy for the more delicate business of symbolically-encoded complexity to arise. You definite parts to start constructing elaborate wholes ruled over by rather immaterial ideas or purposes.
But the recent biophysical revelations about the molecular basis of life show that a cell depends on its fundamental instability. All its molecular parts must be in danger of falling apart to make them in fact easily controllable by the cell's information. So life seeks what was, back in the 1980s, called the edge of chaos, or self-organised criticality. It is materiality at its most fragile or labile that is "living enough" to become the robust foundation of living processes. As what is poised on the point of falling apart is also poised on the point of falling together. All the molecular chaos needs is a steadying genetic hand - enough of a signal pointing in the "right direction" that is the falling together.
So biosemiosis is about this central understanding. Life depends on fragile material. It wants a material foundation so labile that it can then become "completely regulated" by the ideas and purposes remembered at the informational level of the genes. The job of stabilising is owned by the system's information. The mind of the cell - as a collection of learnt habits - is the source of its long-run stability.
So consciousness is often thought of as being centrally about spontaneous creativity and maximum fluidity. But neuroscience has also come to realise it is the same story of a regulation of uncertainty. The mind is centrally about habit formation. And it exists to stabilise a collection of useful physical or behavioural interactions with the world.
Any other model of "the mind" - like a spiritual or freewill one - is fundamentally flawed. Even the linguistic human mind is all about creating a social and cultural stability. Humans - as animals - are a bunch of unstable degrees of freedom. But language is society's way to bind humans into collective organisms. As we see in modern society, personal instability is promoted - we are brought up to imagine that anything might be possible in terms of how we might behave. And then that individuated instability becomes a potent energy that society can harness - keep nudging just enough so that we collectively fall together in some enduring direction while always seeming to be on the verge of catastrophically falling apart.
OK, this story of semiosis as "the stable realm of symbol regulating the instability of material reality" works for life and mind. Then pansemiosis would extend that to the physical world in general.
And again, this is simply just the view that physics has been backing into for about 100 years now. Quantum mechanics tells us the Cosmos is fundamentally indeterministic and then needs "a context" to collapse its uncertainty. What creates material stability is thermal decoherence. And this context, this history, is then "written into" thermal event horizons. The holographic principle shows that the physics of "material events" is ruled by the "information content" that can be encoded on the "surface" of a physical region of spacetime.
So it sounds odd if - as MU does - we try to understand pansemiosis in terms of the Cosmos literally having some kind of mind that is interpreting physical events as symbolic activities. This starts to sound like the pan-psychism of Whitehead and his prehending particles. Atoms are reading each other as signs rather than just colliding like material billiard balls. Spooky, hey?
But still, modern physics actually has rejected the material billiard balls now. Two particles crash into each other and recoil in some far less material way. In quantum language, the collision starts to become a blizzard-like exchange of virtual particles - tiny messages that you are getting too close to me and need to start backing off. The pressure of exchanges increases until the other particle is forced to veer off.
And then as we really step back to a quantum field description, the reason why two particles bounce off each other becomes just some kind of statistical effect - an completely informational one. The probabilities of where the two particles ought to be becomes exponentially "anywhere except as close as this". Even the last material connection of virtual particles has vanished. The quantum picture has switched to one of pure sign. All the physics can properly describe is the abstract image of a completely generic wavefunction. Somehow an observer must then intrude "physically" to tell us what actually happened on this or that particular occasion with the same kind of probabilistic set-up.
So I accept that pan-semiosis sounds weird. But reality is weird! And pan-semiosis is a metaphysics weird enough to account for all of the phenomena that science is most concerned about. It is a metaphysical machinery that can span the gamut from the quantum to the cosmic, the physical to the mental. Even if physics ends up calling it something else, it will still be pansemiotics as Peirce originally envisioned it. And it is quite nice that in theoretical biology at least, a conscious connection to Peirce has been forged in the public embracing of "biosemiosis" over the past 20 years.
Hey, not fair. I've read the Pattee paper, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics numerous times, and also a longish essay on Peirce's idealist philosophy by an academic, Nicholas Guardiano, and other materials. What I'm saying is that there is an idealist conception of 'mind' that is implicit in Peirce, which you are trying to get rid of, because it doesn't sit with the physicalist side of your project.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly the same can be said about you. Remember that review I found, 'Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism':
My underline!
Yet, you say my reading is tendentious! But, keep coming! You're more than halfway to NOT being physicalist already, you're only an epiphany or two away ;-)
Yep. That was my point. I was puzzled Andrew was calling it prime substance. But then I guess that the problem is Aristotle was ambivalent about the status of prime matter in exactly the way I tried to describe.
In places you can read him as trying to talk about pure potential. The material aspect of reality would be no more than "the accident of a fluctuation" - the possibility of an action in a direction, without yet a definite context - if we dial existence back to its first bare beginning.
But then - I agree - that even a fluctuation is already "formed" in some matchingly minimal sense. So you can’t escape this Firstness as being substantial as well.
It sounds paradoxical. My own reply is that at least Firstness or vagueness is our conception of whatever it is that could count as being the least substantial state of being. It is a suitably apophatic description. We can get some kind of useful handle on the Big Bang "pure materiality" this way.
Then also it feels right to assert that matter comes before form when taking this approach. If prime matter is a substantial state, it is the least substantial form of material/effective causality in lacking yet a world with a history that might provide any proper regulation. The full form of that world is not going to be completely revealed or expressed until "the end of time".
So finality, or the prime mover, is placed where it should be, at the other end of existence's journey. The Cosmos has to grow into its Being, even if - through mathematics - we can understand that Being to have retrospective necessity. If the beginning was a symmetry, then only certain ways of breaking that symmetry were ever possible. And so the form of the Cosmos can be regarded as latent in prime matter. It could be considered "prime substance" on that ground.
It's all very tricky. And the "prime problem" is that Aristotle was focused on how actuality creates potentiality, rather than the more truly foundational issue of how potentiality creates actuality. Or perhaps even just that the scholastics were interested always in arriving at that interpretation as they wanted to bend Greek philosophy towards the central purposes of their theistic metaphysics.
Never going to happen. Not unless I get a brain tumour or something. 8-)
"Aristotle does in fact use the expressions “prime matter” (prôtê hulê) and “primary underlying thing” (prôton hupokeimenon) several times: Physics i 9, 192a31, ii 1, 193a10 and 193a29; Metaphysics v 4, 1014b32 and 1015a7–10, v 6, 1017a5–6, viii 4, 1044a23, ix 7, 1049a24–7; Generation of Animals i 20, 729a32."
I haven't come across this until now; wouldn't "A to the north of B" enable us to claim that "B is to the south of A" but we are not allowed to claim that "B is not to the south of A" and so the proposition is made explicit by this conceptual connection. I am not entirely sure if there is a distinctness between the two propositions where it is apparently independent of the mind because they do not syntactically differ or are co-referential. It is a prori knowledge.
Thanks. So you are thinking "hupokeimenon" here makes a further distinction in regard to substantial being? Or is hyle not meant to distinguish matter - as the ultimately unformed - from hupokeimenon in fact?
Prime matter is normally mentioned in contrast to a prime mover, isn't it? So in that context, it would be more generic than "prime substance" as it is matter and form that give you a substance.
However a prime substance could be read as a claim that the hylomorphic condition is what is most primal. The underlying substratum is that which already underwrites both material cause and formal cause in a most primitive sense.
I could get behind either reading to an extent. Though as I argue, neither completely works. You need Peirce's triadic metaphysics which starts with a primal potential - something that is neither yet material, nor formal, yet already the possibility for that hylomorphic combo to arise.
En-mattering requires in-forming. And in-forming requires en-mattering. And all that exists at the start is this mutuality, this dependent co-arising, as a potential.
The other obvious key difference is the Peircean view is based on form as constraint. So Aristotle still frames the issue as having to drill down to a substance than can underlie all construction. That was my point about him being focused on an actuality that can have potentials predicated of it.
It is presumed that for something to persist through all change, some quantity of that thing must be conserved through the whole history of the Cosmos. You don't get something for nothing. The Cosmos has a substance conservation principle.
But like Anaximander, Peirce is taken an open systems view. The Cosmos is formed by "pinching off" some quantity of substance in become semiotically closed by its particular sign system. Like an organism, or a dissipative structure, it sits in an infinite bath of potential, and then forms a structure that can feed off an inexhaustible supply that flows through it.
So again - as I remarked about material instability being regulated by stable information - the paradigm has to be flipped on its head. The substrate that persists through the material changes is in fact primarily the formal one of the emergent constraints.
Matter doesn't play the role of the stable unchanging stuff which gets reworked into multiple forms. Instead, it is the raw and unlimited action that gets constrained by some kind of global organisation of closure. Substance gets its "materiality" by prime matter or raw potential become trapped into certain restricted "habits". Finitude is what finality - final and formal cause - imposes on infinitely unbounded fluctuation.
The truth of the proposition is not caused by our coming to know it. I agree. It was caused by agreement regarding cardinal directions, the establishment of cities, and other meaningful creations of humans. Cardinal directions require thought and belief, for they are existentially contingent upon it. They are a product of it. This is clearly proven by the fact(state of affairs) that other cultures have/had no such conception prior to becoming European colonies. For example, Hawai'ians use the notions of mauka and makai. The former means "mountain" and the latter "ocean". Mauka side of a building is the side closest to the mountain, and vice-versa. So, depending upon where one is at on the island, mauka could be north. but it could also be south. Those terms acquired their meaning is precisely the same manner, by virtue of the same means, as the term of cardinal direction.
Russell claims here that we apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. If the fact is that "Edinburgh is north of London" then that fact is wholly dependent upon thought and belief for it;s very existence. Without thought and belief, there is no London, there is no Edinburgh, there is no such thing as cardinal directions, and therefore without thought and belief there can be no relation of cardinal directions between the two cities.
Russell is employing the term "fact" to mean a true statement and/or proposition.
Or Merrill's reasons. It stands contrary to facts(states of affairs), as clearly argued above.
Nothing mental is presupposed in the true statement, or proposition that "Edinburgh is north of London"?
There goes a bit of the confidence I once had in Russell. X-)
I clearly disagree with this aspect of his metaphysics. As earlier, I think I'm just rejecting his taxonomy, the use of "fact" in particular. However, he is of an era which had thought and belief all wrong as well, so...
Not sure if it's the truth of the proposition that's "caused by agreement". I think it's the possibility of the truth of the proposition that's caused by agreement, i.e. the agreement creates a thing to say yes or no about, to be true or false about, or rather a question for nature to answer "yes" or "no" to, upon interrogation.
The meaningful element that we interpose, the cardinal directions, etc., creates the possibility for something to be true or false, or a standard in terms of which things can be measured, etc.
In this way, universals contain an element of both the internal and external. The thing that comes from us is the logical possibility (a way things could be), but then it's Nature that goes its own way and provides examples of things that either have that nature and logic - or don't.
If we don't find the thing to be like we imagine it to be, we dust ourselves off and move on - either alter the logical construct, or look harder, check whether we made a mistake, etc., or even reinterpret the evidence if we really want to stick to our posit.
It's simplest if we just think of things as indeed having some nature, and us not knowing that nature in advance, but positing natures, positing structures for things; yet if the thing has that structure, then it really has that structure. It's not like our saying anything earmarks any particular structure for an object of experience coming down the pipe, but if it has a structure, it really has that structure, that nature.
I see nothing objectionable here, guru. We seem to agree. That's no fun. X-)
Russell argued for the idea that the cardinal direction "north of" was a universal. The place on the globe where Edinburgh stands is and was north of London prior to our talking in terms of cardinal directions.
This is a bit tricky to clearly parse, isn't it?
I would be willing to state that the place on the globe where Edinburgh stands was spatiotemporally distinct from the place where London stands prior to thought and belief, but it cannot be said to have always been north of London if being north of anything is existentially contingent upon thought and belief.
Do we become aware that Edinburgh is north of London? Surely, if we were born after both cities and cardinal directions were established... clearly we do. We become aware of how to appropriately talk about the spatial relations between the two cities.
Did those who first agreed upon the cardinal terms become aware that Edinburgh is north of London? Well, if the inventor(s) of cardinal directions coined the terms prior to the establishment of both cities, then they certainly could not become aware that Edinburgh is/was north of London, for there was nothing to be north of something else. If cardinal direction terminology was invented and in use prior to the establishment of the two cities, and those who established the cities did not know cardinal directions, then they could possibly become aware that they had established the cities in such a relation. If cardinal directions came after the establishment of the two cities, then we invented a way to talk about the locations in spatial terms. That is most certainly not discovering that Edinburgh is north of london.
The place on the globe where the two cities stand is not contingent upon thought and belief. Thus, the spatiotemporal relationship that those two places have with one another and the north pole is not existentially contingent upon thought and belief.
Becoming aware of that relationship most certainly is, however, for it is contingent upon language which is, in turn, contingent upon thought and belief. So, in closing this aspect of my own considerations regarding Russell's notion of "north of" being a universal; the terms themselves are existentially contingent upon thought and belief, but what the terms set out is not. There is indeed a spatiotemporal relationship between the three places on the globe. There are actually several. We privilege the one.
The thing is, Aristotle demonstrated that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality. Potentiality will not produce anything actual unless it is acted on. So this act which acts on potentiality to produce something actuality must be prior to potentiality. That's why Aristotle focused on how actuality creates potentiality, because the inverse, how potentiality creates actuality is an impossibility. Potentiality cannot create anything unless it is acted on.
Just consider action and direction to be accidental properties of potentiality. They might get actualised as a bare contextless fluctuation, but it ain’t a necessity. However having happened accidentality and set off some reactions, then the regularity of a habit might well develop. Necessity might make its belated entrance on the scene.
Here, we can come to discover this by virtue of comparing all the known moralities and moral discourse. So, this presents us with an odd set of conditions. Morality is contingent upon thought and belief. Moral/ethical talk is contingent upon thought and belief. Acquiring knowledge of what all moral/ethical discourse has in common is also contingent upon thought and belief. However, we can get that wrong by virtue of not paying attention to the right sorts of things. They have more important things in common aside from just being called 'moral/ethical discourse'.
Things that are existentially contingent upon thought and belief can still be gotten wrong(what all moral/ethical discourse has in common). Thus, it does not follow from the fact that something is existentially contingent upon thought and belief that we cannot get it wrong in rather important ways, aside from misuse of language.
Being sensible is not equivalent to being true. The former is about meaning and as such it is wholly established by our thought and belief. The latter is correspondence with fact(states of affairs, events, happenings, the case at hand, the way things are/were, etc.), which requires meaning and as such is existentially contingent upon thought and belief, but is not necessarily determined by it.
As it pertains to the topic. Earlier I asked...
Can we further assess the different senses of universal in a sort of comparative/contrast way? Can we be wrong, not in the sense of using the word incorrectly, but can we both - use the word sensibly and say false things about universals?
Is that even a productive way to put things? Is there a better way?
Well there’s always Jill Bolte Taylor......
There are divergences. Kant did a dissertation on the Ideal Forms in his early days, but changed his view later. But arguably they became internalised in Kant as forms of understanding. I'm still looking into it. (There's an Egyptian philosophy blogger, D S Kashaba, that I have discovered who is totally into all this, I'm reading his articles.) But overall whilst Kant had his differences with Plato, he was still very much in the Platonic tradition. Aristotle and Kant are both Platonists! (And Lloyd Gerson would say so.)
Quoting Agustino
Not so - only perceptible by a mind, a rational intelligence, that is capable of understanding 'north'. Hey, cows graze facing north, but try explaining that to a cow. They do it without thinking about it (and science doesn't know how!)
Quoting apokrisis
Except that for Newton, physics was never going to be a complete account. He believed that the Universe was actually held together by God (now 'dark matter' ;-) )
Quoting TimeLine
You're right. Everyone is very blasé about a priori knowledge, as if we understand what that means; but I think this example calls attention to what Kant designated the 'primary intuition of space'. The 'synthetic a priori' is key here.
Right, I agree that they are internalised in Kant, but that's precisely the problem. If they are internalised, then they are mind (understanding) dependent - they are of subjective origin. This is precisely what allows Kant to call space, time, causality, etc. as transcendentally ideal, as opposed to transcendentally real.
Quoting Wayfarer
In Kant's terminology understanding and reason aren't the same. Kant's point is that the understanding gives (or creates if you want) the forms. So perception itself is fashioned by the understanding according to Kant. Understanding + sense impressions = phenomenon. So it's not that the understanding understands forms that are out there in the objects. But rather it creates the very objects that are objectively given in the phenomenon.
Quoting Wayfarer
Sure, but presumably (we can't know for sure the subjective experience of a cow though), cows also have spatial perception. In order to have any kind of spatial experience, the understanding must supply the form of space according to Kant (refer to the transcendental aesthetic). Cows may lack conceptual ability, but this isn't to say they lack the forms. One can drink water without having the concept of drinking water. And one can perceive in space (ie their understanding provides the form of space), without being able to think about it.
You think? I did Landmark Education, one of their lessons is called ‘chocolate or vanilla’. It’s the way things come at you from a completely unexpected angle. Life throws stuff at you. Shit, as they say, happens, and you often don’t have a lot of time to think. And I think that’s where you learn character. You will see people on the news - ‘hey, I didn’t think, I just acted’ - and sometimes that’s positive, like ‘bystander rescues trapped driver from burning vehicle’, and other times it’s negative ‘I saw the money on the table and I just grabbed it’. Morality is what it is that determines which of those impulses wins out
.Quoting Agustino
That is mistaken. They’re not ‘subjective’ in the sense of ‘pertaining only to myself’.
Quoting Agustino
Strike two. ‘Percepts without concepts are blind’.
Quoting Agustino
Strike three.
Ummmm. No, they are subjective and they pertain to whatever creatures experience things in space. I never meant by subjective that they pertain only to yourself - Kant was quite clear that the forms are universals and necessary - nothing can be imagined without them, and everything presupposes their existence (from your point of view at least).
Quoting Wayfarer
You are not following closely what I've been saying. Your understanding can have the form of space (which you can take as a concept), without you being able to analytically describe this concept, break it into its parts, derive Euclid's postulates from it, etc.
So Kant's point is that sense impressions without the understanding cannot be experienced in any way - they are blind, since it is the understanding that provides the form and organisation through which they are understood. And inversely, the understanding without sense impressions is empty, since it has no content to apply itself to.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nope - what I meant by conceptual ability was ability to linguistically break things down into their component parts and perform operations with them. Cows do lack the latter part for sure, though very likely they do NOT lack the understanding that assembles experience through the forms of space, time, causality, etc.
In other words, cows don't lack the ability of synthesis - they lack the ability of analysis.
Kant's point is to centre human knowledge back to human experiences. If we are affected by something, a phenomena, it is necessarily knowable to us, for it takes the conceptual form explicable in terms of us-- "North" is indexed to our spatial world, "space" refers to an expression of the states we encounter in our experiences, "time" is a manifestation of the world we understand, etc.
In the context of metaphysics and epistemology, this is a significant move (or at least if you've not already made it with someone like Spinoza or maybe even Descartes) because it removes the transcendent force from our analysis of phenomena. With respect to phenomena, there cannot be a "hidden" realm which defines it. All phenomena is necessarily explicable in the form it takes in our experience.
