Predicates, Smehdicates
I've been reading Wilfrid Sellars' Naturalism and Ontology recently, which is full of wonderful ideas, but among them is one in particular I want to explore here: the idea that predicates are entirely dispensable. This is a pretty provocative idea to say the least, insofar as entire philosophies are built around the subject-predicate couple (i.e. 'The apple [subject] is red [predicate]'), such that you get classical ontologies built around the substance-accident distinction ('Man is a substance X that has properties Q, W, V'), which quite clearly mirrors the subject-predicate couple of language. The same applies to ontologies built out of first-order predicate logic, with expressions like F(a) (read roughly: 'a is F') sometimes given ontological standing as mirroring, as it were, the structure of the world.
Sellars makes all sorts of moves to justify the 'dispensability' of predicates, but the one I want to explore is this. Using a made-up language he calls 'jumblese', he says that a statement like 'X is red' can be expressed by using something like a boldface X, as in: X. That is, if plain old 'X' is 'apple', X stands for 'red apple', or 'the apple is red'. The upshot here is of course obvious: X expresses the same thing as 'X is red' without utilizing any predicates. One just has to be versed in jumblese to understand it. He gives another example. Instead of saying 'X is larger than Y', he says jumblese might express this as so:
X
Y
Where the fact that X is above Y conveys that 'X is larger than Y' without using the expression 'is larger than'. The tricky point is this: for Sellars, nothing in the above expression (X placed above Y) does the job of 'is larger than' in the first expression . He is absolutely insistent upon this: "Many philosophers have stared this point in the face and missed it, thus failing to grasp its significance". That is, one may think that X's being above Y is 'doing the job' of 'is larger than', but for Sellars, this is absolutely not the case. So what is happening here according to Sellars?
For Sellars the fact of there being an 'is larger than' between X and Y, does the job of the fact of X being above Y. In other words, what is at work in both is nothing other than a spatial or conventional relation between graphic objects. On it's own 'is larger than' does not signify anything: only by virtue of it's being spatially positioned between X on the left and Y on the right does it convey any meaning, just as only by X being above Y in the second formulation does the latter convey the any meaning. If we replace 'is larger than' by 'flufflewumps' in another language, we can get the same meaning. In yet other words, it's simply the graphic concatenation of 'X', 'Y' and 'is larger than', in a certain spatial distribution, that gives the phrase meaning.
This is how Sellars grounds his claim that "not only are predicative expressions dispensable, the very function played by predicates is dispensable". The significance of being able to dispense with predicates is pretty massive: first, the argument commits one to nominalism about attributes insofar as to say 'X is red' no longer entails any ontological commitment to the attribute 'red'. There is no Platonic attribute 'red' apart from red particulars. Second, to dispense with predicates means that propositional form "belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders", or, contrapositively, reality does not have propositional form. In other words, just because we think, or rather talk, about the world in a certain manner, does not mean that the world mirrors the manner in which we speak about it. Any ontology modelled on the subject-predicate distinction in language (as per 'substance-accident' ontologies, or even ontologies of 'logical form') is radically undercut by such an approach.
@Banno is this something up your alley?
Sellars makes all sorts of moves to justify the 'dispensability' of predicates, but the one I want to explore is this. Using a made-up language he calls 'jumblese', he says that a statement like 'X is red' can be expressed by using something like a boldface X, as in: X. That is, if plain old 'X' is 'apple', X stands for 'red apple', or 'the apple is red'. The upshot here is of course obvious: X expresses the same thing as 'X is red' without utilizing any predicates. One just has to be versed in jumblese to understand it. He gives another example. Instead of saying 'X is larger than Y', he says jumblese might express this as so:
X
Y
Where the fact that X is above Y conveys that 'X is larger than Y' without using the expression 'is larger than'. The tricky point is this: for Sellars, nothing in the above expression (X placed above Y) does the job of 'is larger than' in the first expression . He is absolutely insistent upon this: "Many philosophers have stared this point in the face and missed it, thus failing to grasp its significance". That is, one may think that X's being above Y is 'doing the job' of 'is larger than', but for Sellars, this is absolutely not the case. So what is happening here according to Sellars?
For Sellars the fact of there being an 'is larger than' between X and Y, does the job of the fact of X being above Y. In other words, what is at work in both is nothing other than a spatial or conventional relation between graphic objects. On it's own 'is larger than' does not signify anything: only by virtue of it's being spatially positioned between X on the left and Y on the right does it convey any meaning, just as only by X being above Y in the second formulation does the latter convey the any meaning. If we replace 'is larger than' by 'flufflewumps' in another language, we can get the same meaning. In yet other words, it's simply the graphic concatenation of 'X', 'Y' and 'is larger than', in a certain spatial distribution, that gives the phrase meaning.
This is how Sellars grounds his claim that "not only are predicative expressions dispensable, the very function played by predicates is dispensable". The significance of being able to dispense with predicates is pretty massive: first, the argument commits one to nominalism about attributes insofar as to say 'X is red' no longer entails any ontological commitment to the attribute 'red'. There is no Platonic attribute 'red' apart from red particulars. Second, to dispense with predicates means that propositional form "belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders", or, contrapositively, reality does not have propositional form. In other words, just because we think, or rather talk, about the world in a certain manner, does not mean that the world mirrors the manner in which we speak about it. Any ontology modelled on the subject-predicate distinction in language (as per 'substance-accident' ontologies, or even ontologies of 'logical form') is radically undercut by such an approach.
@Banno is this something up your alley?
Comments (251)
Well that goes on the reading list, thanks SX. (There was already a vague entry for "all of Sellars" but this still helps.)
Does he talk about lambdas? Quine, another die-hard nominalist, at some point realized he could use lambdas to get around needing classes (and certainly attributes) as first-class objects for most purposes.
I feel completely in over my head with that comment about the "linguistic and conceptual orders". You see this sort of Kantian view all over 20th century Anglo-American philosophy, even in Strawson's "descriptive metaphysics" (IIRC, they both wrote books about Kant) and I really have no idea what to make of it yet...
Also, our understanding of those terms since modern philosophy is a feeble, truncated thing, relative to what the Aristotelians and Scholastics would have understood. (For example in the classical philosophy, substance and accident are tied up with concepts like actuality and potentiality - there's a whole bundle of closely-related topics in that area, that we don't really understand unless we make a study of the classical philosophy.)
I'm old enough to remember several attempts at linguistic relativism - and funnily enough, Sellars' argument actually shows why they fail (because there are numerous ways of using symbols to signify the same thing different language users have noticed in reality).
Not lambdas per se, but he does make use of Quine's virtual classes in order to try and conceive of Frege's 'concepts' in a nominalistic manner. That said, with respect to Quine, Sellars argues that he makes an advance over Quine insofar as Sellars manages to provide a theory of reference that was missing in Quine:
"We are also able to locate an insight of Quine's. He has argued, in "On What There Is" and other places, that predicates are syncategorematic expressions, contributing to the meaning of sentences without having reference. They present the ' ideology' of a language rather than its ontology. They are said to be ' true or objects. 'Red' is true of a just in case a is red. But Quine does not offer a theory of just what it is in which their syncategorematic character consists. He does relate it, however, to inaccessibility to quantification-indeed this seems to be almost its defining trait. My analysis, on the other hand, explains the syncategorematic character of predicates without any reference to quantification. This frees the concept of generalization from the close tie with objects and ontology which was built into classical quantification theory..."
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I have a rough understanding of it, but N&O doesn't address it too much. The basic distinction in which it is used is that between the order of causes and the order of reasons, where the latter is constituted by the normative demands of inference-making. I understand the relation between the two orders as one of asymmetry: while one can't 'read off' reasons from causes, one can read off causes from reasons. I say this only very schematically, as my understanding is mostly second-hand, but it's something I want to familiarize myself with more.
I'm not sure sure about this. It seems to me - but I won't press the point too much - that rational thought itself is categorical - i.e. we think in categories and classes, generalizations (genera) and species, on pain of being unable to rationalize at all. This is by no means a 'bad' thing - it's the virtue of reason itself, but the question - Sellars' question, if I understand him correctly - is whether the specificity of reason ought to be taken at face value when approaching questions of ontology.
Quoting gurugeorge
This I agree with entirely, and I follow Sellars - in this thread anyway - in using 'Platonism' as more of a catch-call for certain tendencies in thought rather than a clearly defined and crisply worked out position.
Yeah, this would definitely be kind of close. That said, Sellars actually doesn't address existence as such insofar as he thinks doing so would open a can of worms he'd rather keep a lid on ("the verb 'to exist' is a slippery one and has uses which belong in quite different contexts and raise quite different problems [therefore,]... I shall not draw upon it"). So perhaps we might even go stronger and say that Sellars addresses and seeks to nominalize all predicates except for existence (which is not to say he doesn't want to, just that he keeps it aside for now). But yes, the basic idea is: don't translate grammatical categories into ontological ones - especially predicates.
What I tried to lay out in the OP - unsuccessfully, it seems! - are the reasons why Sellars thinks this: namely, that was can dispense with predicates altogether in our talk about the world without losing anything in particular. 'Jumblese', a language without predicates, is a way to do this. The OP is mostly a few examples of how Jumelese would work, and why it would be relevant with respect to thinking about predicates. Thanks for the Izutsu essay too, it seems very interesting.
--
Also, sorry for not getting back to you in the evolution thread, I was more or less away for three days and by the time I got back it was smashed with comments and I wasn't sure how to go about getting to them.
Peirce thought his existential graphs were his ultimate and unambiguous clarification of a logic of relations. Speech - being a linear code - does suffer from being less constrained than the geometric reality it describes.
You can believe in nominalism if you can reduce reality beyond its irreducible spatiotemporal structure. But existential graphs show up that illusion quite neatly I would suggest.
If the parallels 0 to 9 is seeing with Bourland's E-Prime are relevant - and I feel they might be (I was wondering the same thing before I saw her post) - I wonder if Sellars would rather say that, by abandoning a Platonic interpretation of triangularity, we see triangularity for what it does.
Is the "is" the essential element of predication?
If so, then are Sellar's examples 'bold X' and 'X above Y' really any different than if we drop the 'is' to express the same ideas, 'red apple' and 'X larger than Y' respectively?