If we are dealing with phenomena, we can always get out of the cave (to reference Plato). We just have to find the exit (i.e. understanding of the relevant form).
Here "subjectivity" doesn't mean "personal opinion" or "lack or objectivity." It just means that phenomena are "of the subjective" (i.e. given and explicable in experiences), rather than being of a different realm defined outside the context of what might be available to experiences.
[quote= "Wayfarer"]Strike two. ‘Percepts without concepts are blind’.[/quote]
Kant is making exactly his point in noting the subjective nature of phenomena. If our percepts didn't access the objective knowledge of logical forms, we couldn't possibly understand any percept. Unless our experiences are a percept of understanding a logical form, we couldn't really be aware of anything.
In fact, we have grounds to say we couldn't experience anything at all, for even the most basic observations of phenomena (e.g. "What is THAT?", an instinctual attention to something that moved,etc. ) involve conceptual form.
The forms of phenomena must be a construction of experience, insofar as our experiences are concerned. Our experiences are us, not anything we might be looking at. We always have to do the work. The presence of something is never sufficient to amount to its presence in experience.
Yup. I do think. I see nothing here that contradicts what I think either. I'm puzzled by how this qualifies by your lights, as being an appropriate reply. Relevance?
I don't think so unless I misunderstand you. Aristotle's point is that what is being talked about when the word 'man' is used is what select individuals (i.e., men) have in common. Even if the word 'man' was never defined or used, that commonality would be still be there.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes. One could mistakenly say that 'Callias' is a universal or that 'man' is just a name (per nominalism).
That Aristotle is a kind of Platonist isn't very much in doubt. However, saying that Kant is a Platonist is very much different. In what sense is he a Platonist?
The only senses in which I can see Kant being a Platonist is in thinking that:
• The forms are prior to experience, and make experience possible.
• Intelligible qualities (concepts) are prior to sensible qualities (sense impressions).
• Appearances have an underlying unity which is prior to difference (unity underlies difference).
But Kant very much disagrees with Plato/Aristotle on:
• The speculative capacity of reason to go beyond the bounds of experience.
• The centrality, availability (to Reason) and explanatory power of God.
• The existence of a realm of forms or the inherence of the forms in the things themselves apart from us (realism).
• The independent existence of things apart from the (transcendental) subject.
• Certainty being of objective origin (our view matching reality) versus subjective origin (spatial judgements are certain because they make reference to the form of space which is subjectively given)
• Experience is a given - a gift - as opposed to a construct of the mind.
• The origin of the forms as both internal and external to us.
• There is one underlying reality behind appearances - and that's what gives coherence to the appearances.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I regard prime matter and prime mover as Platonist remnants of Aristotle's view that were inconsistent with his own hylomorphism (which is the position that everything that exists, i.e., substances, are inseparably matter and form).
My claim is that Aristotle's cosmological argument actually implies a hylomorphic first cause which I described as "prime substance" (my coined term here, not Aristotle's).
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but hylomorphic.
Quoting apokrisis
That's true if it were a linear series where it's turtles all the way down. But the universe doesn't generate substances outside itself, but within itself as structure emerges and evolves.
Quoting apokrisis
Agreed. The logical point here is that it is substances that are the locus of action, not matter or form.
From your later post:
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, though just as I would question pure matter at the beginning, I would also question pure form at the end. However...
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly. So semantics aside, the Peircean view and the Aristotelian view may not be far apart, particularly as Aristotle considered the prime mover to be a final cause, not an efficient cause.
Thanks for clariflying. And here I would clarify that I only mean that the form would be expressed in its most definite fashion at the end. It would become clear to see in the substantial end state of development.
I was musing on the extent to which morality is dependent on thought and belief, rather than vice versa - that was all.
I don't see how action and direction could be other than universals, and therefore they cannot be accidentals. Each of these is a relative term, referring to relations between things. And relations are described in no way other than through the use of universals.
Accidentals are the properties of particulars. So action and direction cannot be accidentals because what these words refer to is relations between particulars, which are described by universals, they do not refer to properties of particulars.
I think, that by definition, accidentals cannot enter into the universal. If the accidentals are part of the description, then the description is a description of a particular, and not a universal. That is what separates the particular from the universal, the accidentals.
[EDIT] Also note that following the logic of vagueness - "that to which the PNC fails to apply" - the accidental vs the necessary becomes a moot distinction when talking about the potential itself. As complementary generalities, they themselves are only actual once stably realised in a world as contrasting limits on the nature of being.
So properly speaking, this firstness of a bare fluctuation is neither really an accident nor an essence during its first moment of happening. But retrospectively, as a stable world develops as a result, it can be seen to be more of an accident than anything else - given the apparent lack of a context to have been "its cause".
This is the difference again between reasoning about the general with the logic of particulars vs reasoning with a metaphysical logic that is rooted in a fully triadic view - one that dialectically derives the particular and the general from the vague.
Aren't there more than one accepted use of the term universal?
If what you say is accurate, then Aristotle does not use it in the same way as a nominalist would. To Aristotle, assuming what you claim is an accurate report, being a man doesn't require language. I would agree with that much, I think. What counts as being 'a man' does.
What's being talked about when the word 'man' is being used is determined wholly by the shared meaning of a community of language users. I disagree with Aristotle on that point.
Ah, I see. It's both my friend.
Morality as a code of conduct is existentially contingent upon thought and belief about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and behaviour. It's codified thought and belief about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour
Meta-ethical considerations are thought and belief about pre-existing morality(ies). One's 'sense' of what's moral/immoral can change with meta-ethical considerations. That requires first having a 'sense' of what's moral/immoral. A 'sense' of what's moral/immoral is developed through language.
I was actually leaning more towards the origen of codes of conduct.
From Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophical Analysis of the Nature of Man, by Robert E. Brennan, O.P.; Macmillan Co., 1941.
What is more important here is that the accidental and the essential (or the necessary) are a dialectical dichotomy - defined as a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair of complementary terms. And so through the unity of opposites, we can track their emergence from pure possibility (vagueness) as each other's mirroring generality.
In the view I am taking, all universals are not singular but dual. True generality is defined by matched pairs that speak to opposing extremes of realised being.
So if I say form, you say matter. If I say discrete, you say continuous. If I say chance, you say necessity. If I say flux, you say stasis. And so on through all the fundamental ontologically-basic categories.
Once the duality, or complementary logic, of "metaphysical strength" universals is accepted, then it becomes obvious that the two need the third thing of a ground of common being from which they can arise as the opposed limits of "the possible". They point back to their own grounding in vagueness - pure potentiality - by the very fact that they represent the counterfactual extremes on that possibility.
For the discrete to be distinct from the continuous - for that distinction to be actualised in a general way by a world - then each must successfully exclude all possibility of its "other". Thus also, the possibility of the "other" must exist to actually get excluded in this fashion. The potential is defined (in dichotomous contrast to the actual!) as then the state where nothing is yet excluded. So before the dichotomy can be the case, there must be the third thing of a vagueness that is neither discrete nor continuous in any degree ... a state that is just the potential for such a division to arise.
Of course, not all "universals" are metaphysical strength dichotomies. That is where a lot of confusion starts. Whiteness is a reasonably strong universal, in being the complete opposite of blackness. But a horse is really a fairly particular "universal".
The concept of "a horse" sort of excludes donkeys and mules and zebras. But the boundaries are vague. And more importantly "a horse" does not stand completely opposed to any other generality. A horse is a living organism as opposed to an inanimate object. A horse partakes of more fundamental metaphysical dichotomies. It is a continuous whole in terms of itself, a discrete part in terms of its world. But even here, the boundaries of the concept of "a horse" remains vague. Is the sweat that is about to drop off the horse still part of its structural continuity or now part of what counts towards defining its structural discreteness?
The problem with the conventional take on universals is that people try to reason about them using the logic of particulars - the predicate logic secured by the three laws of thought. Peirce unpicked that logic by showing that generality is rightfully defined by the LEM failing to apply, and vagueness by the PNC failing to apply.
This opens up the system of reasoning so that we can see that what defines the metaphysically fundamental categories is the absolute division they achieve via dialectical opposition. The discrete and the continuous mutually define the extremes of a certain kind of universal possibility. And in defining the extremes, they together point back to the undivided potential that must have been there to birth them.
Aristotle of course tackled this in his Organon in contrasting contradiction and contrariety.
Two statements are contradictory if one affirms or denies universally what the other affirms or denies particularly. But two statements are contrary if one affirms or denies particularly what the other affirms or denies particularly of the same thing.
So a contradiction excludes a middle, but a contrariety admits to a middle. The same substance - your soup - could be hot, or it could be cold, or it could be anywhere in between. If all soup is hot, then it is a contradiction if your soup is cold. But if my soup is hot, then it is only a contrary fact that yours is cold.
The trick then is to see that when we speak of universals as the product of dichotomies or dialectical opposition, we are now contrasting two particulars. They are only contrarieties (as if they were contradictions, then one couldn't even be considered a possibility, and if one wasn't possible, then its "other" can't even be crisply defined).
If the poles of a dichotomy are only contraries, then only the vague, or pure potentiality, counts as some actual monistic universal - but now an apophatic one, defined by its actual non-existence.
What actually exists is not the "oneness" of this potential but the "many-ness" of the divisions that proved to be possible. So universality unfolds hierarchically in the manner first articulated by Anaximander (well, metaphorically by the Hesiod also). That is, metaphysics seeks to identify the most general dichotomies (or symmetry breakings) that then led to the increasingly more specific ones.
Anaximander actually managed a strikingly thermodynamic view. The Apeiron first separates into the hot and the cold, then follows the division into the dry and the wet. Earlier I highlighted the fundamental division that modern physics appears to have arrived at - the two basic "directions of action" of a (gravitational) integration and a (quantum) differentiation.
But whatever the story, the logic is the same. A first most general symmetry breaking paves the way for a casade of further symmetry breakings. Universality has hierarchical organisation - an unfolding direction in time. The most general change sets the scene for more particular change. And every metaphysically significant change takes the logical form of a dichotomisation.
Hence why hylomorphic substance was taken by Aristotle to be the foundational state of being. The combo of en-mattered form and in-formed matter. Everything definitely begins only when material cause and formal cause are brought together in an actualised state of contrariety - when they are realised with the middle ground that connects them as the matched extremes of a state of possibility.
But then when did these two "actions in directions" first arise? The talk of prime matter and prime mover tries to bypass this question by just claiming their actuality, their divided particularity, as something static or eternal. So again, to get beyond the usual impasse, we have to have a triadic metaphysics where the grounding potential is defined apophatically in terms of what we consider to be the most fundamental pair of universals. If this is form and matter, then that is what a vague beginning swallows up.
Substance can't be the substrate of substance. But a potential could be divided in any fashion by a dichotomisation. And logically - reversing the hierarchical story to be seen in metaphysical development - the first dichotomy is then going to be whatever is the most general possible one. If generality has to set the scene for specificity, then that is why Anaximander (or the Hesiod) intuitively sought the most general possible dichotomy as the first act of world-creating symmetry breaking. And - back to modern physics - why a theory of quantum gravity seems fundamental to explaining the "how" of a Big Bang creation event.
This is an example of the bad thought habit I just highlighted - turning a "soft" contrary into a "hard" contradiction. It is the reductionism you always complain about.
So it is not a problem that knowledge is structured by it having two poles of being - ideas and impressions, concepts and percepts, rationality and empiricism.
Psychologically, we know it is just a fact that our mentality is divided in this fashion. But the big mistake is to turn it into some absolute ontological separation - the duality of a hard contradiction - when really it is only the relative thing of a dichotomous contrariety.
If you turn to a powerful model of a "knowing system" - like Stephen Grossberg's Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) neural networks - you can see this point made mathematically and explicitly. He models awareness in terms of a "long term memory" layer in interaction with a "short term memory" layer. So the basic potential here is "memory" - a state of encoded representation or response. And then hierarchically, all you need is a contrast of characteristic timescales. Sense data or impressions are the immediate reaction to the events of the moment. Concepts or ideas are the long term memory states that create the more general context that can interpret the particular events forming a perceptual state in the short term memory layer.
It is an important fact that the best mathematical models of psychology support the view that ideas and impressions are not hard contradictions - a dualism - but only a soft or relative state of dichotomisation.
All mindfulness boils down to a "memory response" - some intra-layer neural competition that is an adaptation of internal state to some applied perturbation (a changing environment). And then you get a useful structure, a complexity of response, just by a separation of spatiotemporal scales of adaptation. Ideas vs impressions is a natural divide that "processes" the world in a balance dichotomous fashion.
So you are enthusiastic about philosophical approaches that appear to endorse full-on dualism. Science misses something as it rejects a hard division of reality into the material and the immaterial. Science is wrong in thinking that materiality vs immateriality is only a relative affair so far as its physicalism is concerned. You take it as just an obvious fact that there is an empirical world that is available to the senses, but then an actually separate rational world that is available to ... the nous, the mind, the secret sauce spirit.
Yet natural philosophy rejects actual dualism. And science supports its immanent understanding of nature.
Dichotomies or symmetry-breakings are how nature achieves intelligible structure. So - in its highly developed state - nature will appear to be broken by its dualities. But mystery is avoided by recognising that any such duality can only be soft or relative. A pair of developmental contraries, not a pair of existent contradictions.
But if you want to keep lapsing into a reductionist ontology, and then complaining bitterly that "science" doesn't accept the resulting hard dualism, that must be your private psycho-drama in the end. A properly organic conception of nature doesn't even need to go there. It can show that the dualism is always the product of a semiotic or epistemic "cut". Any division must arise out of a shared commonality.
And resolving that division means dissolving it back into a state of vague potential. It is not logically permitted to collapse all the material aspects of the account to immaterial ones, or vice versa.
If Peirce were an "objective idealist" in the sense that you keep wanting to claim, then he would simply be wrong by his own lights. There would have to be something very queer about his thinking. He would have to be contradicting himself.
But if you read him as talking of structuring contrarieties, then you can see he was emphasising the complementary nature of reality - its hylomorphic organisation where even the Cosmos at its most physically simple can be considered to have mind-like features.
Poetically, matter is effete habit, deadened routine. Substance at its most unlively.
You can read it as an endorsement of transcendent theism if you like. Plenty read it as an endorsement of immanent panpsychism.
But perhaps it actually is just this organic thing, this middle path between hard realism and hard idealism, that one would dub pan-semiosis.
What's the benefit? You compile them into books you then sell? :P
Writing helps clarify thought.
That's only a matter of perspective. The other perspective claims that making categorically distinct things, like the sensible and the intelligible (the particular and the universal, material and immaterial), into two poles of one category, with degrees of separation, is the real mistake.
Quoting apokrisis
It is this form of idealism, the desire to make all things mathematical, which drives this mistake. So of course the mathematics will support it.
Quoting apokrisis
Natural philosophy does not reject dualism, it is only interested in the one aspect, the natural. It is metaphysics like yours, which attempt to bring the two categories of dualism into the fold of "natural philosophy", which was never developed with this intent, which fall into error.
It's an excerpt from a text on Thomist philosophy and psychology. I didn't quote it as an example of what I believe, but because it addresses the point that Mitchell had raised. I think it's also an interesting pre-cursor of what was to become Cartesian dualism.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes - it misses the fact that 'spirit' or 'intelligence' or 'mind' is not something known to the natural sciences. Science is not the top of the hierarchy of philosophy but this is something that has been entirely lost sight of nowadays.
Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge
There's your 'immanent metaphysics' in a nutshell.
Quoting apokrisis
He was hardly a systematic or monolithic thinker. I've laboured through a couple of his essays on 'protoplasm' and the like and also some of his more idealist essays, and they have many contradictory ideas in them. It's what makes them interesting. He was opposed to philosophical materialism. And, I'm not the one who categorised Peirce in those terms, many encyclopedias list him alongside Josiah Royce, F H Bradley, and other 19th century idealist philosophers, because this was before G E Moore's 'Refutation of Idealism' came along which marked the turn to analytical philosophy and the rejection of idealist metaphysics. The fact that he was an idealist philosophy is something you continually try to deprecate, but it is a fact nonetheless.
There's more than one use of the term, though I'm not sure what 'accepted' adds here.
Quoting creativesoul
Right.
Quoting creativesoul
Yes. So would you say that the ordinary use of the word 'man' is more accurately described by Aristotle's definition of universals (where what is common to being a man is language independent) or by the nominalist definition (where 'man' is just a name)?
Exactly. And an unreceptive audience is a help in making the effort as you get old and lazy. :)
Well if a dichotomy is a mistake, you should be able to expose that fact.
For instance, the material and the immaterial is indeed a weak-arse dichotomy. It is just a simple negation. It is the claim that there is the material .... and the not-material.
Well what can you really make of a vague distinction like that - one without proper self-grounding context?
Matter and mind is also a bad dichotomy - one that doesn't really make intelligible sense as I keep telling you. There is no formal reciprocal relation being described.
A properly formed dichotomy is one that is self-grounding, self-contextualising, in being reciprocal or inverse. A is not B because it A is 1/B. That is, A-ness contains or partakes of the least possible degree of B-ness. And B-ness in return is defined by containing or partaking in A-ness to the least possible degree.
That is why information and entropy make a nice dichotomy. Informational certainty is inverse to entropic disorder. There is a formal connection via the reciprocal relation. Each others its other to become itself. The greater the separation, the more sure the polar distinction.
It's the same with the infinite and the infinitesimal. They are defined as each other's reciprocal. And physics has found the same duality in the Planck scale. And that is what has got physics so excited about holography - the duality of fundamental theory found in the AdS/CFT correspondence.
So there are clear rules for forming proper dichotomies. It's not a matter of "perspective". It is an exact mathematical relation.
Again, that is why I champion semiotics. The possibility of information arises at exactly the point when physics is at its most constrained, or mechanical. One can see the connection by which a fundamental distinction must emerge. If you limit physical dimensionality - degrees of freedom - so that it approach zero, then you get the emergence of the counterfactual possibility of a symbol or informational mark.
Life is chemistry reduced from its 4D chaos down past 2D surfaces and 1D chains all the way to the possibility of zero-D codes. DNA is a strand - a linear sequence. Any codon could be the next in line. That reduction of physical causality - the fact that any codon could be next - then allows DNA to represent pure information. Or at least a variety of amino acids that can be connected in a 1D chain to curl up and act as a 3D shaped message, an effective cause, in a 4D brew of cellular action.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Mathematics reveals nature's fundamental patterns. So a lack of mathematical rigour is always going to be the actual mistake.
A silly reply if my immanent metaphysics is what I've said it is - a full four causes naturalism.
Quoting Wayfarer
Are you kidding?!? That's like saying Led Zeppelin was hardly a rock band. :-O
Quoting Wayfarer
And yet he started from psychology - from a proper kind of cognitive and evolutionary idealism, not a muddled mystical one - and worked his way outwards to recover the material world.
I don't think so. A dichotomy is a mathematical relation only if you define it that way. But there are fundamental differences which cannot be expressed as mathematical relations, such as the dichotomy between future and past, the difference between what has been and what has not yet come to be.