(Jumblese seems appropriate given that Sellars was, reportedly, drunk all the time :rofl: ).
I don't think so, at least not for Sellars. He often drops the copula entirely, preferring to use logical notation like 'Fa', or even alternative expressions like 'X stands for Y', 'X exemplifies Yness', or even 'X means Y'. He does note the specificities of each formulation (he leans on some but not others when trying to parse out both meaning and truth), but I don't think it's so relevant when talking about predicates as such. In fact I think the use of so many ways of expression is deliberately meant to show how widely applicable the strategy of 'dropping predicates' is meant to be.
Quoting Janus
Depends on what angle you want to look at it - for Sellars the answer is of course, no, they are not really any different at all, but you can only 'say' this if you recognize the essential continuity between bold X and red apple; and doing this in turn should lead one recognize the dispensibility of predicates. The key for Sellars is in understanding that subject-predicate couples do not stand for a relation between non-linguistic facts but between linguistic objects. 'X above Y' are two linguistic objects in a spatial relationship with each other, just and 'X larger than Y' contains three linguistic objects, 'X', 'larger than', and 'Y', in a triadic spatial relation to each other.
Quoting Janus
Didn't know this, lol.
Hah, I think would be a particularly apt way to put it.
I don't think the two claims are as incompatible as they look. As a practical matter, it's true that its simply impossible to drop predicates. But, to use Sellars' expression, it is 'philosophically perspicacious' to consider the fact they they are entirely dispensable, and see how this acknowledgement might change the way we think about ontology.
To expand a bit on why dropping predicates is so inconvenient - for my own sake as much as yours - think a little more about what Sellars proposes that they can be replaced with, with the language he calls jumblese. I'll focus on the bold-face example, because it's easier to deal with. Consider an object X. Now qualify this object as being red. Instead of saying 'X is red', we can say X, where boldface X expresses 'red X'. Now consider if the object is green. Perhaps in jumblese we say X (italics). And if blue, [s]X[/s].
What is happening here? Basically, language is being 'de-linearized'. We are considering not just the individual letter ('X'), but also the manner in which that letter is inscribed as carrying additional information. I say 'delinarized' because we are now looking at language in two dimensions: we are not just reading it from left to right, but also considering an extra (orthogonal?) dimension. While this is really cool, it is also incredibly inconvenient. It is much easier to memorise a series of base colour names ('red, green blue') and tack them on as qualifiers (predicates) to subjects (X, Red X) than it is to come up with multiple ways of writing 'X' (Apple, apple, [s]apple[/s]). And liniearization also allows us to easily subject propositions to logical operators like negation, disjunction, conjunction, and quantification (although, as Apo's diagrams show, we can show such operations diagrammatically as well, even though they are more 'clunky' to work with).
So the inability to dispense with predicates is a matter of convenience: but Sellars' point is that we ought not to mistake convenience with ground for an ontology.
I don't think I understand.
I don't see why
Quoting StreetlightX
is not just translatable as "X is larger than Y"; but from what you say here:Quoting StreetlightX
that's not what is being argued.
Doesn't the position of the two variables indicate the predicate? That is, wouldn't
Y
X
be translated as "Y is larger than X"? You say:
Quoting StreetlightX
So I don't understand how it is that the predicate is dissipated.
But there is a way to disappear predicates. Treat them extensionally. The predicate ceases to have any meaning beyond the set of individuals it applies to.
Treating predicates thus does not cause me any grief. Indeed, I;m sympathetic to Davidson's use of it to clean up meaning.
A curious thread - Cheers.
This is the crux of the issue and it's important to clarify: what is the 'function' of the predicate? What work is it doing? This is the most delicate part of Sellars' argument: Sellars argues that it is not doing any work insofar as it is a predicate. Instead, it is only doing work insofar as it is a linguistic object (which just so happens to be, in this particular but entirely contingent case, a predicate). This is crucial to understand. The predicate qua predicate isn't doing any kind of job at all; in fact the only reason that it seems that it is doing any work is because it is a linguistic object. Putting it graphically might help, in terms of a hierarchy:
{Linguistic object(predicate)}
Where predicate is a 'species' of the genera 'lingustic object'. The work is being done by the fact of it's being a linguistic object, not by the fact of it being a predicate. The trick is to recognise that there are other linguistic objects than predicates, and that it is at this more general level where the work 'takes place'. Thus, boldface X, X is doing 'meaning work' by the fact of it's graphical difference, in it's capacity as a graphic object, and not because it does the work done by the predicate. This might seem a minor and even obscure difference, but the upshot is that it diffuses the tendency to abstract predicates as conceptual properties or metaphysical attributes. I quote Ray Brassier's gloss on this:
"The predicative role should not be reified and turned into an abstract entity called a “property” that exists independently of sentential contexts. Still less should the conceptual property supposedly expressed by the predicate be hypostatized and turned into an ontological attribute that exists not only independently of language — as conceptual properties are alleged to — but also independently of thought. As Sellars puts it, “The extralinguistic domain consists of objects, not facts. To put it bluntly, propositional form belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders” (Brassier, Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism).
@Banno I hope the above also clarifies why X being above Y does not indicate the predicate, but rather indicates the general function which the predicate contingently happens to fulfil.
Sellars speaks of this strategy in terms of 'unsaturated' propositions, but says that it doesn't do enough to diffuse the 'temptation' to treat particulars as universals:
"We must avoid that picture according to which the connection between 'a is red' and the non-linguistic domain is a composition function of a connection between 'a' and a and a connection of 'red' with red objects. For it is this picture which generates the perennial temptation to assimilate the semantical function of 'red' to that of 'a,' and hence to think of 'red' as referring either to an object (redness) or a non-object () is red The result in either case is a metaphysics which construes red things as particulars which, in the one case, are tied by 'exemplify' to the attribute redness and which, in the other, "saturate" the gappy (predicative) entity, () is red."
I think this is right, although I'm more conceptually unsteady here than with respect to predicates. Basically, Sellars develops an account of meaning in which the meaning of anything is given by it's 'functional role' in (a) language. He has quite a complicated account which involves sortals and metalinguistic levels and other philosophical sprockets and gears, but the idea is broadly Wittgensteinian in that a word (or phrase, or whatever) is what one can do with it: to know (a) meaning is to have a certain 'know how' regarding how that word can function in a system of inferential patterns (saying certain things commits one to saying, or even doing, certain other things. This network of commitments is 'what language is', and meaning is making a commitment in that network, and understanding the ramifications of that commitment; to say 'here is an apple' while holding up an orange is to misunderstand what one is committed to by saying 'here is an apple').
To speak of commitments in this way provides, I hope, a clue as to why it's not the case that Sellars severs the tie between language and world. While it's true that on Sellars' account, predicates are intra-linguistic objects and not emblems of extra-linguistic facts, what matters is the larger network of commitments in which the mobilisation of those objects in relation to each other function in. Which is a very round-about way to say that all saying is a kind of doing. Brassier, again, puts it better than I can:
"Meaning is not a relation [between word and thing]: meaning statements establish metalinguistic correlations between words and other words rather than a metaphysical relation between words and things. ... Words do not depict reality because of what they mean but because of physical connections between the semantic regularities obeyed by speakers and the physical patterns in which these semantic regularities are embodied ... These uniformities are incarnated in phonetic, graphic, or haptic patterns, as well as behavioral ones. They are exhibited in the uniformities of performance that constitute pattern-governed linguistic behavior. But these patterns reflect espousals of principle that constitute linguistic competence".
In yet other words, the connection between language and world is in the performance of 'languaging' (which ties together words, behaviours, and patterns of commitment), and not in the fact that words stand for things in one-to-one relations. It is, to use an apt phrase, 'representation without mirrors'. Anyway, this is a bit far removed from the question of predicates, although it flows directly out of what it would mean to 'dispense' with them. But seriously good questions though, really helping me think some of this through.
There is a much easier, and more efficient way of dealing with the function of the predicate, and that is to make it completely subjective, an imaginary object, entirely within the subject's mind. This is completely distinct, to what you propose, as giving the predicate a functional role in something independent from the mind, called "language".
What the predicate is doing, is then seen as what the mind is doing with the predicate. It's really the proper way of looking at this issue, because the predicate is just a passive thing, an object which is not doing anything other than what it is made to do by the mind. So the mind is really the active agent which is doing something with the predicate, and the predicate is purely imaginary. Once we see the predicate in this way, it may be dissolved and replaced with "activity of the mind".
But that is the only way to actually get rid of the predicate, to replace it with activity of the mind. Allocating it to "language" doesn't do this, and therefore this is fated to failure in any attempt to understand the predicate. Attempting to understand what the predicate is doing, without reference to the mind which is doing something with the predicate is just a futile exercise.
Just chiming in to say I think "commitment" is the magic word here. This is exactly the word I was about to reach for over in the "Belief" thread to explain my sense of beliefs as something like rules or norms you follow in thinking and acting.
And I think of commitment as placing your bet, or running your experiment. There's a strong current of pragmatism running beneath all this that I find increasingly appealing.
Yeah, I think I grasp what the problem is, and it's really difficult. The way I've thought of it in the past is how our categorical thinking seems to "overlay" a world that's happily describable ontologically in terms of mechanistic laws that have no room for meaning or value. Another way of thinking of it is in terms of Sellars' distinction between the manifest and scientific images. How the hell do you marry that dull, mechanistic ontology with the grandeur of the variously-populated world revealed by thought?
I think there's probably a complex "tear" (as in paper) line between the two - some everyday categorical concepts do overlap with highly "chunked" parts of that simplistically-described baseline ontology, and some don't, some are just arbitrary ways of chunking events, perhaps developed in the meandering process of cultural evolution, with functions in evol psych terms, but not any real truth to them. (I'm thinking here of an analogy: the difference between the simple rules of Conway's Game of Life, and the larger regular structures and super-structures those simple rules produce as being things in themselves. Are those large patterns that grow from such simple seeds really things? Well, sure, they're big recurring patterns that you can name and that have a describable "fuzzy" logic of their own, quite different from the crisp, super-simple logic of the game rules. But at the same time, in a different sense, they're not really things in themselves, for they only exist only insofar as they are generated by the rules, the rules are prior, they have a deeper underlying reality.)