Quoting apokrisis
The patterns of nature are revealed to us before we apply mathematics to them. They are there, revealed to us, naturally. We apprehend them through sight, hearing, and other senses, in all their beautiful splendor, before we apply mathematics. The passage of time reveals nature's fundamental patterns to us, we apply mathematics in an attempt to understand them.
Huh? The past is the constraints on future degrees of freedom. The future is the remaining free possibility that the past hasn't managed to constrain. Of course the definition is reciprocal.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Maybe before science got going and the game changed.
Did pre-scientific folk intuitively believe that cannonballs followed a parabola, or that a rolling ball on a frictionless plane would roll forever?
Was that much of nature really revealed by an Aristotelian level of physics?
As I said, you have no description of the qualitative difference between what has already been, and what will have being in the future. What you express is the description of an agent at the present, who has constraints relative to the past, and freedoms relative to the future. You have no description of what it means to be constrained or to be free.
Here's an example. Say we have hot and cold, as dichotomous terms which define each other, with degrees of difference assumed to be "between" them. By defining hot with not-cold, and cold with not-hot, and degrees of difference, we have no description of those qualiies, what it means to be hot, or what it means to be cold. So if you proceed in this direction now, to define what it means to be hot, and what it means to be cold, you'll see a fundamental difference between them, such that hot and cold are completely distinct ideals which cannot be related through the degrees of difference. Hot and cold are discrete, while the degrees of difference are continuous.
In all such instances there is an incommensurability between the discrete (hot and cold, constraint and freedom) and the continuous (degrees of difference). Incommensurability is beyond the capacity of mathematics. So we have an incommensurability between the continuous existence of the agent at the present, and the two discrete things, constraints of the past, and freedoms of the future. That incommensurability cannot be grasped with mathematics.
Quoting apokrisis
You're missing the point. Nature, with all of its various patterns, reveals itself to us, with the passing of time, it is not something that we reveal through applications of physics or mathematics.
Agents?
My account was rather more general than that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hot and cold are defined by a temporal asymmetry - a direction in which time or change flows. So cold is more than just not-hot. It is a state of maximum entropy. While heat is then the opposite in being an order or energy - a negentropy - available for dissipation.
We have some exact maths that describes what we now mean by differences in temperature.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is rubbish.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good try. But completely irrelevant argument.
The maths of limits works. My approach explains metaphysically how it could in fact work. It explains in what sense there are limits to approach even if these limits could never be reached.
If one extreme of a dichotomy is defined by its "distance" from the other, then it is both possible always to be measurably moving towards one limit - by measurably moving away from the other limit - while also never arriving at this other limit, as then that would result in the nonsensical claim of having left the other limit "completely behind". The other limit would have to have vanished. And what then could measure a distance from it?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You're avoiding the point. If we were still sitting around on our chuff, not doing the maths, we'd still be convinced by Aristotelian level physics no doubt.
Your account was one of constraints, and degrees of freedom, which implies necessarily an agent which is to some degree free and constrained. So your description of past and future is the perspective of an agent, and therefore subjective. It tells us how past and future appear to an agent, but we need to get beyond that, and produce a description of what the difference between past and future really is. And this requires relating it to material existence, things which are not active agents, but have passive existence, and may be acted upon.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure the math works, but it doesn't explain what the limits are. Nor can it determine what the limits are. The limits are imposed on the mathematics by the rules of application, the axioms.
Quoting apokrisis
The point is that the limits are always determined by referring to something outside the system which is being measured. So the limits, by the very fact that they limit, must be outside, and therefore completely distinct form the thing limited. If there is no such real limited, then the entire scale is arbitrary and meaningless.
In other words, there must be a categorical separation between the scale, and the things measured by the scale or else the measurement is meaningless. Measuring things by comparing them to themselves, is completely meaningless. So we set up a scale where the limits are the "absolutes", and the absolutes are produce by relating the things to be measured to something completely different from the things to be measured. The limits must always be in a different category from the thing being measured by that dichotomy or else the measurement is meaningless. What makes the measurement meaningful is its relationship to something outside the category of the things being measured.
So when you measure a degree of continuity, what else do you measure that against except a corresponding degree of absence of discreteness?
A is continuous to the degree it isn’t .....
Go on. Try to fill in the blank with a word that doesn’t mean discrete.
Invoking sensibility, conceptual scheme, and/or linguistic frameworks per my earlier questions regarding further discrimination between them.
Quoting Andrew M
Quoting Andrew M
Neither and both.
The ordinary use of 'man' has meaning that is determined exclusively by multiple users drawing the same or similar enough correlations between the term, other 'objects' of physiological sensory perception, and/or the agent's own mental ongoings(attitude/emotional state/relevant pre-existing thought and belief). What counts as being a "man" is what one is taught counts as being a man. That varies tremendously from group to group, or it can at least. Today's gender issues display this all quite nicely.
The metacognitive sense that Aristotle employs marries the ordinary use to a conceptual notion(universals). He initially learned what counts as being a man the same way everyone else does. He was taught how to use the term as others were already using it. Being a man included certain things, whatever they happened to include in his group at the time.
He then, after metacognitive endeavors, proposed that what all men have in common is what makes them what they are, and that we only later call them "man". Aristotle held that being a man is not dependent upon language because what is common to men is not dependent upon language.
I disagree with Aristotle strongly on that matter. If being a man is not dependent upon language, then nothing that is existentially contingent upon language counts as part of being a man.
So is a penis a social construct? Is an X chromosome a social construct?
Sure, social construction is a thing. But so is biological construction. And semiosis recognises other kinds of "language use" beyond just words, like the language of the genes.
Aristotle was right about humans as substances as their being is organised by a structure that is more than accidental. Genes and neurons encode a purpose and a design. There is a reason why bodies and behaviour hang together, or endure.
Aristotle was hazy about the detail. Yet he was a structuralist. And a social level of construction - the one that employs actual language - needs to be understood in similar structuralist fashion.
Quoting creativesoul
So you are talking past what counts in terms of biology so as to focus on what counts in terms of culture. And yet both of these are realities of the experienced world, not imaginative fictions.
Definitions of masculinity might change as the needs of particular social systems evolve. But anthropologists can find the structural logic, the evolutionary sense, that explains the prevailing definitions. Or else they can show how some signifier of masculinity - like wearing a tie - is a symbolic "accident".
Social constructionism is properly a theory about social realities. It doesn't mean culture lives in a fictional world. Culture is all about the symbols that are the language which can be used to structure a world of social meaning.
Give me a bit. This interests me greatly, and our approaches are similar in many ways, despite our frameworks.
Suffice it to say that I'm not disagreeing with Aristotle's aim for setting out that which is not dependent upon language. His method seems inadequate, or 'hazy' as you say.
The notion of being a social construct doesn't factor into my own considerations here. To be clear, I understand that senses of terms are called such, and understandably so. I grant that. However, as it pertains to whether or not something or other is existentially contingent upon language, the notion of being a social construct cannot further discriminate between that which is and that which is not. All social constructs are existentially contingent upon language. Some social constructs set out that which is clearly not.
The difficulty, it seems, is developing a method for taking account of which constructs set out that which is existentially contingent upon language, and which ones set out that which is not.
What I am emphasising is the structuralism that was implicit in his substance thinking. The holistic causality used to account for the nature of Being.
So your comments seem overly focused on linguistic structure. And even linguistic structuralism - of the familiar Continental/Saussurean type - strives after a more sophisticated triadic or holistic reading.
And then we now know enough about biology and neurology to see how those are also levels of organisation that are the product of semiotic codes. Maths and logic - as languages - are a still higher level of structuration.
So there are men as biological animals, men as socialised humans, and men as rationalising scientists and mathematicians. Three levels of substantial being right there. :)
A degree is a discrete unit. By measuring a continuity in degrees, you are applying discrete units to the continuity. That is exactly my point, to make sense of things within one category, they must be related to another category. Your way of relating things only within the category leaves us with nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
That of course is a statement of nonsense, as is your habit, stating nonsense to defend a nonsense metaphysics. If A is continuous then it is not discrete. To insert the word "degree" here is simply to insert unnecessary ambiguity, which is nonsense. If a thing is hot, then it is not cold. To say that a thing is hot to the degree that its not cold, is to replace a clear logical principle with an ambiguous one, allowing contradiction that the thing be both hot and cold, qualifying this with the ambiguity of "by degree".
Instead, what we do in reality, is assign a temperature to the thing. The degree is the temperature. The temperature is meant to be objective and any temperature in itself, is neither hot nor cold. But the temperature scale is related to something completely independent, separate, with standards of judgement as to which levels are to be interpreted as hot, and which as cold. Depending on the application, what is hot by one standard might be cold by another, but the independent standard allows us to avoid the nonsense of "it is hot to the degree that it isn't cold".
Pragmatically, where is the difficulty?
You seem to want to turn an ontological question into an epistemic one. Your tactic seems to revolve around emphasising the doubt that we can truly know reality because we only know reality via the structure of words.
But while that is a routine epistemic challenge, it is pretty irrelevant once you accept a pragmatic approach to belief and just get on with ontologising.
Yes, language is a reality-making game. But then was Aristotle using ordinary speech or pioneering a new logical level of semiosis to "talk about" the universalised concept of "a man". Are you actually critiquing Aristotle here if you are only merely carping about ordinary language usage?
First, the concept would need to be one that sets out the elemental constituents of the candidate in question(what counts as being a man in this case). Second, we would need to be able to assess the elements in terms of whether or not they are existentially contingent upon language.
So now you are saying that a unit is a continuity chopped into discrete pieces? That is, it places limits on the continuous so that bits of continuity can be treated as the same and thus counted as repetitions. A degree is a difference that isn't a difference fundamentally, just the very same thing happening all over again?
Hmm. Seems familiar.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So much for Aristotle's distinction between contradiction and contrariety then. What a goof that guy was!
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Do you ever read what you write? Or is making sense utterly irrelevant here.
So I am right that you simply fail to get what a structuralist ontology is about? You are wedded to logical atomism. Aristotle wasn't.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I said that a continuity is measured by discrete units. This is the point I am trying to make, that the measurement is made with something categorically different from the thing measured. You put them together in some ambiguous mess.
The candidate is what counts as being "a man". Are you saying that being a man doesn't involve being a composition of things that are not existentially contingent upon language? If "a man" is a universal, and being a universal requires existential independence from language, then being a man requires consisting entirely in/of that which is not existentially contingent upon language.
So are these discrete units bounded lumps of continuity or not?
What dichotomy properly defines your notion of "unit" here. Clearly you have in mind the idea of a sameness that repeats. We can cut the whole into a set of similar parts. The one can stand for the many.
I see a whole tangle of metaphysical dichotomies in play here. The usual story. As it should be.
Hey, you just invented a new category of fallacy!
I'd rather you directly address what I've said. I mean, quote me in it's entirety, and let me know what you think. Do you agree or disagree with it, and if you disagree explain why.
I'm saying that counting shaping or structuring constraints is different from counting compositional elements.
So you are thinking like a reductionist. Aristotle was thinking like a holist.
If "a man" is a universal, and being a universal requires existential independence from language, then being a man requires consisting entirely in/of that which is not existentially contingent upon language.
That's an argument. Do you agree or not?
Of course not, that would be contradictory to say that a continuity has bounded lumps. If it has bounded lumps, it is not a continuity. This is simply a matter of avoiding contradiction.
Quoting apokrisis
That things are defined by dichotomies is where I strongly disagree with you. This is the point I am making. Things are defined by description. According to the description, we may place classify the thing. The class is a universal. A universal itself may be defined by a dichotomy hot/cold, big/small, etc.,, but the individual thing, is not defined by a dichotomy. The "unit", being an individual thing cannot be defined by a dichotomy, it can only be described.
p1. Being a man is universal
p2. Being universal requires existential independence from language
C1. Being a man requires existential independence from language
I removed the portion which seemed at issue.
Do you agree with it as it is now?
So how do you divide up a foot into inches unless there is some underlying continuity to be divided?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So now you have switched track from epistemology back to ontology? One second we are talking about units of measurement, the next about actual substantial objects out there in the real world?
Always a pleasure doing business with you, MU. ;)
But sure, a complex substance is going to be predicated of multiple dichotomies or universal contrasts. But surprise. That is why Aristotle defined complex being in terms of hierarchies of constraints.
So what?
Set out the problem with my approach. There is a clear and plain argument given that eliminates the compositional aspect. Do you agree with it? If not which premiss are you rejecting?
Back to the topic...
What counts as being a universal? Moreover, what counts as an adequate criterion?
If being a universal requires existential independence from language, then an adequate method for determining what counts as a universal must be able to set out that which is not existentially contingent upon language as well as that which is.
If we remove all things existentially contingent upon language from our notion of being a man, what is left to call a man?
A penis does not a man make. Geckos have those.
Are you continuing with this nonsense even after I explained why it is nonsense?
A structuralist approach to language use emphasises its role in the construction of a social reality. A semiotic generalisation of linguistic structuralism shows how reality in general is the product of structuring constraints.
So if we are talking ontology, then human language use really does construct humans - at a social level. But it doesn't construct them at a more basic neurological or biological level. You need the language or neurons or genes to do that.
So when Aristotle started the business of thinking about reality in structuralist terms, he could see that the universal definition of "a man" would have to reflect these levels of organisation. Men were reasoning animals that might even participate in an even more abstracted logical realm of semiotics.
But Aristotle didn't know about genes and neurons. So that is why his approach to substantial being was a little hazy on the details of what might properly constitute the different levels of structuralism going on.
So my complaint - which you have so far failed to answer clearly - is that you are bringing an epistemic quibble to an important ontological debate. You are simply saying all knowledge of reality is linguistic and so every concept a cultural construct.
Well, yes. It is a pragmatic fact that we need a more abstract semiotic machinery - like language - to do the meta-structuring of our biologically and neurologically structured experience of the world. Pigeons can categorise. But speech let's us take it to another level. And formal mathematical language can take us a step even beyond ordinary language. All this is epistemically understood.
But then it is an ontic category error to confuse the linguistic basis of knowledge with the knowledge claims then being made.
So "being a universal known as a man" has to be understood in terms of what constraints really form "a man". And it is an ontic mixture. Social constraints - our shared cultural image of masculinity - clearly play a real part in producing "real men". A man can be measured by the degree to which he does or does not conform to some generic cultural stereotype.
But then there are also the neurological and biological constraints in play. Any reasonable use of language is going to acknowledge this at least implicitly. A man has a dick, two balls, and the usual complement of X-chromosomes, on the whole.
He is generically an animal while also generically a reasoning being. And neither of these generalisations are "social constructions". They are both accounts of the reality. It is just that the cause of this reality is on some levels genetic and neurological, on others social and cultural.
Maybe you get this, maybe you don't. But you seem to be striving to blur the line between social construction as an epistemic issue and social construction as a cause of substantial being.
You keep repeating your magic phrase - "existentially contingent upon language". Well some aspects of "being a man" are clearly existentially contingent on the cultural ideas that only language encodes.
It we were talking about bacteria, or stars, then no, our conceptions of them have very little bearing on their existence. We can exert some constraints on bacteria - like inventing antibiotics and seeing them evolve resistance. But really, we don't construct their existence through just talking about them.
However palaces and fences and iPhones are examples of other kinds of objects - artifacts - that are clearly very dependent on the games of linguistic social construction. Through our conceptions, we are the causes of their existence - the reason why they exist materially.
Perhaps it is unfortunate you picked on such a confusing example of "a man" as your example of a universal. It could be a good example as it illustrates the hierarchical nature of structured being. But only if you are already clear about the pansemiotic underpinnings of structuralist holism.
Aristotle viewed universals as "predicates that can be attibuted to more than one individual".
So, obviously universals exist (as predicates or "names") as a function of "What can be said". The question of the ontological status of universals is rather whether they are simply elements of language or are features of the non-linguistic world. One fundamental question of Metaphysics, then boils down to how we think language is related to the world.
creativesoul, in saying "If we remove all things existentially contingent upon language from our notion of being a man, what is left to call a man?" seems to suggest that universals are "linguistically created features"; in other words, Nominalism. Or am I misunderstanding something.
Do geckos exist apart from language? Is "gecko" a universal?
To be honest Mitchell, I'm highlighting the need to be able to determine whether or not our candidate can be adequately assessed as being simply an element of language or a feature of the non-linguistic world. It's about method.
I'm also working from the idea that being a universal requires being independent of language in a more stringent way than my toaster existing independently of language. On my view, being independent of language requires existential independence. If something is existentially contingent upon language, then it is most certainly not independent thereof.
Is my toaster, or automibile, or any other product of human activity, something that "is existentially contingent upon language"?
Not all products of human activity are existentially contingent upon language.
Toasters most certainly are, for they are existentially contingent upon the technology, and the technology is. The same holds good for automobiles.
True belief, however is existentially contingent upon human activity but not language. It would be best put as... not all true belief is existentially contingent upon language.
As mentioned earlier, the difficult part seems to be devising a method by which we can assess something with regard to whether or not it is existentially contingent upon language.
P.S.
True belief is actually not contingent upon human activity. Not all true belief anyway. Human true belief is. Other agents' is contingent upon their own activity, not necessarily ours unless we're involved in activities together, such as feeding my cat. In that circumstance, her true belief is contingent upon my activity and hers.
What? Even the females?
Let X = a penis
I would think that clearly penises are not existentially contingent upon language. Thus, "penis" sets out something that is properly called ontologically "independent" of language, for it is not existentially contingent upon our taking account of it via naming it.
A penis does not a man make. However, if we take a more compositional approach, if all men have penises, and penises are not existentially contingent upon language, then we have one elemental constituent of being a man that is not existentially contingent upon language. It takes more than that, although that's a start.
So you won't answer the direct ontic question - are you backing realism or nominalism. Instead your issue is epistemic - how could we determine the matter either way. Where is our "access" to reality.
And yet pragmatism has already been "devised" as a method. :-}
Dicks are real and not linguistic inventions. This must be progress!
The foot, as well as inches, are the measuring units, there is no underlying continuity. Divide the inch into halves, quarters, however you wish, they are still all discrete units. Numbers are discrete units of value , and no matter how you divide them they will always be such. Any assumption that there is an underlying continuity is simply false, because as much as you assume that they are infinitely divisible, they always exist as discrete units. But the thing which they are applied to, to be measured, may be assumed to be continuous.
Quoting apokrisis
I have been trying to maintain the categorical distinction. You have been switching back and forth at will, because you denied the categorical distinction in the first place. You want the degrees of difference to be in the same category as the hot and cold. That;s your most fundamental ontological principle, deny the categorical separation of dualism, and replace it with terms of dichotomy. This moves things which are inherently incommensurable, into the same category so you can proceed under the illusion that they can be related through mathematics. You want to compare apples and oranges.
Now this is the consequence of your ambiguous principles, you can't even determine which of these categories we're referring to at any particular time, because you've already synthesized them in principle.
And yet all still capable of further sub-division apparently. And how can there be further division if there is nothing further that counts as the undivided?
Your mathematical logic doesn't really seem all that water-tight, eh?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I was simply trying to keep pace with your flip-flopping. One second, measurement units. The next second, actual things.
That's a good question Mitchell. Geckos are not existentially contingent upon language. If "gecko" counts as being a universal, as a result of geckos not being existentially contingent upon language, then all names which set out that which is not existentially contingent upon language would qualify.
The problem of course, is that we're calling a certain group of names, which are existentially contingent upon language by yet another name that is meant to denote that which is not existentially contingent upon language. Seems incoherent.
My participation in this thread was motivated by my own unconventional use of 'universal' which is more about being a common denominator... being universally extant within all X after removing the individual particulars.
No need to remove them. A constraints-based logic simply ignores them as differences that don't make a difference.
So a compositional approach - one predicated on construction or addition - wants to understand its "other" of universality or generality as that which can survive all particular acts of subtraction. That is how it seeks dichotomously to complete itself. What can you take away and so arrive at "the particular essence".
But this ontology doesn't really work, as we know.
So a constraints-based approach is more like the pragmatism of Wittgenstein's family resemblances, or even ways of life. A state of constraint merely has to tolerate difference. Stability of identity emerges once a system is in some equilibrium balance and further change ceases to create significant change.
So no need to remove individuals. They are only noticed if they matter.
Is a penis definitional of a male? Well biologically, there is a family resemblance to speak of. But maybe it is a stunted micro-penis or maybe this male has two of them.
The identification of this individual as a true male might come into question on biological functional grounds. Is there still some possibility of this individual impregnating a mate with his appendage? At some point, the "penis" will have such a low probability of functioning as intended that it is not fit for purpose.
But the line is somewhat arbitrary precisely because probability is involved. A misfit penis might on occasion still do the trick. The difference might not make a difference as a matter of chance.
So a constraints-based approach is the one that gets the probabilistic nature of reality. It is flexible in its definitions, whereas a compositional approach has this unnatural brittleness when applied to the world.
(Hence Bayesian reasoning!)
Language is related to the world by virtue of the attribution of meaning... by us, no less.
Nope. Meaning arises out of the relating. The meaning of words is stabilised through the functionality of habits of use. Language is shaped by the work it does, the purposes it serves, in our interactions with the world.
Quoting apokrisis
Ignoring/removing... no difference. Setting them aside either way.
Essentialism fails. I agree.
But it is a big difference. It is the difference between atomism and a structural holism.
One view needs to presume fixed parts. The other presumes a fundamental instability that can become suitably regulated.
So they claim opposite things about reality at a fundamental level.
Your view is incoherent. It calls things that are existentially contingent upon language 'independent' of language. Go back to sleep.
Where exactly?
Each unit is discrete. That a unit is potential divided into other discrete units does not imply any continuity. It implies that the unit is composed of discrete units. Where do you pull the continuity from out of your hat?
Sounds legit.
Glad you agree. Maybe we've got a starting point then. Do you agree also that the discrete and the continuous are inherently incommensurable?
That charge is inaccurate, actually. My mistake. Unless you hold that universals are independent of language.
Relevance?
It appears we have no hope of understanding one another. I asked you how your statement was relevant, if it is at all. What you said doesn't seem to be at all relevant. Do you believe that it is?
I was admitting that I may have made a mistake in my analysis of what you've been arguing. Perhaps a direct question would help.
Do you hold that universals are independent from language?
I think there are compelling arguments for dualism* provided that it is clearly understood at the outset that the 'mind' is never an object of cognition. This is where Cartesian dualism caused so much mischief, by conceptualising res cogitans as an objective substance; it wasn't hard to demonstrate the unreality of the so-called 'ghost in the machine'. That has been behind a lot of the physicalist philosophies post-Enlightenment. But philosophical dualism doesn't have to assume such a form and from what I am learning about dualism in the classical Western tradition, it seems quite a credible attitude.
Modern scientific naturalism dealt with the Cartesian duality by then treating the mind as a subjective reality or derivative attribute:
[quote="Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos" ]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
You will probably say that semiotics overcomes this duality by introducing the triadic relationship of sign, signified and interpreter, and that is true, but there's more to it.
Quoting apokrisis
The reason that natural philosophy rejects actual dualism is connected with the fundamental misconception that arose from Cartesian dualism; subsequent naturalism tended to spontaneously gravitate to the physicalist side of the Cartesian duality. But modern naturalism also originated in the rejection of scholastic metaphysics. So the result was fundamentally monistic: that what is real is matter-energy, in whatever form it assumes.
Hence 'immanent' becomes understood as 'other than transcendent' - continuing the general trajectory towards naturalism, where Nature is conceived as a self-grounded or self-originating.
But this abandons one of the fundamental roles of philosophy which is the disclosure of the transcendent domain of values, in contrast to the domain of instrumental or technical knowledge. It is simply assumed that philosophy is in the service of science, technology and engineering, as there is nothing beyond the physical or natural life of man to consider.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think that 'hard idealism' is a meaningful description. You can interpret idealism in such a way that it's not about the nature of existents, but about the nature of the knowledge of existents. Such an idealism doesn't for one minute negate the empirical findings of chemistry and physics, but it might argue that the mind's contribution to chemistry and physics is often overlooked or ignored by science, as the mind's contribution is not amongst the objects of perception - one of the main points of the Critique of Pure Reason (which, incidentally, is not a 'psychological' work.)
Quoting apokrisis
In Aristotelian philosophy, ‘final cause’ was ‘the reason that something exists’. So understanding something also meant understanding its reason for being. But if there is no reason beyond the physical, then what kind of reason could be considered a 'final cause'? Perhaps the Universe wishes to assume the form of intelligent sentient beings - which is a naturalistic answer I would be quite willing to contemplate.
Quoting apokrisis
The jealous God dies hard, eh?
-------------
*Incidentally, a great Web resource on dualism here.
I think you're misunderstanding what realism about universals entails.
Here's a specific example. Aristotle defined humans as the rational animal. For arguments sake, let's suppose that rationality just is the ability to use language. So humans are the language-using animal.
Does this mean that the existence of humans is dependent on language? Obviously if there was no language, then there would be no humans per the above definition. (Just as there weren't earlier in evolutionary history.)
But it doesn't follow that being human is therefore a language construct or human creation (as if humans created themselves via definition!) Instead that language-using ability is a feature of the world as exhibited by select individuals of the animal kingdom. And it is that feature of the world that is being picked out in the definition as the essential distinguishing feature between humans and other animals.
Q1) When something is undivided, is it:
A) Divided?
B) Continuous?
Q2) When quantifying an amount of water, do we ask:
A) How many water is there?
B) How much water is there?
Q3) When quantifying an amount of apples, do we ask:
A) How many apples are there?
B) How much apples are there?
Q4: When you have fallen into a pit of logical incoherence, do we:
A) Keep digging?
B) Cease to dig?
(Answers on a back of a postcard...)
A) is excluded by the law of non-contradiction. To answer with B) would require definitions. If you define "undivided" as continuous you are begging the question. Furthermore, if you define "undivided" in this way, you have a contradiction in your question. Your question refers to "something". Therefore defining "undivided" in this way would imply that there is something which is continuous. The definition of "thing" is such that it is a discrete entity, so it is contradictory to assume a thing which is continuous.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see the relevance of the rest of these questions Whether it is common vernacular to ask "how much water" or "how many water" doesn't seem relevant. Your method of argumentation continues to be an appeal to ambiguity, as is consistent with your habit.
Right, I may have told you before that I don't find Stanford to be very helpful in their philosophical principles. First, they are not at all rigorous in their philosophical definitions and descriptions. And, I disagree with the physicalist perspective from which they formulate their definitions and descriptions.
My dictionary defines continuous as "unbroken, uninterrupted". And an entity is a distinct thing, which implies necessarily, boundaries. Accordingly, an entity, a whole, is necessarily a discrete thing. So if continuity is opposed to discreteness, as suggested by your Stanford entry, it is impossible under the law of non-contradiction, that an entity, a whole, which is a discrete thing, is also a continuity.
You’re in a hole. Quit digging.
Is a discrete entity continuous within itself?
I’ve explained. Universals are constraints. Constraints are causal. Causal is real.
And then language is a semiotic constraint on meaning. Language can be generalised pansemiotically to talk about the machinery of constraints in general.
So in a loose sense - one far more general than your locution hopes to imply - all universals depend on language, or rather the semiotic relation by which constraints on being develop.
Most universals of course don’t rely on human language - human socio-cultural constraints. Tables and chairs do. Constructs like masculinity do. But a horse is a horse due to genetic level information, or constraints over bioiogical development. An electron is an electron due to more fundamental symmetry constraints over material development.
So the way you pose your question fails to recognise the greater metaphysical generality of the metaphysical framework I employ. Your question only seemed direct as it depends on a far more limited notion of causality and existence.
I don't know what you mean by "unbroken as an antonym of continuous". But in case you haven't noticed, definitions are usually composed of defining terms, not synonyms. Red is defined as a colour, but this does not mean that "red" and "a colour" are synonymous. So your reference to synonyms and antonyms, whatever you are trying to say here, is completely irrelevant and is in no way a representation of what I said.
Quoting Janus
I doubt that very much. And the reason that I doubt it is that we know things to be composed of parts, and we know the parts of one thing overlap with the parts of another. For instance, there is air within my body. And atoms, which are supposed to be things over lap each other as molecules. So it doesn't appear likely that a discrete thing is even continuous within itself. I think it is highly unlikely that a discrete thing is in any way continuous, and that is why we separate these two as mutually exclusive. Apokrisis likes to create ambiguity in well defined categorical differences, and this ambiguity allows the separation between the categories to be dissolved in support of a monist materialism.
But a discrete thing is considered to be one thing separate (or at least separable) from all others. If it is composed of parts and this entails that it is not a discrete thing then it cannot be a unity, surely. For me this actually goes more to apo's point that discreteness and continuity are limit cases which are only ever approached, never realized.
As to what is simple and what is complex - ‘the atom’ was supposed by atomic materialists to be simple, i.e. not composed of parts - indeed the word ‘atom’ means ‘uncuttable’. So atomism solved the problem of the relationship of ‘the One and the many’, by saying that ‘the imperishable’ existed as the fundamental matter from which everything was formed. This was obviously a hugely influential and important metaphysical theory in the grand scheme.
Whereas the Platonists argued that the fundamental entities were ideal forms, the Platonic geometric solids, and the Forms, which were metaphysical in their very nature.
But the central metaphysical question was the relationship of ‘the Uncreated’ and ‘the manifest domain’. Universals were understood to be nearer to the Uncreated, because less subject to change and decay; hence the attraction of mathematical objects and principles, as these remained constant, while individual things constantly arise and pass away.
I realise you are just pissing about, but it is not a problem that a nested hierarchy of classification - one dependent on the bifurcating exactness of dichotomies - results in genus~species relations, or levels where the one is represented in terms of the many.
That was kind of the (Aristotelian) point. If you have a division defined in terms of opposing limits, then you also get the continuous spectrum of possibility that lies between.
So even with something as psychological as colour, if we have black and white as the limiting opposites - the extremes which lack particular hue - then we get a continuous spectrum of all the hues in-between.
So colour arises between two uncoloured limits. White is all colours. Black is no colours. Then in-between we can count an almost unlimited variety of colours. With three-cone vision supporting a doubled-up set of opponent channel processing - a red~green channel and a yellow~blue channel - we don't get an actual infinity of hues. But we can discriminate hues in their millions.
Of course colour and red don't refer to phenomena at the same hierarchical level.
Colour is one of a variety of sensory modalities. Sensory modalities are the spectrum of possibility created by a more general dichotomy at the level of basic neural logic. In neurology, it is usual to oppose sensation to motor action - input vs output. Sensation involves some general semiotic neuro-receptor transduction which turns physical energies into useful information - a pattern of spikes.
Then red, as I said, is a particular that is "species to the genus" that is colour experience. But red is itself, in turn, a universal - a primary - in terms of colour experience. And that can again be seen directly from the dichotomous logic the brain employs to make reality intelligible. Red stands opposed to green in the circuits of the visual pathway. Neurons will respond to an absence of green as if they were seeing the presence of red.
That is why we look at the brain as a rather logical device. It reasons in precisely the way I say metaphysics reasons. Neuroanatomy finds that the best way to understand reality is dialectically. Not-green = red, and red = not-green. And by defining green~red in terms of limiting extremes in this fashion - repeating the black~white discrimination that is the more general - redness and greenness are sub-universals so far as colour vision goes (along with blue and yellow). As each others limit, they together anchor the range of colour experience we discover inbetween.
Yep. MU is suddenly now an anti-Aristotelian atomist for some reason. But to call a thing an individual is only to point to something that has been individuated, or in-formed.
There is nothing about "discrete thing", which denies that the discrete thing can be made of parts. It is a unity and a unity may have parts. That it is bounded makes it a discrete thing. It is when we look at the parts as discrete things in themselves, that we put in jeopardy the unity of the original thing. To say that the parts are discrete things requires that we assume another principle to account for unity of the original thing. So it is by this other principle, the mereological principle, that the parts make up a whole. The nature of the mereological principle is what monists and dualists disagree on.
If we deny the need for a mereological principle we end up with apokrisis' systems approach. As a whole, or as a part, are two different ways of looking at the same thing. Whether it is related to a larger thing or to smaller things, determines whether it is a part or whether it is a whole. This denies the need for a mereological principle to account for unity, but a unity is just an arbitrary designation relative to one's perspective.
Quoting Wayfarer
In Aristotelian logic, "substance" is given to the individual, the particular. Substance is at the bottom, as that which validates the universals, and therefore is the most well known, the most real. This is evident in his law of identity, which puts the foundation of the entire logical structure in the identity of the thing, the individual.
Quoting apokrisis
The problem I have with this, which I am trying to explain, is that if you place the opposing limits, within the same category, as "the continuous spectrum" which is assumed to be within that category, then these limits are not real. They are arbitrary because they are derived from what is observed as the maximum and minimum of that category. They are not derived from what is actually limiting that category. Once you allow that there is something real which is actually limiting that category, then the thing which is doing the limiting is necessarily outside of the category. Therefore the limits cannot be of the same category as the thing limited. If they were part of the same category, they wouldn't have the capacity to limit it.
I don't think that's right. Again, I think you attribute far too much significance to the notion of the individual. It was barely present in classical philosophy. Individuals only exist because they are expressions of the universal.
There’s a relevant Wikipedia entry on the principle of individuation, which says that Aristotle did regard the individual as having to be accounted for, which is why he introduced the distinction between specific and numerical unity. So Socrates is both an individual, but is also a member of a species; he is an instance of the type Man, but also an individual, although his individuality is accidental. The given citation from The Metaphysics says:
This was interpreted by Boethius to mean that things which are discrete only in number (i.e. individuals) differ only in accidental properties, or in other words, they're essentially similar.
And that actually conforms with the quote on Thomist philosophy that we discussed in the other thread:
That is why we are able to have theories in the first place! It's because when we apprehend the qualities of such and such a chemical substance, and we know the (universal) rules which govern the behaviour of its components, then we can predict that this piece of material is going to behave like such and such (which is why Greek philosophy has such seminal importance in the formation of science.)
But there's something else that needs to be spelled out here. I think you're assuming that individual particulars are real tout courte - real in their own right. But I'm sure the classical tradition didn't believe this - individuals are only real by virtue of the fact that they instantiate the universal form of which they are examples. Again, it's not an individualist philosophy. But in order to make sense of that it's necessary to understand what, exactly, is meant by 'real'. From an IETP article, 17th Century Theories of Substance, note the following:
This is a clue to why universals, numbers, ideas, and the like, were held to have a higher degree of reality than individual particulars in pre-modern philosophy. While individual things were perishable, evanescent, corruptible, the ideas which they exemplify are imperishable and if not eternal, then nearer to their eternal source than are individual particulars. Now of course this is generally rejected by moderns, in fact it's rejection is one of the hallmarks of modern philosophy. And that goes back to the realist v nominalist debates in the medieval era, in which the nominalists generally triumphed. But recall that in Aquinas, the 'rational intellect' is to all intents synonymous to 'the soul' as being the immortal part of Man, because it is that which 'sees the real', or 'what truly is'.
(Some of this is quite compatible with what Apokrisis is saying, except that he rejects the kind of theistic undertones of a 'higher intelligence', which I do not. But it is worth recalling that the Platonists did not actually understand themselves as a branch of Christian theology at all, and that their understanding of The One was later appropriated by Christianity to provide a philosophical scaffolding around which they could construct their Hebraic theology, although arguably the marriage was never that happy. That, however, is a different topic.)
Quite possible.
It follows that being a human is existentially contingent upon language. No language... no humans, according to that definition, anyway. Being existentially contingent upon language and being a language construct are not equivalent.
Muddle.
Yes. No. Maybe so.
A propensity for self-contradiction...
Call it what you want.
Why would you consider something that is made op of parts to be a unity rather than a multiplicity?
Boundaries are notoriously imprecise, so it seems we cannot rely on them to define what counts as a discrete thing. Say a discrete thing is an individual; the etymology of 'individual' is 'not divisible', and yet something made up of parts can be divided into those parts, or may even be able to be arbitrarily divided. Would you say you ceased to be an individual if I cut off your arm, for example?
I haven't read up much on mereology, but as far as I know it is a contentious field; so I'm not convinced there would be an unambiguous "mereological principle" that could be relied upon. Now I can say, for example, that my body is a unity of discrete parts, so what kind of "unity" is that, if not a functional unity? And to think of unity in functional terms would seem to be thinking in terms of systems rather than entities.
Of course we do commonly speak and think mereologically, if that is just taken to mean something like "in terms of parts and wholes". But we are here questioning whether or not that thinking, on analysis, remains unambiguous. I don't think we can fairly claim that it does.
That doesn't follow; the definition doesn't say that we became human by beginning to use language, or that we would cease to be human if language use somehow disappeared. it just says that humans are currently distinguished from other animals by the fact that they are language users. That definition doesn't rule out any number of alternative distinguishing features, that could be used to identify humanity, either.
Quote the entire argument, then explain how your objection is appropriate.
Humans are the language-using animal. No language, no using language. No using language, no language using animals. No language using animals, no humans.
It follows that humans are existentially contingent upon language. If humans are existentially contingent upon language, then being a human is as well.
QED
The objection is appropriate because that is your conclusion, whether correct or incorrect, from the "whole argument"; and thus I don't need to address the "whole argument". The conclusion is flawed for the reasons I already gave.
In other words, Aristotle may have, according to your definition of 'rational', defined humans as the language-using animal; but this can be taken as meaning 'the animal that now uses language" and need not be taken as 'the animal that always used language' or 'the animal that always will use language".
You sure about that?
;)
No reason to doubt it...
That's not what Aristotle wrote, granting that Andrew M's reporting is accurate.
It was you that concluded that the cited definition entailed "no language use, no humans". I showed you why that conclusion is erroneous.
:s
@mitchell - you might find this interesting. Meaning and the Problem of Universals, Kelley Ross.
I was granting the definition as a means to see where it led... necessarily so. Reductio ad absurdum.
The premiss is false. Humans are not the language using animal. Some humans are. Those are all matters of fact. We can look and see all for ourselves.
NO, no...what's the matter with you... they simply cease to be human. Aristotle knew that, why can't you accept it? ;)
By and large and/or ideally, humans are the "rational animal" or "langauge-using animal" (whichever you prefer) among other things: of course it doesn't follow from that that all humans are rational. So, I see nothing wrong with Aristotle's definition, however much about humanity it might leave out; and consequently I still think your conclusion that his definition is flawed is flawed.