I have a big beard that has a recognizable gestalt shape of its own. That shape was somehow "latent" in the simple growing rules for the hairs on my face, but the shape of it is not represented or described in those simple rules. There's no plan for George's beard anywhere, and yet there it is - every time I stop shaving more or less the same "thing" sprouts.
This also speaks to the Hegelian/Marxian idea of dialectic, the organic development of concepts, etc., I think. Concepts (or for Marx, various social relations) are "latent in" and grow out of other concepts - but without having a represented plan within the original concept.
If we discard a mapping relationship (such that certain words are somehow 'tied' to their referent) then it seems like we have two patterns: Linguistic (qua behavior -- language as a game that is played) and the world itself, as it unfolds. In discarding correspondence, we still, right, believe that some relationship obtains? The pattern of linguistic gameplaying is somehow linked up with the pattern of the world unfolding.
So if it's a matter of two patterns that aren't isomorphic (i.e there's no 1-1 semantic correspondence, or syntactic isomorphism) then what we have, instead, is basically a kind of (linguistic) behaviorial ecosystem thats linked up to a bigger system. It's not independent of what its linked up to, but neither is it a carbon copy. It's the pattern that works.
Is that fair? I really like this, but I'm trying to link it to your recent trend toward ecosystems and forces.
Notice also that the translation goes both ways: we can "translate" 'X is larger than Y' with your spatial arrangement, but we can also "translate" your spatial arrangement by 'X is larger than Y'. So why is one translation preferable to the other?
Yeah, thinking of language in terms of what it commits one to really is the key here. That said, I borrowed the vocabulary of commitment not from Sellars (who prefers to talk of 'uniformity of behaviour' and 'patterns of inference') but from Robert Brandom, who more or less takes Sellars' 'inferentialist semantics' and develops it. Brandom actually says that there are two modes of inference at work when using language, one of which is commitment and the other is entitlement. Saying things commits you to inferring or being able to say/do other things; and commitment in turn entitles you to saying/doing other things (If I am entitled to 'it is raining' then I am entitled to 'the streets are wet'; also, if you commit to 'it is raining', I am entitled to asking for reasons why you think so). It's a way of seeing language as a kind of contract that comes with rights (entitlements) and responsibilities (commitments).
Again, this is something I'm only roughly familiar with, but I like it very much.
Yeah, commitment and entitlement make a nice pair of terms, because there are natural points of contact with your speech community there: what you've committed to and what you're entitled to are clearly not entirely up to you but negotiated, so to speak, and over longer and shorter terms, with other members of your speech community (which I've come to think of also as your epistemic community). All of that fits nicely too with the game theory analysis we get from Lewis of reciprocal expectations, which is where the "contract" comes in. Good stuff.
I think it is. One interesting thing to note that is that Sellars refuses to give up the vocabulary of 'representation'. He continually calls for a more adequate theory of representation than those he argues against, and sees himself as providing such a theory. He even unabashedly uses terms like 'mapping' and 'picturing' even as he reconstrues them in ways that are almost barely recognisable. With respect to isomorphism, he even distinguishes between a 'first-order' isomorphism (where word mirrors thing) and a 'second-order' isomorphism in which what are correlated are patterns in the causal order, which language itself is part of. This is why he qualifies linguistic objects as natural-linguistic objects:
"The natural-linguistic objects which, by virtue of standing in certain matter-of-factual relationships to one another and to these non linguistic objects, constitute a picture of them in the desired sense, are the linguistic counterparts of nonlinguistic objects (not facts), and it is not too misleading to speak of them as 'names'. To add that it is a system of elementary statements (qua natural-linguistic objects) that is the picture is to draw upon Wittgenstein's insight that the occurrence of an elementary statement is to be construed as the occurrence in a certain manner of the names of the objects referred to." (Sellars, NAO)
It's this construal of language as belonging to the natural order that makes his 'theory of representation' a naturalist one. Brassier leans heavily on this strand of Sellars' thought: "He is a naturalist because he claims that linguistic practices, in which thinking is rooted, are varieties of natural processes... [even as] linguistic activity is a distinct and possibly even a unique variety of natural process". One further upshot of this naturalism is that it respects the 'autonomy of the real': the fact that nature, while not having propositional form, can nonetheless be 'tracked' by thought: "The challenge is to explain both how propositionally structured thought arises within nature and how it can be used to track natural processes despite the lack of congruence between propositional form and natural order."
Perhaps here is where you can see, dimly - as I still do - the connection between this and my interest in ecosystems and forces.
The argument is not that because we can dispense with predicates, they have no ontological standing. It's more along the lines of, given that we can dispense with predicates (as per demonstrated), what kind of ontology can we forge on this basis? The motivations for doing so are not internal to the argument; rather, the demonstration functions within a larger project in which the goal is to construct a naturalist ontology and with it, a naturalist theory of representation. One of the 'fallouts' of this desideratum is that such a theory must be a nominalist one, with respect to attributes like 'redness' or 'triangularity'.
Quoting Nagase
There's a particular asymmetry at work which I tried to detail here.
Let's throw out concepts and universals along with predicates. Cleans things up nicely.
So, it is claimed that the predicate is not doing any work insofar as it is a predicate, but is instead only doing work insofar as it is a linguistic object.