"Humans as the language using animal" is not semantically equivalent to "the animal that now uses language".
Understand yet?
I directly addressed the original. You objected based upon something else. Thus, neither certainty nor objection is well-grounded.
So what?
I addressed what it did say.
It does say "the language using animal". It does not say "the animal that does not use language". All your examples are of not using language.
Nor is it semantically equivalent to 'the animal that has always used language' or 'the animal that will always use language'. If I am identified as the man who wears a red cap, it does not follow that I always wore a red cap, or always will wear a red cap. Say I just starting wearing the red cap last week, I was the same person before I began wearing it and will be the same when I cease. Get it now?
Quoting creativesoul
No, the examples were just to show that your conclusion certainly does not follow from Aristotle's definition that someone before they could use language or someone that was incapable of using language or lost the ability, would thereby not count as human, as you seem to think it does. Nor does it follow that humans were not humans before they could use language. You erroneously think that those things do follow, and you think that is what is wrong with Aristotle's definition. Well, as I have shown, it doesn't follow, or at least it only follows on a simplistically narrow interpretation. You surely must impute a dire stupidity to Aristotle if you think he would have thought that such a conclusion follows from his definition, or that he would have mistakenly thought that it didn't follow.
What the above calls the "idea itself", to be looked upon as a model looks to be nothing more and nothing less that one's notion and/or conception of...
Concepts are linguistic. Notions are linguistic. World Of Forms, to which we have access before birth and we are now remembering...
Fine idea, I suppose. I find no need to posit such a thing. What is clearly explained by invoking such talk? There's good reason this view has fallen out of favor.
Ideas are mind-dependent. Mind consists entirely of thought and belief(drawing mental correlations). Ideas are existentially contingent upon thought and belief. The content, however, can shed light upon that which is not. Some ideas talk about things that we discover. These things are not existentially contingent upon being discovered. These are the sorts of things that we can be fundamentally wrong about. Things that exist, as they are, prior to and after our becoming aware of them.
Thought and belief are two such things.
I agree that it is a good thing that the idea of a 'realm of forms' has fallen out of favour. I do not go to the other extremity of holding to nominalism, and saying that universals reflect only the human mind and nothing beyond that. Some people do not seem to see any alternative apart from one or the other extremity.
Didn't say it did. Didn't say it didn't. It need not follow that you always wore one, or always will. That is irrelevant to the argument made. If you are identified as the man who wears a red cap, and you are not wearing a red cap, then the identification is false.
To keep it on point...
If you are existentially contingent upon wearing a red hat, then it only follows that thought and belief are necessary for your very existence.
Red hats are existentially contingent upon thought and belief. You are existentially contingent upon red hats. You are existentially contingent upon thought and belief...
True.
Note that the position being argued does not suffer...
The same applies to humans using language; and nothing in Aristotle's definition necessitates otherwise. So, the idea that the conclusion that being human is "existentially dependent" upon using language is a corollary of Aristotle's definition is false. I've explained why, and I won't explain it again. If you don't accept it then show me where I went wrong in showing you where you went wrong.
That may be true, but nor does Aristotle's position suffer...
I mean, my point is really that, for example, whether humans are distinguished by being the only animal that uses language, or the only anthropoid with opposable thumbs and scant body hair; it does not follow that humans are existentially dependent on language, opposable thumbs or scant body hair. If they evolved to lose the opposable thumb and become covered in hair they would still be human, in other words.
You objected to my analysis, and later sided with the author. Your objection, however, was not based upon what the author said. My analysis was. The author said 'X'. I showed that 'X' suffered reductio. I further argued that 'X' was false.
You're claiming that the author's definition does not suffer from reductio. I presume you're also claiming that the author's definition is not false. Your evidence for that has been something other than the author's definition.
So...
You have not shown that the argumentative form is invalid. You have not objected to the author's definition. You have not directly addressed the argument I've offered, in terms of validity or terms of truth. Your claiming that the author's definition does not suffer a reductio. I presume you're also claiming that the author's definition is not false.
Your evidence for that is something other than the author's definition.
That's the best I can do.
Hope it helps.
****Need offering flower emoticon****
I've yet to see a complete rendition of Aristotle's definition of being a man or being a universal. I'm basing my argument upon what is at hand here.
Show me Aristotle's stuff, and we'll get past that part.
;)
I agree with all this.
If we changed the definition accordingly. Problem is, we're doing philosophy here. Changing a definition in mid-debate is a bad move, an invalid objection.
If humans are ontologically defined by using language, having opposable thumbs, and having scant body hair, then all humans use language, have opposable thumbs and have scant body hair...
Or...
The definition is wrong. Pick one. You can't have your cake and eat it too, here. Either the definition is wrong, or being human is existentially contingent upon language.
Yes, but that the author actually meant what you say he must have meant is merely your interpretation. I think I have shown that it is open to a wider interpretation.
These are flexible 'average' definitions, though. Someone could be irrational, mute, incredibly hairy and born without thumbs, and yet still be human. You are insisting upon an unnecessary rigidity of interpretation.
The definition is right as far as it goes, in other words; but exceptions must be allowed for.
See ya around.
I really don't know what else to tell you, except to read some Aristotle. Did you read the quote I put on the other thread? The individual is central to Aristotelian philosophy. From his law of identity, which refers to a thing, through "substance" which refers to the individual, through his physics, which employs matter and form to account for the fact that individual things change, through his biology which assumes the soul, to account for the existence of a living body; and his metaphysics, where he states that the important question for metaphysicians to ask, is not why is there something rather than nothing (in the general sense), but why is this thing, the thing it is, and not something else.
And as I argued in the other thread, Aristotle derived this perspective from Plato. You know Aristotle was a student of Plato. The difference is that Plato came to the importance of the individual towards the end of his life, in his later philosophy, so it forms more of a conclusion to his philosophizing, whereas Aristotle takes the importance of the individual as a starting poinmt. With Plato, all his early material focuses on universal Ideas. It's after the Republic, where he sees the need to assume "the good", that he starts to shift his attention toward the creation of individual things.
Notice first, that Plato speaks of "the good", and this is commonly misrepresented in modern presentations of Platonism, as the Idea of good, or the Form of good. You can see that this misrepresentation changes the nature of "the good" from an individual to a universal. But the good is necessarily an individual, as "the ideal". And this is the conclusion he reaches at the end of The Republic, that there is necessarily a perfection to any idea, which is the Ideal. Positing the perfect idea, the Ideal, allows that we can all have a different idea of what "just" means, while there is still, "the Ideal" idea of just, somewhere that we haven't yet grasped. This is very important, because the fact that we all have different ideas concerning things like "just", is a major problem for those who claim participation, i.e., that the idea we each have of "just" is a participation in an independent universal. How can our ideas be a participation in an independent universal when our ideas of the very same thing are so different?
Once Plato gets to the Ideal, the whole structure of idealism must be turned around, inverted. The independent Idea can no longer be conceived of as a universal, because it is necessarily a particular, the perfect, the ideal, and this is where the Neo-Platonists derive the One. For Plato though, by the end of The Republic, he proposes an Idealist structure of a double representation. There is a divine Idea, of "bed" for example, (we could say God's idea of bed), which is the perfect idea of what a bed is. The carpenter attempts to copy this ideal, with his own idea of the best bed, then proceeds to build a bed in representation. So we have two levels of representation. The human mind produces the universal, which is an attempt to represent the divine idea. what is apprehended as the perfect universal. With the use of the universals which the human beings have created, they proceed to produce individual objects. Notice how the entire structure starts and ends with individuals. The divine, "Ideal" bed is an individual. The products produced by human beings are individuals. The "universal" is a medium between these two particulars, the ideal particular, and the material particular which the human being creates.
Quoting Janus
It is dictated by the statement "something made up of parts". To call it "something" indicates that it is one, unity. if we called it a group of things, rather than "something", then it would be a multiplicity.
Look at the symbol, "5". Depending on how you choose to interpret this you could choose that it signifies one number, the number 5, which is a unity of parts, or you could choose that it signifies a multiplicity. However, the rules of interpretation which are required for mathematical proceedings. dictate that we interpret it as one unit. That is the essence of the symbol "5", that this particular multiplicity exists as one unit, represented as 5, so it is treated within mathematics as one unity. That's how it must be interpreted. If "5" were interpreted as a multiplicity, then each object within that multiplicity would have to be dealt with individually, and the mathematical process would be thwarted. So "5" represents a unity not a multiplicity, because this is what is required for proper mathematical proceedings.
Quoting Janus
I don't really see the meaning of the question here. To remove a part from a whole makes that part no longer part of the unity, but it is an individual on its own. To remove my arm from me makes me less, in size for example, as an individual, but still an individual. But my arm is also an individual now. Notice that examples like this are just exercises in interpretation. We might disagree on interpretation, so we'd have to discuss to see what exactly is meant by the example. If we have "5", and we remove "1", we then have "4", and "1". 4 is not the same as 5, but they are both unities.
Quoting Janus
That is exactly the point, just precisely what the mereological principle might be is of contention, but that does not negate the fact that one is needed to account for the existence of unities, if we are to give any unities the ontological status of real existence. That it is contentious indicates that we do not even know what a unity is. If we deny the need for such, then unities are illusions, and all we have is multiplicities. But sense information tells us that we have individual objects, unities, and they are real. Furthermore, if there is nothing real to account for unities then the assumptions of mathematics, that 5 is a unity, for example, are completely ungrounded. Unity is the basic assumption of numbers.
Quoting Janus
That what "unity" refers to , or what it is, remains ambiguous, gives a rational foundation for doubt and skepticism with respect to all mathematics, and the entire epistemological system, which is grounded in the identity of the individual. Until we know what it means to be a unity, and validate the reality of a unity, then all knowledge based in the assumption of unity (including all mathematical knowledge) can be considered to be unsound.
It makes mereology emergent rather than fundamental. So yes, ontically it gets the story the right way around. It explains how hierarchical organisation can arise in nature.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well yes. A “category” is thus unambiguously defined in terms of what it is not. Being is shaped by its complementary limits. The polar extremes create an actual range that then allows the third thing of some particular or individuated position on a spectrum of possibility.
So all ideas about things are mind dependent and some ideas about things are mind independent.
Seems legit.
I disagree with this. An arbitrary collection of disparate, unrelated things is a multiplicity, but then so is a collective of functionally interrelated things, such as for example, the human body. We say the human body is a functional unity insofar as it consists of parts that work together to achieve self-regulation. A human body is constantly changing, so it is not one and the same thing from one second to the next, Its identity is not a matter of an isolated instant presence, but is the idea of one unique ever-changing spatiotemporal activity.
How does this story work when we are talking about nature? Humans can invent notions about beds (and what use God would have for a bed is a mystery). But where is this double representation deal when it comes to an oak tree or a river?
Does the ur-oak tree and ur-river exists as a particular ideal in God’s mind? And how particular would it be, given variety seems an essential part of natural things? (Natural law always seems to have maximum generality according to scientific discovery at least.)
Then in what sense is material nature trying to make an ideal oak tree or ideal river? How is universality the medium connecting two individual representations. Does nature employ a mind when it produces its paler imitations of the divine ideal?
I have read enough of the sources to believe that your interpretation is incorrect. The law of identity doesn't have anything to do with individual identity as such, it's about logic.
Your account needs to say something exact about why fiveness can be regarded as a unity. The continuity has to be explained on logical grounds, not simply treated as a matter of mathematical fiat. A meaningless convention.
Crucial to the notion of fiveness is that it is a permutation symmetry. The five parts that compose the whole can be swapped around without making any difference to their total number. The set has cardinality but not ordinality. And fiveness, in representing pure cardinality/complete lack of ordinality, thus can become itself an ordinal part. It can be placed after fourness and before sixness.
So even when dealing with a paradigmatic conception of atomistic discreteness - the integers or whole numbers - the dialectical logic of metaphysics applies. The fundamental story is the triadic one of a symmetry breaking.
The story goes that in the beginning is some higher state of symmetry - a vagueness or firstness. Then you get a symmetry breaking - the separation towards two mutually opposed bounds of possibility. Then finally you get the arrival at some equilibrium balance - the arrival at a limit to the symmetry breaking which is itself a return to a symmetry. Like a completely thermalised gas of ideal particles, a symmetry is restored in that while the particles continue to move about freely, the changes in position no longer make a difference. They express a permutation symmetry so far as the macroscopic or universal properties of the system go.
So the arc of development is the triadic one of symmetry, symmetry breaking, arrival at a balance where breaking ceases to break and so symmetry again rules.
If we are talking about our conception of numbers, we can see how we go from some conception of absolute unbroken unity - the One - to a conception of the many, the brokenness of multiple ones, and eventually arrive at a permutation symmetry in the sense of the many sets of ones where the internal arrangement makes no difference to the macroscopic state of the set. Five is five, regardless of how it’s composing ones are shifting about and swapping places.
But then ordinality emerges as a new property of this cardinality. The symmetry can be broken by a ranking in terms of some new concept of relative size. Some permutation sets are bigger or smaller than others.
Next stop, some conception of infinity that restores a new level of symmetry, finds a limit to counting sequentially. Counting now becomes a difference that can’t make a difference. Countability just becomes a generic macroscopic property of a counting system. Talk of individual acts of counting make no more sense than worrying about the microstates of a thermalised ideal gas.
The basic point is that the capability came first (i.e., animals evolved with the capability for language/rational thought). At some later point that capability was recognized and represented in language.
For the realist about universals, that capability is real independent of whether it is represented in language. Whereas for the nominalist, that capability is real only to the extent that it is represented in language. Essentially it comes down to whether universals are considered to be discovered or created.
BTW by rational animal, Aristotle was referring to a general capability (i.e., humans are capable of acting rationally or irrationally in addition to being instinctive animals). See the Wikipedia entry for the general idea or, for a more nuanced sense, try Matthew Boyle's article, Essentially Rational Animals.
I think Ernst Cassirer's definition is also apt here:
Quoting W. J. T. Mitchell
Edit: animal symbolicum definition due to Cassirer, quote is Mitchell's.
Even in logic, it is for reasoning about the particular. It axiomatically secures the PNC and LEM.
But then how is the principle of identity itself secured, except in distinction to the notions of vagueness and generality?
So here we now have the principle of indiscernibles - the idea that there are differences that don’t make a difference. A can now equal A to the measurable degree that someone agrees nothing essential is changed by the finer detail.
A man is still a man so long as his functional unity isn’t compromised too much by a missing arm, a micro-penis, or deaf-muteness.
All through this thread, MU and creative show how badly metaphysics can go astray in presuming identity as brute fact rather than being relative to some principled degree of indifference.
Mathematical thought has no problem specifying what counts as indiscernible, as I just explained with the entropic notion of a permutation symmetry.
So there is no real excuse for perpetuating a simple minded atomism or reductionism when it comes to the laws of thought. To apply predicate logic to issues of holistic metaphysics is always going to come up short.
Metaphysics has irreducible triadic complexity for a reason. That is how an immanent nature can bootstrap into being.
Agree. A = A isn't about whether a particular instance of A 'is equal with itself', which seems absurd to me.
Again, the passage from the metaphysics that I cribbed off Wikipedia:
The passage from Thomistic psychology that I have quoted previously
So here is a statement of matter-form (hyle-morphe) dualism - the form is universal, the same in all things of similar type, in fact, what makes perception of 'similar type' possible, not to mention the ability to quantify or count.
The material difference is accidental, i.e. this particular man happens to be Socrates or Callias. The higher intellect sees the immaterial form, the lower mind receives the sensory impression.
So in my understanding, this is a clear pre-cursor to Cartesian dualism - actually you can see how Descartes derived his basic schema from this, but then radically altered it by conceiving of res cogitans as something self-existent; whereas in A-T dualism, matter and form are always part of a single whole, even if they have recognisably different aspects (although I suppose at the end of the day, it is simply 'body and soul'.)
But, intuitively, what it means is that 'nous' is 'what perceives the meaning of things ' - the faculty which sets humans apart, being able to think and communicate abstractly, as per the Cassirer quote above.
Again, you are saying the same thing. By designating it a "collection", you have declared that it is one whole, a collection. So it is fundamentally a whole. If you remove the designation of "collection", then you have a "multiplicity" and either this multiplicity is a bounded whole, or we'd have to consider that it is infinite. It's simply the way that our language works, we refer to things, wholes, and it's very difficult to get out of that paradigm, because everything then becomes unintelligible.
Quoting apokrisis
The "right way around" as you assert. But I've demonstrated to you, in a number of different ways, in a number of different threads, that your ontology is backward, because it is illogical. You put the part as prior to the whole, but this is logically impossible. It seems intuitive to you, for some strange reason, that organization has emerged from complete disarray, but this is demonstrably unintelligible.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the structure which Plato produced to explain the existence of ideas, and ideas are demonstrated to us by human beings. How Ideas relate to natural things was developed later by the Christian theologians in the theories concerning creation.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that the general sense of this would be that the Form of the individual thing exists in God's mind prior to it's material existence, such that the ideal Form is the cause of the thing's existence. This does not necessitate determinism, as God's will is free. Under these principles, which are more religious than Platonic, though they may be derived through Neo-Platonism, the material thing follows the immaterial Form of the thing, like a representation of it, and the universal, as the human conception follows the material thing as a representation. But it's complex, because human beings create things as well, and in the act of creation, the human being produces an idea or form, and the material object follows from this, just like God's creation in nature.
Quoting apokrisis
That's the way "5" is regarded in mathematics. It is the number five, a single unity. It is not regarded as "fiveness", it is regarded as a collection of five, a unit of five. If this were not the case, then 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, would have the same meaning as 5. But they do not have the same meaning, the former is five separate ones, while the latter is five united as one. So two plus three is equal to 5, but it is not the same as five. This is what I learned in grade school. Johnny has two apples, and Bobby has three apples. We describe this as a group of three (3), and a group of two (2). This is not described as five (5). But if we put them together (add them), then we have five (5). A group of three and a group of two is different from a group of 5.
The point being, that unity is implied by "5" when the symbol is used within the mathematical system. It is a mathematical fiat, but it is not meaningless convention it is a very useful convention. The fact that it is useful says something about the reality of unities.
Quoting apokrisis
You call this "crucial", but I think it's irrelevant. What is at issue is the unity. It is self-evident that the members of the unity are treated as being "equal", or the same, because what is being dealt with here are values. Because 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 are all of the same value, and the entire system is a system of values, then they are the same. But the values united, as 5, is not the same thing as the five individual values, 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 and 1. Whether the values are united as one, or they are separate, makes a difference.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you misunderstand the principle of indiscernibles. It actually indicates the exact opposite of what you claim here. It indicates that we cannot disregard any differences in our designation of identity. Because it states that if there are no differences between what appears as two distinct things, then they are necessarily one and the same thing. So we must account for all differences or else we might mistakenly identify two distinct things as one and the same thing.
Quoting apokrisis
Identity is a brute fact, that's exactly how the law of identity was stated by Aristotle, a thing is the same as itself. This means that any thing has an identity proper to itself, and this is not relative to anything.
So does God imagine trees in general, or the particular kinds of trees like oak and larch, or even each particular tree, such as all the individuals in an oak forest? Is there any limit to the particularity of his generality? Or alternatively, any limit to the generality of his particularity?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So do you think grade school philosophy of maths is sufficient for the questions raised here? Hmm, okay....
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And the reason for that unity is....some kind of continuity? They were all scattered and part, now you have collected them altogether so they can be tallied within the one act of counting? They are not a disunity. Or something like that. :P
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You meant, no essential difference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Of course it is. :)
Meaning and the Problem of Universals
Try again apo...
Mirror, mirror...
Cool. Thanks for the actual Aristotle stuff...
I'll check it out and get back with ya.
8-)
I cannot see any reason why you would think "collection" implies "one whole", whereas "multiplicity" does not.
For example take the collection ( in the sense of 'set') of things in this room; they do not form a whole in any but the associative sense that they happen to all be in this room. I could equally refer to them as ' the multiplicity of things in this room'. Multiplicities or collections need to be functional or relational unities in order to qualify as wholes.
It’s not hard to understand a constraints based approach to these hoary old chestnuts.
But I would add that universals represent the real possibility of a difference.
A universal is a generality and thus the potential for an act of particularisation or individuation. And a strong universal is talking about a dichotomous-strength difference. One that is bounded by mutually definitional limits.
A Pekingese is a dog. A dog is somewhat different from a wolf or fox, and rather more different than a rat or a cat. But the differences are weak or vague. A dog isn’t different to other animals in some absolute sense. So to call a dog a universal is rather a stretch.
A universal really ought to be speaking of properties we would predicate of being itself. The real business of metaphysics was working out the most basic possible divisions of nature - the symmetry breakings that could have got it going like discrete vs continuous, flux vs stasis, chance vs necessity, one vs many, matter vs form, etc.
It is particulars which I was talking about. I think I went through this with you on another thread. It is necessary to conclude that the Form of each individual thing precedes its material existence. This is necessary because the existence of material things is contingent. When a material thing comes into existence, we have to account for the reason why that particular thing, and not some other thing is the thing which came into existence. Therefore the Form of the thing must be prior to the thing's material existence, as the reason why the thing is what it is. It is a formulation of the principle of sufficient reason. Your metaphysics of emergence seems to oppose the principle of sufficient reason.
Quoting apokrisis.
I wouldn't equate unity with continuity at all, they seem quite incompatible. The symbol "5" refers to one discrete unit, or it means a group of 5 discrete individuals. I do not see how you can impose "continuity" on this concept.
Quoting Janus
Collection; a group of things collected together. Multiplicity: a great number. Whole: all there is, entire, complete. Do you see how "collection" implies a finite group, with completion to that group, a whole. All there is of that group is in that collection. On the other hand, "multiplicity" implies no such wholeness, or completion, it may even be infinite.
Quoting Janus
Of course the collection forms a whole, it is the whole of "things in this room", all there is, entire, complete. Any set is a whole, by definition. Here's what Wikipedia says is Cantor's definition of set:
"A set is a gathering together into a whole of definite, distinct objects of our perception [Anschauung] or of our thought—which are called elements of the set."
Quoting Janus
Yes, you could equally say that there is a multiplicity of things in the room, but that is to say something completely different. As a collection, or "set", the things in the room are referred to as one object. As a multiplicity, the things in the room are referred to as numerous objects.
I'm focussing on the sense in which logical laws, real numbers, and so forth, comprise the laws of thought. They dictate or are constitutive of our ability to understand. The mistake is to then believe that therefore that they're existing things. They're not existent as phenomena - number can only be grasped by a mind capable of counting, but is the same for any such mind. That's why I think what is 'intelligibly real' is different to what is 'empirically real'. So it would be a mistake to say that the objects of mathematics are phenomenal objects; they're actually 'noumenal objects', i.e. real objects of thought.
In a recent discussion about objectivity as the criterion for 'what is truly the case', it occured to me that you have to be numerate to work out what is objectively the case. In other words, arriving at an objective result relies on numerical analysis to derive the generalised picture of whatever object of analysis you're dealing with. But numerical analysis is not objective insofar as it is purely deductive. You can validate your calculations against the results, but the calculations themselves are purely logical or deductive. And often enough a deductive result might even reveal some imperfection in the experimental set-up or the way the results were interpreted, again showing the predictive traction that mathematics provides.
It seems to me a valid distinction and a way of focussing on what the debate is about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So are you saying that the form in God’s mind is always completely particular?
Seems that this leads to more than a few problems regarding change - Janus’s point about the fact you are materially different every day.
Or else that is one hell of a helicopter parent you are imagining there.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again as Janus reminds, continuity of function or purpose seems a trivially obvious reply.
Regarding the essay...
Self-contradiction on page 7. In defending Aristotle's definition of "man", the author says this...
With this prima facie point, I agree. Since Aristotle set forth his own criterion for what counts as the 'kind' of definition in question, a charitable reading would grant that he would meet his own criterion of what it is to be a "man", and would also realize that being rational is insufficient.
However, on the same page much closer to the bottom, while attempting to justify another point, the author then states the following...
Well, not according to Aristotle. If it is the case, as the author suggested, that Aristotle held that being rational was unique to man, then that alone is all the evidence we need to know that either Aristotle did not mean to include other animals, or his position contained inherent self-contradiction(incoherence).
That problem is fatal for the author's project. However, it is an interesting article and I'm going to finish reading it. It may have material worthy of a topic in it's own right, Actually, the groundwork(brief summary at the beginning) piqued my interest significantly...
This dubiously presupposes a completeness that is later represented. I would strongly argue that being rational in the way humans are cannot be successfully argued for in such terms if we take the relevant everyday facts into consideration.
Everyday fact bears witness to quite the contrary.
Thought and belief are accrued. Human rationality, if it is to include all that the ancients wanted it to include, is very complex. Thought and belief are accrued. At conception, we are utterly, completely, and totally void of all thought and belief. That is a true conclusion that is grounded upon what everyday facts show, and thus prove to anyone willing to look. Thought and belief are accrued.
It cannot be the case that thought and belief are accrued if it is also the case that the thought and belief necessary for being rational in the way that humans are is complete in it's capability and/or potential at birth, or at conception.
Thought and belief are accrued.
For me, Aristotle's definition of "man" as being a rational animal is real solely in terms of it's efficacy. A vein of thought for another time.
Quite frankly, the capability just isn't there. Being rational, in the human sense described in the links I've read, requires being able to think about one's own thought and belief. Embryos cannot. Infants cannot. Thinking about one's own thought and belief requires having it, being able to identify it, then isolate it in order to then talk about it. Being rational, in the sense that humans are rational, is not the capability of an infant solely by virtue of just being human. It is not a capability of an infant at all. Being able to rationalize as humans do is the capability of being rational.
Being rational is existentially contingent upon being able to think about one's own thought and belief. Being able to think about one's own thought and belief requires written language(per argument in preceding paragraph). Humans are clearly incapable of being rational in all the ways humans are rational until we have a baseline upon which to take an account of the world and/or ourselves. That baseline is our first worldview, and it is almost entirely adopted.
We first look into and at the world, including ourselves, via adopted lens.
That bit of Aristotle doesn't warrant belief.
Well. I guess there's nothing more to say then, since I don't interpret those terms the way you apparently do.
Grant the terms. See them through. Talk about the consequences. Compare them. Further scrutinize them.
Don't be coy. What's point would you like to make about those ?
I would say that this is a conclusion which must be made, the divine Forms are particular, as property of one divine mind, and they are present to us as particular things. And this is consistent with the notion of perfection and completeness which is commonly assigned to God. Also, it is consistent with Aristotle's law of identity, that an object has a perfection which is proper to itself.
Quoting apokrisis
There is no problem with change, in fact this perspective makes change very intelligible. The theological conception of time is quite different from that of physics because it focuses on the importance of the present, and "what is". The will of God is necessary to support the existence of material things, at each moment of passing time.
The reality of free will, and what you call the degrees of freedom which you assign to the future, indicates that there is no necessary continuity between the observed material existence of the past (physical constraints), and what will exist in the future. In principle, any material existence can be changed at any moment in time, by an immaterial power such as the mind. This indicates that the entire material universe must be created anew at each moment of passing time. That there is consistency in this "creating anew at each moment", with the appearance of continuity, is described as inertia.
In physics, inertia is taken for granted, but this is inconsistent with your assumption of degrees of freedom. So one or the other must be dismissed as an ontological misrepresentation. Either the degrees of freedom are not real, or inertia cannot be taken for granted. Under the theological representation, inertia must be supported at each moment of passing time by the will of God.
Quoting apokrisis
I didn't understand Janus' remarks about functionality, and I still don't. You say that its trivially obvious, but I don't see how one can conclude continuity from functionality. It appears like the claim is that if there is functionality then there is continuity, but I don't see the relationship. Perhaps you can explain.
Quoting Janus
I already knew that this was the case. It was evident. I took my definitions directly from the Oxford dictionary though, so you may want to consider the possibility that you misunderstand these concepts. However, I know it is very likely that you could find some definitions to support your interpretation, so the misunderstanding is on my side as well. What does this indicate about the supposed existence of these concepts?
OK, for 'multiplicity' Oxford has:A large number or variety
For ;collection': A group of things or people
I can see where you are coming from insofar as 'multiplicity' is (or at least can be) less specific than 'collection'. This is shown by the fact that we can say "There is multiplicity in nature"; we can speak of 'multiplicity' or 'a multiplicity', whereas we cannot speak of 'collection' unless it is treated as a verb. So, if I say "There is a mutliplicity of objects in my room" it doesn't seem any different in meaning or in what it implies than saying "there is a collection of objects in my room", because both are referring to a precisely specific group of objects. On the other hand, it seems more appropriate and suggestive of unity to say of the human body, as an example of organic unity, that it is a multplicity, than it does to say of it that it is a collection.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Concepts are certainly not rigid in their meanings or implications. This fact seems to lead to the conclusion that Platonic Ideas, the Form of the Good, the Form of Beauty and the Forms of Tree, Horse, Man and so on, are incoherent, because they are the ideas of specific forms of the general, and this doesn't seem to make sense if generalizations cannot be rigidly defined. (Particulars cannot be rigidly defined either, but at least they can be apprehended and precisely referred to). When it comes, then, to the idea of particular forms; I can only parse that idea in terms of 'eternal counterparts to temporal forms'. And in this connection I would say that if there were such forms, then the eternal form of any individual existent would have to be the eternal form of its whole temporal history, of its entire existence through time.
Perhaps this could be related to Einstein's 'block' theory of time and other 'eternalist' views.
So this divine mind, is it the bit that is continuous? :-O
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But inertial motion is a degree of freedom. So a particle is defined by having six degrees of freedom - three of translational momentum and three of angular momentum.
As I said in my first reply on this issue, you can use "multiplicity" in a similar way as "collection", but this just means that you are using each to refer to a whole. What we are discussing is the difference between referring to a number of distinct things, as distinct things, and referring to them as one whole. So we can refer to a multiplicity of objects in your room, or a collection of objects in your room, and the meaning is very similar. We are referring to a whole, all the objects in your room. It is the clearly defined boundaries of "objects in your room", which turns this collection, or multiplicity (however you want to call it) into one single object, a unity, or whole.
What was at issue is the principle of mereology which would be utilized here. We determine a defining feature, a principle whereby we differentiate these objects to be classed together, from those objects to be left aside, and this defining feature gives us "an object" which is the collection, or unity, the whole.
Quoting Janus
In this case, you are speaking about the human body as a unity. The principle of mereology which would be utilized here would be quite different because the things which we sense as a distinct objects, are naturally referred to as objects, wholes, or unities because that's how we sense them. So we call an object a whole, or a unity, because we sense it that way, so that becomes our principle of mereology. But when we sense objects as distinct objects, then we need a principle by which we class them together, such as "the objects in your room", and it is by this principle that they are considered to be a whole.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know. So far the idea of continuity has not been grounded. We really haven't agreed at all on a definition. You think it's at the opposite end of the spectrum from discrete, I think it is categorically different from discrete. It appears like continuity is some sort of assumption. We can think up this idea of continuity, so we figure that there must be something which corresponds to it.
On the other hand, the divine mind is brought in out of necessity, to account for what we experience as existence at the present. If we can establish an association between this, and the idea of continuity, then we might be able to say that the divine mind is the bit that is continuous, or at least related to continuity. This would depend on whether we assume any continuity involved with the passing of time, and if so, how we would relate the passing of time to continuity. Under the assumptions of the last post, it is impossible that the temporal existence of material objects at the present is continuous. It may be the case that the passing of time itself is continuous though, but this would require a separation between the passing of time and material existence, such that the passing of time would be independent of material existence. Then the divine mind might be associated with the passing of time. The divine mind seems to be other than the passing of time though, so if one of these is "the bit that is continuous, the other is probably not.
Quoting apokrisis
Since inertial motion is completely defined by past constraints, and "degrees of freedom" is how you refer to the future, I do not see how inertial motion is at all consistent with any degree of freedom.
Rationality is the ability to ‘see reason’ - to make inferences, to say ‘because of this, then that must be the case’, to say that ‘this means that’, or ‘this equals that’. Being able to think about one’s own thought might require that, but I don’t believe it’s the definition of rationality. That is self-awareness, which is related, but not the same.
Reason is not contingent on language, so much as language is contingent on the ability to abstract. Apokrisis said that language might become established as ‘a habit of reference’ which might well be so - but hierarchical syntax is a step beyond pointing and making a sound about something. But then you’re into the whole discipline of evolutionary linguistics, which is a vast subject area. Here I think we’re actually talking about a very general point.
So one of us has defined it by grounding it as the opposite of the discrete or the divided - the standard dictionary definition, as it happens.
The other of us says it is "categorically different", but can offer no good reason for that claim.
I say let's call this an honourable draw. >:O
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, you might not see it, but it's a definitional position in mechanics.
As I explained, defining a thing with its opposite doesn't ground it. We need to refer to something outside the category to give it meaning. That's the point I was bringing to your attention when I first engaged you in this thread. Defining cold as the opposite of hot, and hot as the opposite of cold, does not tell us what it means to be either hot or cold.
So, we've looked at all sorts of things which all seem to have discrete existence. In fact, as I was explaining to Janus, to be a thing is to be discrete. So, are you arguing that to be continuous is to be nothing, or that there is nothing which is continuous?
Quoting apokrisis
Damn! I was under the false impression that you were reading my posts.
My position is that reason comes in grades of semiosis. So animals are reasoning creatures because the brain is organised by the kind of dichotomous principles that break the world down "intelligibly". The neurology of animals with brains exhibits a basic kind of reasonableness just in things like the opponent channel processing of the visual pathways. In Gestalt fashion, brains are designed to break the experience of the world into events vs contexts - create a rational view that sees the world as a collection of definite objects or entities.
The evolution of language then provided humans with another level of semiosis. A structure of grammar and cultural habit could be imposed on the neurology of the animal brain. We could start to see "a world of objects" through the lens of a collective social history. But traditional cultures aren't "rational" in the sense we mean by the kind of rationality which gets positively taught in modern literate society. The reasoning of the peasant can seem curious to a person educated in "the proper way to think".
And so rationality - in it most modern exalted sense - is the product of still higher grades of semiosis.
First the transition from oral to textual culture is a big step up. Writing forces a much greater rigour on speech acts in terms of tight and complete grammatical structure. Writing has to be able to bring to mind everything that is not actually present for the reader. So literacy has a big impact on "the habit of rationality".
Then after that comes the invention of logical and mathematical levels of semiosis. A new completely symbolic or abstract kind of language with a grammar to match. To be rational now means to think mechanically, in utterly constrained fashion - no room for vagueness or allusion. Ideas are constructed from arrangements of elements. Each step in an argument is as absolute as a computation.
So the definition of humans as reasoning animals does get at a major fork in the road - the huge departure that was the human evolution of articulate speech.
But because semiosis is always "reasonable", neuro-semiosis is a recognisably rational process. It is fundamentally dialectic. It is fundamentally "scientific" in being the production of beliefs which are held because they are measurably useful in achieving an organism's purposes.
So animals are rational in their simpler way too.
But then for the majority of their existence, humans weren't rational in the literate and logic-grammar sense. That is yet a further level of reasoning that only began to emerge 3000 years ago.
So if we want to define Homo sapiens in terms of a distinctive evolutionary break, it would be animal+language rather than animal+reason.
Once humans started painting pictures on walls, wearing bear claw necklaces and daubing themselves in ochre, then they had become symbolically organised social creatures. They were reasonable at a collective socio-cultural level of semiosis. They were using signs to take a shareable view of a "world of objects".
Your false impression would be that you made sense.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are just trying to say that categories are monistic. I am pointing out that categories arise via triadic development.
And yes, mine is an internalist or immanent approach. That is the whole bleeding point.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I've already said hot and cold are pretty weak as a "dichotomy". They are too symmetric and don't speak to some deeper asymmetry.
A strong definition of temperature is one that is concretely bounded. So a kinetic theory of temperature defines heat in terms of motion. From quantum theory, we can then see that motion is bounded by its contrary extremes of the Planck temperature or energy density, and the absolute zero which is the Heat Death or the "empty as possible" vacuum.
So physics understands temperature as a bounded spectrum. Opposing the hot and the cold is at least a start on getting to the root of the story. And now physics can define reality in terms of being bounded by the asymptotic limits of the absolutely hot and the absolutely cold.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Damn! I was under the false impression that you were reading my posts.
Check back and you will see that a proper notion of "an object" is that it is continuous with itself and discrete from the world. So the absolute separation from the world is the logical source of being able to claim the matching fact that the object is absolutely continuous with itself.
This was illustrated by the duality of cardinality and ordinality. The one act secures both aspects. To the degree that an object is discrete from the world, it is continuous with itself and thus obeys your precious law of identity.
And then Janus pointed out how the category of the discrete~continuous connects to the category of the material~formal.
In the four causes Aristotelian view, formal cause is about constraint - the regulating presence of some enduring tendency, function or purpose. So organisms are defined as wholes rather than mere sets of parts because they are glued together by a common purpose. They have a generality or continuity that is real in being actually causal. That is why Aristotle could claim his hylomorphic substantialism. Form wasn't all accident. The glue of a purpose is what is essential to the continuity that makes anything an actual substance.
It boggles that you claim to be any kind of Aristotelian. You seem to have gone way past even Medievalist revisionism in your theistic wildness.
The point was that what you said was not true. There were other things to do, despite the fact that you and Meta work from different senses of key terms. I mentioned them.
Note, that I was working from Aristotle's notion of being rational, which stresses that humans are the only rational beings. That would mean that being rational in the way that humans are requires the ability to rationalize in all the various ways that humans do.
I reject Aristotle's ill-conceived notion of being rational - in addition to the earlier objections - for it doesn't draw and maintain the crucial distinction between thought and belief and thinking about thought and belief. It is grounded by an inadequate understanding of what thought and belief consist of... their 'ontology', if you like. Looks like most of Western philosophy followed...
Reason - as and/or on a whole - most certainly is. However, the attribution/recognition of causality is not.
A dichotomy is not a category.
Can you please supply the argument and all the working out that supports your conclusion. :-}
Meanwhile, just consider that there has to be some good reason why the philosophy of maths has settled on category theory - the dichotomy of structures and morphisms - as the fundamental basis of mathematical thinking.