These are my initial thoughts:
So, what is a predicate? Is it not a linguistic object or symbol denoting a particular[/I] meaning, or having a [i]particular function? And, is it not [i]its particularity[/I] which gives it meaning? We must understand that this linguistic object is, or functions as, [i]in particular[/I], a predicate, in order to understand the meaning. And as to whether it [i]is[/I] a predicate or [i]functions[/I] as a predicate - that's a difference which makes no difference. And as to whether it'll be used to denote a predicate or some other logical function, that is arbitrary.
I don't see how it's not the predicate [i]as a predicate[/I] which really matters, one way or another. Yes, it's a linguistic object, but that doesn't tell me enough. I need to know its function, which, in this case, is as a predicate.
Another thing: I really don't get how 'X' above 'Y' is any different from 'Q(x,y)'. Or, how Jumblese is any different from predicate logic. Is it supposed to be? It looks a lot, at least to someone like me, like it's doing the same thing, and that the difference is only superficial.
Anyway, there's a lot to take in, and these are just my initial thoughts. I intend to revisit this when I have more time on my hands. I have to get ready to leave for work now.
But the point is that this is exactly not the case. A predicate does not denote a particular meaning, and it is not its particularity which gives it meaning. It is only it's role as a linguistic object, concatenated with two other linguistic objects ('X' and 'Y') in a certain graphical manner and embedded in a larger network of rule-governed linguistic behaviour, that lends the expression - as a whole - meaning. Another way to put this is that on it's own, a predicate is meaningless: "Names are part of the natural order but only insofar as they are meaningless" (Brassier).
Quoting Sapientia
Sellars actually spends an entire section of the essay dealing with this. The question is not how they are different - Sellars' point is precisely that they are the same - but what 'X above Y' illustrates about Q(x,y). The basic point is that 'X above Y' illustrates that Q does not pick out a universal or name (Q) that X and Y share or are related by. The point of putting X above Y is to place the accent on the graphic relations between X and Y which is not obvious in the Q(X,Y) formulation, which, on it's own, looks to treat Q as a name for a fact and not a mere linguistic object concatenated to the left of 'X,Y'. In a slogan, Q looks like it is signifying and not occupying (a place), when in fact, it's the latter that allows it to play a role in meaning.
What matters, in other words, is the 'matter-of-factual' (graphic, inscriptual, physical) relations between X, Y and Q, which show but do not say, the relation between X and Y. Which is another way of saying that Q does not denote and does not signify. It is a physical pattern which we respond to in rule governed ways.
You cannot found epistemology on commitment alone. And, commitment doesn't even give us an approach to ontology. We've already learned the latter from the failings of religion, ontology cannot be supported by faith alone.
As a foundation for epistemology commitment is nothing more than an illusion. The claim of "commitment" is an attempt to negate the reality of freedom, i.e. free will, and this only enables the capacity of deception. To claim that saying "X" amounts to a particular commitment is ignorance of the possibility of deception. And to ignore the possibility of deception is to enable the power of deception.
Quoting StreetlightX
Then how would you get a particular commitment out of any particular instance of usage? The schema you present here is built on the category mistake of believing that something general, the predicate, may be reduced to something particular. But this is to deny the ambiguity of the generality of "the predicate", and to ignore the true reality that the true particularity of the predicate may only be derived from the individuality of the subject. In other words, any particular commitment implied by any instance of usage is purely personal, subjective, and cannot be properly represented as a general rule.
Isn't that already covered in the concept of predication?
I'm almost certain Quine mentions Church when he introduces "virtual classes" (I'd forgotten that's what he called them). What caught Quine's attention about Church's lambdas is that they're anonymous: if you write "(?x . x is red)(that apple)" you're doing something a little different from writing "red(that apple)" -- as Frege might have -- because in the lambda version there's no function called "red" at all. You just concatenate the indicated strings in the indicated way. (You can give functions names, as Lisp does, for convenience, but it's in essence just a kind of shorthand.) Pretty clear why this would be appealing to a nominalist: no temptation to hypostatize when you don't have a name to work with.
I see. But then we have another problem. In the passages, Sellars talks about inscriptions of the X above Y variety. How are we to interpret such inscriptions? Are they sentence tokens? If so, they must be instances of sentence types. And as soon as we admit types, then nominalism is out. So the problem is less with "redness" or "triangularity" and more with "Xness", "Yness" and "aboveness".
Notice that it won't do to just say that there are no types, just inscriptions that we are regularly disposed to react in a certain behavioristically specified way, since there must be a regularity for us to respond to. That is, there must be something that accounts for the similarity of the various X inscriptions, and this can't be just our behavior, as we are dispositionally inclined to regularly react to Xs because they are similar, not the other way around.
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't think that post responds to the concern I raised, which is connected to your reply quoted above. I thought there was an argument from the translation to the acceptability of nominalism. But now it seems that the argument is from nominalism to the acceptability of the language. Of course, then the problem is about how to even set up a nominalistically acceptable language; I don't think it can't be done, because talk of (e.g. sentence) types is unavoidable here.