I can see that you, like MU, are exercised about identifying the oneness, the inherent continuity, that permits one to speak of "a category" in the monistic singular.
Well stretch your grey matter a bit and you will understand the triadic story I've been providing.
What a dichotomy does is provide a singular definition of some spectrum of possibility, or a metaphysical-strength degree of freedom - that is, some axis or dimension along which reality could be measured.
So if you have the discrete~continuous as a dichotomy, that narrows down the messiness of existence to a fairly singular spectrum of "the possible". Possibility is now measured in terms of what lies in between these two bounding extremes. Possibility is in fact particularised in being made describable according to a particular view of one of actuality's definite categories of variety.
So discrete~continuous is a reduction of vague potential to some singular definite dimension of categorical generality. It is a particular slice across existence that encompasses then a spectrum of possible particulars.
Other metaphysical-strength dichotomies look to do the same thing from some different angle. Different categories of possibilities are revealed. Like the spectrum or measurable dimension that could exist between absolute chance and absolute necessity, or absolute one-ness and absolute multiplicity.
So in fact a dichotomy IS how metaphysical categories get defined. A category is a generality that speaks to single dimension of "acceptable" variety. It is a dimension along which open particularity gets suitably constrained.
OK, so lets take this as an example then. Heat is defined in terms of motion, so to be hot is like having lots of motion, and having less motion is to be less hot, or colder. Now hot and cold refer to the different degrees of motion.
Now, I want a real dichotomy, not just opposing terms referring to different degrees (hot and cold) within the same category (motion), but a real dichotomy. So I have to oppose heat, which is motion, to what is other from it, and this is rest. Now I have a real dichotomy, motion and rest. All the degrees of heat, which are described by hot and cold are placed in the category of motion. Do you see the need for the category of rest, in order that we can account for the reality of things that stay the same through time? Isn't this what continuous means, staying the same through time, not changing?
Quoting apokrisis
I know that this is how "physics" understands these things, but we're discussing philosophy here, specifically ontology. Physics only deals with the physical, and this is why we need to go beyond physics, to metaphysics, in order to relate this category of things which physics deals with (motion), to reality as a whole. You seem to want to pigeonhole all of reality into this one category "what physics understands", with total disregard for the obvious fact that physics is a very limited field of study in relation to the vast whole of reality.
Quoting apokrisis
Janus already suggested this, that an object is continuous within itself, but it is obvious that an object is made of discrete parts, and the parts even overlap each other, and with other objects, so it is clear that an object is not continuous within itself. And, it is quite obvious that there can be no absolute separation of an object from the world, so I don't know how you could even suggest such a thing. If you are suggesting a temporal continuity, then we have the issues of my last couple of posts to deal with.
Quoting apokrisis
I've read most of Aristotle's material, and I never saw anything about an object being glued together by a common purpose. I think maybe that's something you are just making up. And you need to make this up because you refuse to respect the difference between formal cause and final cause. Are you saying that all the components of my computer are glued to together by the common purpose of being a computer? Sure, my computer was built with intent, or purpose, but it is not the intent, which holds the parts together. Intent, or purpose, may be influential in inspiring a person to put parts together into a unity, but it is clearly not the glue which holds the parts together.
Quoting apokrisis
I really don't claim to be Aristotelian, though I am very familiar with his work, as well as the work of others.
Thanks for explaining back to me my own argument. But why did you then tack on your wrong conclusion.
So yes, a more fundamental and well formed dichotomy is that of stasis~flux. Or absolute rest vs absolute motion.
Thus if we are talking about kinetics, temperature has this asymmetric direction. There is the spectrum of possible states that are anchored at the two ends of maximum physical action (the Planck heat) and minimum physical action (absolute zero).
The Cosmos then has a dimension of time as there is an irreversible directionality that points from one end of the spectrum - the creation that is the Big Bang - towards its eternal other, the matching timelessness that is the finality of the Heat Death. The Cosmos is a story of absolute change being constrained so as to become absolute unchanging rest by the end of time, thus expressing the Comos's continuity of purpose.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps you ought to brush up on Cosmology 101. You will see that metaphysics is seen as foundational to the physics.
(This really is an excellent introductory site).... http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/
It's a sufficient criterion if humans are the only rational animals. If it were recognized in other animals (say, as a consequence of future evolution), then it would then become necessary to differentiate those rational animals from our own species.
Quoting creativesoul
Exercised rationality is how we come to recognize it. But the definition describes the kind of animal a human is, and is not negated by the developmental stage any particular human is at or whether their capabilities are currently being exercised.
As a similar case, consider the uncontroversial claim that humans are bipeds. Yet initial human embryos don't have two legs and neither does an adult that has had their legs amputated.
There are two points for you to consider. First, in saying that there was nothing further to be said it's possible that I was simply expressing my feeling, rather than presenting a propositional claim. Even if it were a propositional claim it's truth would be contingent upon whether or not the differences between our interpretations were ineradicable or could be modified such as to produce reconciliation sufficient to allow for engaged dialogue. Meta's subsequent reply convinced me that there was enough flexibilty in his interpretations to make it worthwhile engaging in further conversation.
I see you just want to repeat the same mistake with different terms. We seem to agree on this dichotomy of motion and rest. Now you want to refer to these as "the two ends of maximum physical action". But all "physical action", including what you call the two maximums, are by definition, within the category of motion. No type of action qualifies as rest. Are you prepared to recognize that rest is completely different from "physical action", and discuss what type of things might be in the category of rest, or are you satisfied with your category error, and contradictory claim that rest is an extreme type of motion?
So if discrete parts can overlap each other, then you have an interesting definition of "discrete" - one that seems to mean "continuous" as well.
But anyway, the reason mereology fails is that - as a hierarchical account - it is merely taxonomic and doesn't speak to an Aristotelian systems causality.
So in hierarchy theory proper, parts are shaped by wholes. Parts are formed by a functional constraints. Complexity develops by actually producing the simpler parts from which it can be constructed.
An example is bricks. To make construction simple, we shape sloppy and shapeless mud into dry and regular units. The functional constraint of desiring to build a house as easily as possible leads towards the shaping of the most suitable possible part - the repeating unit of a rectangular brick.
So a proper understanding of hierarchical causality sees parts as being emergent along with wholes. The functional desire expressed by the whole is what selects for the right kind of parts to construct that whole.
As I said earlier, a semiotic/process perspective on Being sees it as being about formal certainty regulating material instability. Global information causes local possibility to hang together as enduring structure.
This is the deal that hierarchy theory - based on Aristotelian four causes - recognises.
Mereology is a compositional hierarchy - the view from logical atomism. It's not a metaphysically interesting model.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Err...a house made of bricks?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, when you go to the shop and buy one, isn't that rather your hope? Do you instead go to the counter and ask for various quantities of transistors and wires and LEDs? You carry home a bucket of parts and then proudly tell everyone you have a new computer?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I see. You want to be so literal about "glue" that you mean actual glue - the material/efficient cause for how to discrete things became one continuous thing?
Have fun with your careful misunderstandings!
At which point, they began to wonder.
Discrete things overlap each other all the time, but that doesn't make them continuous.
Quoting apokrisis
You said that purpose is the glue which holds the parts together to make the unity of a whole. If you didn't mean by "glue", the substance by which the parts are untied and held together, then what did you mean? The parts must be united by something, if it's not a substance like glue, and it's simply "purpose", then why didn't you simply say that purpose holds the parts together? You didn't say that because you know that it's nonsense. So you had to add that purpose is a "glue", because "glue" implies substance, and you know that there must be something substantial which holds parts together. Are you saying that purpose is a substance, like a glue, which unites parts to make a whole?
Err, inaction?
Remember inertia? The first derivative of motion? The big deal is that "rest" isn't actually not going anywhere. It is simply a relative lack of motion. A mass can spin or move in a straightline inertially. And it can appear to lack any action if pinned down by an inertial frame. But relativity means that there is no absolute frame which can underwrite a state of absolute rest. If you are moving inertially along with the object you mean to measure, you will both seem at rest. But even Galilean relativity says "seems" is the operative word. Rest is an idea that can be approached, but never absolutely, only relatively, achieved.
Quantum mechanics then tells us that every "resting object" has an uncertainty in terms of its position and momentum (that good old basic dichotomy!). QM tells us that even the empty vacuum has a zero point energetic jitter.
So in the actual physics of action, your presumptions about "rest" being anything else than an asymptotic limit on action is archaic metaphysics.
Then the other side of the coin is that absolute action - the opposite of rest - is bounded too. Nothing goes faster than c. Nothing can be hotter or more energy dense than the Planck-scale limit. The Planck constant, h, defines the fundamental quantum of action.
So post-classical physics is based on the discovery that existence sits suspended between two extremes - absolute action and absolute rest. Together, these are the limits of reality and so can themselves never be achieved.
If you want to keep playing word games, go ahead. But physics confirms my metaphysics in this discussion.
In some ways I understand it better than you...
Study a bit of Davidson.
The definition of man as being rational is not negated if man is not rational?
For the same reasons, being a featherless biped is insufficient for being a human.
Would you also say the claim that "humans are bipeds" is false?
This I take as a mistake, to define rest as a relative lack of motion, because it doesn't provide a real descriptive limit to motion. Now the concept of "inertia" for you is derived from motion, but as I explained already, "inertia" for me is derived from an observed temporal continuity of existence, a lack of change. You have no approach to this concept of lack of change from which the concept of inertia was really derived, because you define inertia as a derivative of motion. But your definition is mistaken, because the basic assumption involved with "inertia" is that things will stay the same, unless forced to change, and this assumption is then applied to motion. It is not derived from motion.
Quoting apokrisis
This betrays your closed minded, physicalist attitude. You are claiming that any assumption of the reality of anything other than what is demonstrated by "the actual physics of action" is "archaic metaphysics".
The issue which you are not paying attention to, is that any description of "the actual physics of action" which we may produce, is necessarily derived from fundamental, foundational assumptions, which act as real limitations to those descriptions. The descriptions produced are "derived" from the fundamental assumptions, they are not derived from the "actual actions". That's the way logic, and the human mind works, our descriptions are limited by the words we know and the ideas we associate with them.. We, as human beings, have no capacity to go beyond these fundamental assumptions in our descriptions, and so they provide the real limitations on our descriptions. The things being described provide no real limitations to our descriptions, as is evident from the fact that we can make false descriptions.
So, you mistakenly assume that the concept of inertia is derived from actual motion, when it is really derived from an assumption of rest, the foundational assumption that things will continue to exist in an unchanged way, as time passes. Now you have no approach toward understanding this foundational assumption, because you have excluded it from your conceptual structure by associating inertia with motion. And you support this conceptual structure with your foundational assumption that anything outside of this conceptual structure is "archaic metaphysics", which ought to be ignored.
Yup. Some are. Some are not. That's the issue I see. Not enough precision in the claims...
Notably, with regard to Aristotle, an impoverished notion of being rational.
Inertia is a positive quality - a resistance to change. So rest is the potential for a reaction to an action. Push a rock to get it to roll and it pushes right back.
But even if you just want to make the dichotomy the difference between passive and active, or static and changing, or inert and vigorous, it’s still about a dichotomy that defines some particular categorical spectrum of possibility in every case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are simply whinging about the fact that Aristotelian physics proved wrong and got corrected by Newtonian mechanics.
The idea that things could be at rest had to be extended to include inertial motion.
But even archaic physics was based on metaphysical dichotomies. The opposed motions of gravity and levity being a prime example.
Ok, so "passivity" does not refer to something which matter is prior to being acted on, it refers to how matter will react when being acted on. See, you are defining everything in relation to action, saying what passivity would be like if it were active. It would be reactive. You give yourself no means for describing what passivity is during that time when it is what it is, passive, i.e. not being acted upon, and not reacting. So passivity is the potential for action. What do you think it means to be capable of reacting?
Quoting apokrisis
The point is, that you have the wrong idea of what a dichotomy is. A dichotomy is a division, a separation. You instead, unite the two defining terms of the dichotomy by claiming that what these two terms refer to are the two extremes of the same thing. So a dichotomy is not a division to you, it is the means by which two terms which would normally exclude each other in reference, are united in the same category. That is because your monist faith will not allow you to conceive of real ontological separation.
You are distressed because your ontology likes to presume a world of passive and stable existence. But the evidence from nature itself is contrary. As Peircean semiosis recognises, existence arises as the regulation of fundamental uncertainty or spontaneity. The basis of existence is instability. Then formal cause - the emergence of constraints or habits of regulation - is what stabilises being so that it appears to become eventually a realm of classical passivity.
So you get your desired passivity. But only at the end of time. And even then, it is only a relative passivity. There is still going to be a quantum scale thermal jitter at the Heat Death of the universe.
Thus in my ontology, passivity is an emergent quality. It is always relative to the more fundamental state of agitation that is a quantum Cosmos.
Then when it comes to the action~reaction dichotomy that accounts for motion in a (Galilean) relative fashion, inertia is also an emergent property. It treats constant velocity or constant angular momentum as the fundamental symmetries of spacetime. Ground zero is a mass moving freely at a steady rate - all impressed forces being equilibrated or in balance. And thus now it is being disturbed from an inertial state of motion which defines "an action" - either an acceleration, or dichotomously, a deceleration.
And mass is a measure of how fast the rate of an object's inertial motion can be changed. Its "resistance" to change is a measure of its "massiveness". The relation is a reciprocal one. Massiveness is like a quantity of elasticity which introduces a temporal delay. You have to push for longer to get the same amount of change in velocity.
Passivity is really a capacity for inactivity. And a massive object at relative rest has the greatest capacity for inaction. After all, at rest it has the least measurable mass as well as the least measurable velocity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Look it up. A dichotomy is a relation that is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
There is the division that is the mutual exclusion - and even that is a connection in being mutual. And there is that same togetherness in thatjointly they exhaust all other possibilities.
One or other alone does nothing. Only when each properly opposes its other, in a perfect binary fit that excludes all others, can it properly be considered a dichotomy. It's Dialectics 101.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
My faith, such as it is, would have to be triadic. You may have heard me mention that once or twice.
Precision isn't the issue. The issue is about what interpretive rule to apply to statements like the above which are termed generics (SEP). Some interesting points from these slides:
I think the interpretive rule here is that the truth or falsity of "humans are bipeds" isn't dependent on whether there are defective or incomplete instances of the type, but instead on whether there is a non-accidental (or essential) connection between humankind and the property of being bipedal.
No, I don't presume that. I understand that some things change and some things do not. I do not presume that world the consists exclusively of either one of these. I accept dualism as the only coherent understanding of reality.
Quoting apokrisis
It is evident that some things remain the same, and we do not have to wait until the end of time to observe this.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, so it appears like you do not know what "mutually exclusive" means. How are rest and motion mutually exclusive when you define rest as a minimal degree of motion? .
Hmm. Will you ever master this tricky notion of reciprocal limits I wonder?
Rest would be minimal motion, and motion would be minimal rest.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Given that the Universe is now scrapping along at less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, you are observing Being towards the end of time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Oh well, with dualism at least you are halfway there. :)
We were discussing dichotomies, not reciprocal limits. And your attempt to turn dichotomies into reciprocal limits is misguided. .
Quoting apokrisis
Right, so rest and motion are clearly not mutually exclusive when defined in this way. Therefore this is not a dichotomy as per the definition of dichotomy which you provided.
Dichotomies are reciprocal limits on possibility regardless of whatever you might pretend to be discussing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
They are mutually excluding.
So I’m taking an active dynamical or process view of ontology, while you want to believe in some theistic eternality where existence is some god-given brute fact. Where you think in terms of nouns, I am thinking in terms of verbs.
Quoting apokrisis
You're not making sense. You defined dichotomy as "a relation that is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". Then you described "reciprocal limits" in a way in which they clearly were not mutually exclusive. Rest is said to be minimal motion, and motion is said to be minimal rest. So it is very clear that your statement "dichotomies are reciprocal limits" is contradictory. Reciprocal limits are not mutually exclusive, but dichotomies are.
Furthermore, as I argued earlier, your reciprocal limits are not jointly exhaustive, because they do not allow for the real limits.
What could be more minimal than zero?
You weren't talking about zero, you were talking about asymptotic limits.
The logic of dichotomies is apophatic. We are talking about reality - definite somethingness. The limit on reality is then where things stop being real. And if limits didn’t come in matched pairs, there would be nothing in-between to be real either.
Your approach demands that limits are what exist. And singularly. That’s obviously crazy.
Too bad the limits on what you can say couldn't stop you at the point where you stopped making sense. You know, if the limits aren't real and existent, then they are completely arbitrary with no real constraint; like what you've just said, completely arbitrary with no constraint in relation to reality.
Sounds legit.
Until we have an adequate way of distinguishing between what is real, and what is not, I don't see any point in worrying about where reality comes to end. You could proceed far beyond the limits of reality without even noticing the difference. As you've demonstrated.
Knowledge cannot be false. Belief can be false. You're conflating knowledge with belief.
The truth or falsity of "humans are bipeds" is wholly and completely determined by whether or not humans are bipeds. Not all humans are.
As this pertains to the thread...
Aristotle emphasized that humans were the only rational beings. Being rational, according to Aristotle, included all different sorts of reasoning. Some of those are very complex metacognitive endeavors. Infants are not capable. Infants are humans. Not all humans are capable of being rational in all of the different ways that humans are rational.
Potential leads to a reductio, special pleading, or piles of being rational...
As mentioned before... the problem here is most certainly one of imprecision/inadequacy. The commonsense belief you speak of is false as is Aristotle's definition statement of "man". The falsity of both are the result of following from (mis)conceptions.
A very young child can learn that touching fire hurts. It does so by virtue of attributing causality. It draws a correlation between it's own actions and the pain that follows. The child forms true thought and belief about touching fire, despite it's inability to tell us about it. It's refusal to touch fire again shows that such non-linguistic belief formation can leave quite an impression.
In that way that child is rational.
If Aristotle held that that and that alone constituted being rational, then there would be no issue with Aristotle's notion and the facts reported upon above. However, Aristotle's notion of rational must be determined solely by virtue of all the different ways he claimed that 'men' are rational. Some of those ways are existentially contingent upon language. Some are not(per the fire example above). Not all of the ways that humans are rational is exclusive to being human.
Other beings can recognize/attribute causality in the same way as the child in the above example. That is particularly the case when another being is in the same set of circumstances.
The truth or falsity of 'A is B' isn't dependent upon this A or that A being B... No. No. No.
Rather... those A's.
Those are the ones that help make "Some A's are B" true and "A's are B's" false.
There’s your problem. You actually write as if you understand the meaning, or the basis, of rationality, as if you have a theory which accounts for it, which I don’’t think you’ve at all demonstrated.
But the deeper point, of the sense in which reason is dependent on //language//, is also incorrect, I believe. I think you’re super-imposing evolutionary naturalism over the top of Aristotelian logic. In fact it denotes the inability to argue Aristotelan logic on its own terms.
//I had mis-typed the above as 'logic' due to entering text via an iPhone//
I've granted Aristotle's terms Jeep. I've subsequently argued for why his conceptions are wrong. You would be correct in saying that I work from a few premisses that work within a methodological naturalism framework. That's irrelevant to what's being argued.
If one who believes that "men are rational beings" is true later admits that not all men are, then s/he is forced to deal with learning that their own belief is self-contradictory, incoherent, and just plain false.
If "all men are rational beings" is true, then "not all men are rational beings" is not(and vice-versa). They are mutually exclusive. They are negations of one another. "Men are rational" is true if, and only if, it is the case that all men are rational.
Quoting Wayfarer
Not exactly following this. Let me be clear here. Not all reason is existentially contingent upon logic. I do not privilege logic over and above thought and belief. All reason consists of thought and belief. Some is existentially contingent upon logic.
Thought and belief are accrued.
The same holds for reason being existentially contingent upon language. All reason consists of thought and belief. Some thought and belief is existentially contingent upon language. Some reason is existentially contingent upon language.
True, but not relevant here.
Quoting creativesoul
On an ordinary interpretation, the sentence "humans are bipeds" evaluates as true. [*]
The problem is that you're misinterpreting that sentence as the universal "for every human, that human is a biped". Since that evaluates as false, your interpretation fails to match the logical form of the ordinary interpretation. In other words, you mean something different to what ordinary language users mean.
So I suggest looking at the SEP article on generic sentences. Per the quantificational theory, the logical form is "for every human, it is normal for that human to be a biped". Per the kind theory, the logical form is "humankind is characterized as being bipedal".
Both of these interpretations evaluate the sentence as true here, which matches the ordinary interpretation. I suggest trying to understand Aristotle's definition in this generic sense.
--
[*] For example, "Humans, birds and (occasionally) apes walk bipedally." from the first google hit on "humans bipedal" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571302/)
You're calling false belief 'commonsense knowledge'. It is most certainly relevant for me to point it out.
Not my problem if others do not say what they mean. There's a bit of irony here. I am addressing what Aristotle said. You and others are addressing what he did not say and charging me with misinterpreting...
There's no reason to believe that he meant anything in that generic sense....
We have every reason to believe otherwise. He stressed that humans are the only rational beings and that that was what made them what they are, different than other animals.
Aristotle fails on two fronts. We are not rational by virtue of just being human. Other creatures are rational, albeit to a much lesser 'degree'. These failings are both consequences of an ill-conceived notion of being rational at work in his work.
We are forced to attribute meaning to generics that does not follow from what was actually stated. "Ducks lay eggs" is true if and only if ducks lay eggs. Some ducks do not. Saying that "ducks lay eggs" is true because some ducks lay eggs would be equivalent to saying "humans are superstars" is true because some humans are. If we all know that only female ducks lay eggs, then we also know that not all ducks lay eggs. If we know all this and state that "ducks lay eggs" is true, then we've called something true despite knowing that it is not.
There is a difference between calling 'X' true and 'X' being so.
"Ducks lay eggs" is not true as a result of some ducks laying eggs and our saying that that is what is/was meant. Rather it is false as a result of some ducks laying eggs. "Some ducks lay eggs" is true as a result of some ducks laying eggs.
I did edit that phrase of mine you quoted, because it was nonsensical - I had meant to take issue with your statement that 'reason is dependent on language', but I was inputting on my iPhone and mangled it.
So, to re-state it, I don't agree with you that reason is dependent on language. The two are obviously closely interlinked, but I'm inclined to give rationality precedence over language, because the ability to abstract and to symbolise, which is required for intentional speech acts, seems to me to be intellectual rather than simply linguistic. And one can have rational insights which can be expressed in language - as evidenced by the fact that science has often required the invention of new symbolic codes, to convey rational insights which there weren't the means to express in the current lexicon (i.e. the expressions associated with quantum physics or computer science).
Quoting creativesoul
Here is where I think you're major problem is. The very point of a definition is that it's general. A definition doesn't have to allow for all of the variations that might be observed in particular individuals. But by stating that humans are 'rational animals', Aristotle is distinguishing between humans and other animals with reference to a capacity humans clearly have, that animals don't, namely, rationality. But it's obvious that not all persons are rational. And it's also obvious that no person is only rational. But this doesn't invalidate the definition. Indeed if your notion of 'definition' held, then it wouldn't be possible to define anything, because definitions, or at least most definitions, are general in their very nature.
And that ability to generalise and abstract is essential to rationality. Which gets us back to universals - because it is only by virtue of universals that we can make abstract and general statements at all.
Here again you just expose the limitations of a nominalist metaphysics. Predicate logic is optimised for reasoning about particulars. Universal predication becomes just an exercise in set theory - a nominalistic claim of congruence. So your weapon of choice simply lacks the firepower to make any impression here. It's a classic case of bringing a knife to a gunfight. ;)
If you check out his Posterior Analytics, Aristotle was trying to steer a middle course between Platonic realism and Atomistic nominalism. So his genus~species distinction is an attempt to understand the ontological issue in terms of hierarchies of constraint. A universal speaks to a disposition - a tendency, function or purpose. And thus is is not contradicted - in its generality - by exceptions ... so long as the exceptions are accidental and don't count as essential.
Universals can thus be seen as allied with the top-down constraining causality of telos and form. A generality, like a genus, is defined as some kind of telic intent. A way of being that is organised by a reason. Then a species is some particular form that expresses that intent. A species is a general desire made specific flesh.
So if we are going to say something truthful-feeling like "ducks lay eggs because birds lay eggs, and ducks are birds", then we would have to look towards the reason why birds would even lay eggs. Birds would be a genus - a real distinction in nature - because there was some essential natural purpose that "a bird" expresses. And then a duck would be a bird as a particular form that in turn expresses that purpose in terms of some more specific design.
Then "this duck right here" would be the individuated being which is the form of a duck made locally and materially definite - complete with all the accidents of matter which can be deemed not to matter as they don't really affect the globally real purpose.
So behind every individuated duck, we have a hierarchy of increasingly general, but absolutely real, constraints. And the constraints themselves have a directional organisation - one that points always from general telos towards specific form.
By definition, telos tolerates material exceptions of every possible kind - except any differences that would make a difference in terms of that purpose. So a constraints-based view of "universal predication" says not only that what is not prevented, could be the case. It says if an exception could happen, it must happen. Exceptions are a prediction, given that the very idea of the essential is dichotomous to that of the accidental. You couldn't have the one in any definite sense without having also its "other".
So your attempts to keep forcing regular nominalistic logic onto a discussion of the problems of nominalism is quite amusing. Your dogmatism is a symptom of the intellectual disease in question.
If we are looking to define humans in terms of what's necessary, required, and/or essential to being a human...
Not all B's are A.
:-}
Being a bird is essential to being a duck, but not all ducks are birds? Sounds legit.
Agree, there are many more elements that could be required to define what 'being a human' means. Definitions are sometimes difficult, especially when it comes to matters such as this. But, as far as it goes, a 'rational animal' does say something important, I think. Especially in a culture which will readily agree with 'animal' and dispute 'rational'.
Sarcasm doesn't write well does it? Looks like we agree that Aristotle's notion is lacking.
Well definitions are notoriously difficult for all sorts of reasons. I'm not arguing against definitions per se. I'm arguing against what looks like a modern-day apologetic for Aristotle's shortcomings. I would certainly grant that most folk use the phrase "ducks lay eggs" despite knowing that only female ducks do. In normal parlance, this is of no concern. However, when we're assessing someone like Aristotle's work it matters. Aristotle was making the strong claim that being rational is what separated humans from animals, and that all humans are rational, and that being rational was somehow 'innate' in being a human, simply by virtue of being human.
If we are claiming that something is essential to being a human, then that something - whatever it is - must be part of every human. Being universal is being universally extant after removing the individual particulars. An essential property/quality of being a human would need to satisfy this criterion. No amount of ad hoc can negate this. Being universal is being a common denominator of a group of particulars.
On my view, just being called by the same name doesn't qualify either(pace Witt's 'game'). However, Witt does shed some light on things by showing us that there are times when the only thing a group of things has in common is that we call them by the same name. There are no relevant common denominators in their elemental composition.
Indeed. This is at the heart of the matter as far as I'm concerned. What counts as being rational. This is one of those things that we do prior to becoming aware of it, and after as well. The difficulty, it seems, is properly accounting for the differences between the former and the latter in terms of 'kind'.
On my view, being rational consists of thought and belief. As earlier with the fire example, and pace Kant, the attribution/recognition of causality doesn't require language but does count as being rational. However, following the rules of 'correct' inference counts as being rational as well. So, Gettier's hypothetical Smith was a rational being as well. Clearly, if we are to make good sense of this, we'll need to take care in our analysis regarding what these kinds of thinking require. That's what existential contingency is about on my view. It is akin, I suppose, to necessary and sufficient conditions.
Drawing and maintaining the crucial distinction between thought and belief, and thinking about thought and belief is imperative. That's where language, particularly written language, comes into play, for thinking about thought and belief is existentially contingent upon written language. Reasoning that is existentially contingent upon(that involves) metacognition is existentially contingent upon written language.
This kind of talk is totally foreign to me. Bird is a genus, because there is "some essential natural purpose" which "a bird" expresses. No matter how much I reflect on this phrase, "essential natural purpose", I draw a complete blank as to what you could possibly mean by that.
Well obviously God has his reason for at every instant forming the idea of all the individual avians in the world in his Almighty mind and so giving shape to their existence. But he does move in mysterious ways I hear.
I wonder if you saw what I've said about this matter. Reason comes in different 'kinds'. Some kinds of reason are most certainly dependent upon written language. Others are most certainly not.
So, I do not think that we are at odds as much as it may seem.
Actually the puzzle is why you would think he didn't. Generic sentences are a feature of all natural languages, not just modern English. If instead, as you claim, Aristotle intended an "all" quantification over particulars (re rationality) then the far deeper puzzle would be why he would make such an elementary logic mistake or be curiously unaware of the cognitive differences between infants and adults. [*]
This paper "Truth-Conditions of Generic Sentences: Two Contrasting Views" doesn't mention Aristotle, but it contrasts nominalism and realism with respect to generics and I think gets to the core of that disagreement. Also note the reference to non-accidental generalization below:
Quoting creativesoul
They are not equivalent. That is the point. "Ducks lay eggs" is true not because some ducks lay eggs, but because there is an essential connection between ducks as a species and egg-laying and only an accidental connection between humans as a species and being a superstar.
That is the nature, so to speak, of generic sentences. You can't straightjacket the wrong logical form onto those sentences (in this case, an "all" quantifier over particulars), you need to investigate and understand the logical form that is already there. This was the kind of situation that motivated the linguistic turn in the early 20th Century where philosophical problems were seen to arise from misunderstanding the logic of language.
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[*] "Vizzini: I can't compete with you physically, and you're no match for my brains.
Man in Black: You're that smart?
Vizzini: Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?
Man in Black: Yes.
Vizzini: Morons."
What's more puzzling; attributing meaning that is possible, or attributing meaning that is not? The notion of "generic" is 17th century. Aristotle lived two thousand years prior.
Aristotle didn't make an elementary logic mistake, per se. His reporting(his logic) follows from his (mis)conception regarding what counts as rational. He posited that being rational was something that was essential and innate to being human, and that only humans were rational creatures. He was wrong on both counts. His mistake was working from an utterly inadequate notion regarding what counts as being rational. What you and others are doing is nothing more and nothing less than an apologetic.
Here's the underlying issue...
Being rational is existentially contingent upon thought and belief. Not all thought and belief is existentially contingent upon language use. Some rationality is existentially contingent upon language use. Some rationality is not.
I find it rather interesting that an entire school of thought and belief has arisen as a means to sophisticate what is nothing more than unsophisticated language use.
"Ducks lay eggs" is not true. That's plain and simple.
It is called "true" as a result of our leniency towards such ambiguity. Most folk know that only female ducks lay eggs and that not all female ducks do.
And so you have some notion of truth that can’t make a useful distinction between the essential and the accidental.
If a female duck can’t lay eggs, that is some kind of accident. But it is still a duck because essentially - barring the accident - it would have laid eggs. As well as having all the other duck-defining feratures that count as essential. (In the end, this might boil down to a genetic disposition of course.)
And then a male duck, if regarded as part of the class of male things, would only lay eggs by some kind of accident.
It is a basic logical principle. That which is not constrained is free. That which is not essential is still possible by accident. Indeed, that which is not prevented has to happen to some degree if it is a possibility.
So you are working with a notion of reality that doesn’t pick up this essential vs accidental, or constraints vs degrees of freedom, distinction. That leads to an impoverished logical model of reality. You can’t in fact speak its truth because you can’t handle all its facts.
There's a marked difference between not being able to draw and maintain a dichotomy and rejecting it based upon grounds of inadequacy...
Try again.
And your argument is...
[creative, as per usual, will fail to fill in the blank space where his argumentation was meant to go ;) ]
Hey! As a friendly note and totally off the subject...
There's a bookstore named Green Apple in San Francisco near Golden Gate Park that has what looked to be a 'set' of 6 or 7 'encyclopedia sized' works of Charles Sanders Peirce in a locked cabinet of 'rare' philosophy books. I immediately thought of you! I opted, of course, for Searle, Davidson, and Witt's...
I find that your approach presupposes agency where none is warranted. Drop the notions of intent and purpose, then see what happens to what's left of it...
Why would I arbitrarily exclude final cause from nature?
I think you give yourself way too much credit for clarity of writing. I didn't understand your comment so I wouldn't even know what other comments might count as the argument that supports it.
So I argued that a notion of the general vs particular doesn't make sense unless it understood how it is connected to the distinction between the essential (or necessary) and the accidental (or chance).
Generality is the essence that a collection of individuals would have in common. Their particularity would then be the accidents that are the differences that don't make an (essential) difference to that.
I illustrated this logical principle in reference to your male duck and non-laying duck examples.
If you can't make a counter-argument here, then I can only take the view you can't in fact muster one.
Your approach presupposes agency where none is warranted. Ockham's razor applies. If dropping the notions of intent and purpose requires excluding final cause, then the exclusion is not arbitrary, but rather it is necessary.
Either you are a true believer in cognito or you do not realize that a well-educated theist shares your presuppositions...
I am asked where my 'argument' is.
I give the location.
An astute reader can peruse the thread for themselves as a means to read my comments here. After doing so, s/he would walk away with a better understanding of my arguments about universals, and particularly about Aristotle's notion of "man", including but not limited to, how his claims of man being rational have been invoked herein as a means to broaden the discourse about universals. My arguments are throughout the thread and they are context specific.
If you, apo cannot figure some of this out for yourself... I cannot help you.
Generality is the essence that a collection of individuals would have in common... if they did.
They don't.
Are you claiming that ducks do not have anything in common with each other that they do not have with other kinds of birds? Or that they do not have anything in common with other kinds of birds that they do not have with mammals, reptiles or insects.
The usual sign of having no argument...
Ad homs aren't acceptable at this juncture.
No. I am not claiming that.
Certainly sounds like it! So, what are you claiming then?
You seem to be confusing a formal analysis of generics with their use. From the SEP article on generics, "By 30 months, children understand that generics tolerate exceptions (Gelman and Raman 2003)". Is it your claim that people couldn't understand this in Aristotle's day? Or that generics have only featured in language since the 17th century?
Quoting creativesoul
There's nothing ambiguous about it. It is called true because most folk think it is true. If you disagree, then why not test your hypothesis and ask a few people whether they think it is true and why.
As far as I can tell, you're just denying that generics are a real feature of natural languages.
When there is no conception of "generics", and in Aristotle's time there was not, then people could not understand that generics tolerate exceptions. Strictly speaking, statements aren't the sort of things that tolerate. People are. So, surely people tolerated exceptions in Aristotle's time and before, assuming they had the ability to take note of them.
Aristotle clearly held that man was the only rational creature, and that being rational was an essential part of being human(man). I suspect that Aristotle recognized that being rational included a wide range of differing abilities. I also suspect that he attempted to bridge this divide with the idea that being rational was inherent to being human and that that much is 'proven' by virtue of it's later representation. In this way, Aristotle glossed over the differences.
My issue here is that Aristotle's own words do not support the ad hoc explanations which aim to minimize the clear contradiction that his words have with everyday facts.
Quoting Andrew M
The term "ducks" includes all things that we call "duck". Not all things that we call "duck" lay eggs.
I agree that "Ducks lay eggs" is called true, because most people think(believe) it is true. However, thinking(believing) it is true does not make it so, nor does calling it "true".
This is a nuanced discussion. I am always happy to bear the burden of my claims. Asking me what I am claiming without further qualification leaves me wondering what you're talking about. I mean, the discussion has taken many turns. See if this helps...
Not all ducks lay eggs.
That seems like a pedantic quibble, though. You are interpreting 'Ducks lay eggs' as "All ducks lay eggs" rather than interpreting it as "it is normal for(female) ducks to lay eggs". One might even say, if the correct term for a male of the species is taken to be 'drake' that we could simply say 'it us normal for ducks to lay eggs'. Likewise the statement that man is a rational animal, should be taken to mean that it is normal for humans to be rational in a way that animals never are. There doesn't seem to be any substantive point to your supposed critique of Aristotle; its relevance, if it could be thought to possess any, is merely of a trivial order.
Interpretation is nothing more than the attribution of meaning to something that is already meaningful.
I am taking Aristotle at his word. You are adding to it.
Do you agree or not?
Nonsense, all meaning consists in interpretation, and it seems to me that it is your interpretation which is inapt to Aristotle's intention, and the scholastically normative interpretation of the meaning of his formulation. It's obvious that only approximately half the population of ducks lay eggs, and that not all humans are highly rational; but that seems not to the point. Certainly any human capable of language and hence of conceiving of the distinction between past, present and future could be counted as rational compared to animals.
So note that most people are aware of the individual exceptions yet continue to assert that "ducks lay eggs" is true. That is because they are asserting something about the category (species, genus, kind, etc.), not the individuals.
Which just is realism about universals as against nominalism, which rejects that categorical usage.
Nonsense?
:-}
Explain to me exactly what's being interpreted again? How about Anscombe??? When she translates Witt, she is interpreting what was already meaningful. All meaning involves that which is or will become a sign/symbol, that which is or will become that which is significant/symbolized, and an agent capable of drawing a correlation between them.
That's how it works... necessarily so... without exception.
I've nothing further here Janus. I've already adequately argued my case without subsequent relevant and/or valid objections.
Shall we take a collective vote on that?
What is being interpreted is a text. Of course texts are meaningful, but that doesn't entail that any text must have just one literal meaning. So, of course interpretation will inevitably come into play. it surprises me that you apparently don't understand that rudimentary fact.
One author, one meaning... or else equivocation. What is a literal meaning? Typical rhetorical drivel.
Rubbish. Speech acts are intrinsically creative. No words ever exactly capture the meaning I had in mind, despite even the opportunity for rewriting. But then the forced concreteness of having to have found some formula of words paves the way for further departures in thought. More refined interpretations arise.
Problem is you cannot ever know exactly what the author means; you obviously don't know what Aristotle meant.
Obviously so-called literal interpretations of texts are possible, but I haven't claimed that the idea of a literal meaning is coherent; in fact that it is not is what I was suggesting. So, accusing me of "rhetorical drivel" is a laughable deflection, an attempt to disguise the fact that you have no coherent argument to offer to support your ridiculous position.