If I understand you correctly, this is something Sellars actually addresses pretty early on, with respect to Russell's presentation of the problem. Sellars grants that yes, "even the simplest sentence which is capable of truth or falsity must consist of more than expressions for particulars. It must also contain expressions which are not names of particulars, for example 'white' or 'to the north of'". But he continues: "Well, suppose that Russell is right and that we do need such words. Grammatically they are predicates. He has not shown that we need abstract singular terms. ' White,' yes, but not 'whiteness.' 'Resembles,' yes, but not 'resemblance.' We need expressions which are not names of particulars. Do we need expressions which are names of non-particulars?"
Similarly, with respect to your point, I think the rejoinder will be: we need 'sentences', yes, but not sentencehood; 'above', yes, but not above-ness. Having winnowed away what he calls abstract singular terms (anything which can have a suffix like '-ity,' ' -hood,' ' -ness,' ' -dom,' and '-cy'), the challenge is then to show that we can treat 'sentences' and 'above' in the nominalistic manner so outlined in the OP. That is, he answers the dangling question above in the negative: no, we don't need expressions which are names of non-particulars: we need expressions which are linguistic objects, which cannot in turn be treated as attributes with ontological standing. That types must be admitted is unavoidable, but - to put it cheekily - what kind of types?
There's just dogs who have a range of hues. We call all the dogs in that group "white dogs." ?
But language is a much messier affair than this. In a language such as English, there is a considerable range of sounds that count as a given phoneme. Not just anything, but also not all that sharply circumscribed because we change what will count based on context. There are allophones allowable when singing that would seem strange in everyday conversation. Toddlers utter sentences in which the prosody is right and just a couple of the phonemes are close to standard, and that counts. You use different allophones when whispering or screaming, and so on.
Paul Grice tells a story about an Oxford college that hired a new don they were very excited to get. The only trouble was he had a dog, and dogs were forbidden. So they held a meeting and "deemed" his dog a cat. Grice then wryly comments (this is all apropos his theory of meaning) that he suspects we do a lot more deeming than we realize.
That's one side: the requirement for regularity is not particularly strict, and is responsive to the project of communal living. On the other side: would natural regularity account for our behavior? Whence our disposition to respond similarly? There is still a logical leap in counting numerically distinct objects howsoever similar as "the same", as members of a class, tokens of a type, or exemplars of a property. We must still deem them the same.
I think it comes down to the nature of abstraction, and to what we ignore. A bee is attracted to a certain sort of flower, not to some one particular flower. Nature operates with types. But what does that mean? The bee must still sup from a particular flower rather than a type of flower. The particular flower has to have certain properties and the rest -- its exact height, position, blah blah blah -- are ignored. The required properties in turn must fall in some range, rather than having one specific value.
Sorry to ramble, but I find types thoroughly confounding.
If I've read you and SEP right on the Myth of the Given, this is some kind of functionalism about predicates. Their meaning is some learned thing - a web of applications and mutually conditioning 'forms of life' and constituent habits - and not given in a relation between an abstract particular and a predicate. Severing predicate from abstract particular could be done with two emphases, I think. One is where you say abstract particular has no bearing on anything and is somewhat of a transcendental illusion (where words are seen as things, briefly), and one is where the abstract particular is not a transcendental illusion but is somewhere between a summary of information and just a representative of an equivalence class over predications.
I'd be interested if much philosophy was actually possible under the first case, or what it would consist in. On the one hand we have a rejection of predetermined significance undermining aprioristic reasoning - everything is only ever everything ceteris paribus -, on the other we have a constantly generated historical a-priori which accompanies all use of language. It's as if most reasoning proceeded on the basis of a bait and switch between learned stuff summarised and internalised and really existent abstractions. But it looks like a real relation between these two is denied? Dunno. I imagine this is similar to @apokrisis's perspective in some ways.
My inner nominalist keeps saying the problem is there's no such thing!
There are a lot of issues that bear a resemblance to this one: the debate in the social sciences over methodological individualism leaps to mind. The problem may not be so much with talking "as if" social groups have a kind of agency you know they really don't -- maybe that's just a harmless shorthand -- but with missing the mechanisms by which the actions of individuals add up to the "actions" of a group.
The suspicion, in a general way, would be that explanations that lean on abstractions in the wrong way are not explanations at all. What exactly happens when you turn up your recessor coils? They're more intense. Okay. More intense how? What does that actually mean? The answer better not be, now they have more intensity.
Another thought I had is substituting the idea of relation for the idea of predication. So, a red apple would be a particular relational complex comprising the apple, the light and the percipient. There would be no universal predicate redness unifying all the different red apples, but merely a set of "family resemblances" or relations.
'Larger than' would not be a predicate but a relation between two things of different size. And 'largeness' would not be a universal predicate but a set of family resemblances between all the entities which are larger than some other entities or benchmark. Resemblance itself would not be a universal predicate, but would consist in a set of "family resemblances" between all the things which resemble one another.
Oh. wait...a regress seems to be looming...but...maybe it's not the individual ideas themselves that can save us from the regress but the total network of ideas with all their family relations and resemblances. :grin:
You're saying the shorthand could lead to misconceptions. I don't have a degree in monsterology, but I assume it would be like asking what gets more humid when the relative humidity goes up. The partial pressure of water vapor gets higher I imagine. But what is pressure? Is there such a thing?
I am a meaning holist. So on the face of it, Sellars' move seems objectionably nominalist. It treats even wholes as always particular. But then it also look to says that wholes are not composed of general parts. So it may be a tactic for revealing the essential inversion that is at the heart of true holism.
Look at the parts and you discover the wholeness. Look at the whole and you discover the partness. Relations need relata, and conversely, relata need relations. Nominalist and Platonists both get it wrong to the degree that they can't give us a clear view of this reciprocal dynamic that maps the particular to the general, the general to the particular.
So what do I think about the reality of abstracta? I take the hierarchy theory view - as set out by Stan Salthe in particular. The abstract now becomes the regularities that persist, that become fixed, due to the semiotic effects of spatiotemporal scale.
So rather than abstracta being transcendent - either actually transcendent forms, as in Platonism, or transcendent constructs, as in nominalism - they are an immanent fact about a material world that has spatiotemporal scale, a world that is organised as a hierarchy of "cogent moments".
Salthe gives a simple model of how it works. Imagine a world of entities of similar size. Now imagine the same motifs or integrative processes being repeated freely at both smaller and larger sizes. We have our regular size blobs - the entities that are about the same size as us, and so they they look like other distinct things. But as these blobs grow larger and larger in relation to us, they begin to fill our field of view.
Eventually, a single blob is so large that it exceeds our vision and becomes the complete unchanging backdrop. It is everywhere at all times, so far as we are concerned. It is no longer particular, but completely general - simply due to spatiotemporal scale and the fact we are confined to a point of view concerning entities.
This creates the upper bound of a hierarchical world. Individuated particulars - even ones that are processes unfolding in space and time - eventually must turn into global generalities simply due to an unbounded growth that makes them too big to continue to be related to as individuated particulars.
So this is a model of how the abstract can, indeed must, arise in a world where entification is a thing, but also not an artificially bounded thing. If there is entification, it should freely be the case over all scales. As why not? And in that fact lies the corollary that scales of entification will eventually completely fill a point of view, crossing a relational event horizon so as to become a universalised property. A fact about the whole.
Then conversely, the same story applies when we look in the other direction - down towards the fractally shrinking scales of entification. Now the generic units that are composing existence are getting both smaller and more frantic. Their spatiotemporal integrative scale, or cogent moment, is becoming microscopic - from our point of view. Eventually it gets so small as to turn into a continuous blur, so far as we are concerned. It all gets too small for us to have a relation to it as a set of discrete elements.
So now we have a complementary realm of abstracta bounding our entified existence. Purely for immanent and natural reasons - the fact that we are observing things from a characteristic scale of entification - both largeness and smallness become the congealed bounds, the event horizons, which come to fix our existence.
We live within the holism of whatever is the spatiotemporal scale that is so large it completely fills our point of view. And also, we are supported by the solidity of the spatiotemporal scale that is so fast and busy that we can't slip between its cracks.
So the abstract is both emergent and real. And it lies in two complementary directions to the particularity or individuation we find all around us - at a similar enough scale of entification.
And of course this hierarchy theory story is Peircean.
The lower bound of reality is the fast/small scale of chance events or Tychism. The realm of the differences that no longer make a difference. The realm of the quantum indeed - when viewed from the distanced safety of the classical middlescale.
The upper bound of reality is the slow/large scale of inveterate habit, or the continuity of Synechism. Now difference is eliminated not by indifference or contingency, but by the growth of universal necessity. All other possibilities have been eliminated. We live within the one unbroken totality - as now general relativity aims to describe.
So to get back to meaning holism, my point is that nominalism vs Platonism is a very familiar dualistic battle. It seems one or other side needs to win.
Yet a pragmatist view - and Sellars is meant to be very close to Peirce, even if it seems to have come via Dewey - really ought to be able to home in on the reciprocality of parts and wholes. The point about local vs global, particular vs general, is that they are just the same thing - divided by an asymmetry of scale.
So ordinary language and predicate thinking wants to work from the bottom up, constructing holistic complexity from substantial parts. However we know that zoom in on the parts and they themselves will keep dissolving into further parts. It is only by keeping our proper distance - preserving the larger thing of the semiotic relation we have with them - that they will remain that solid blur protected by indifference. The predicate approach will function so long as we don't actually look down.
But equally, holism is suspect in its claims of being able to form its world from the top-down, just by the imposition of Platonic constraints of form and purpose. Zoom in on the wholeness and it will be revealed as in fact just another particular. We get the usual story of a totalising physical theory that instead explodes into an unbounded multiverse. Again, it is the semiotic relation that is the only thing holding everything together.
An accurate description of reality, a language that captures its structure in terms of particulars vs generals, has to learn how not to treat the global as a Platonic reality, but just an event horizon that - like a mirage - exists because we are maintaining a suitable distance from it.
So holism - of this kind - is irreducibly triadic. (Salthe did dub his model the basic triadic structure. His book on this - Evolving Hierarchical Systems - is essential reading.) We exist in world of stable objects - the medium-sized dry goods of a classical realm - because any instability is being regulated from both possible directions.
From below, the instability might grow more violent as the scale shrinks, but it also becomes so microscopic as to be indifferent - to us. The "partness" both increases and also ceases to matter.
And conversely, looking up, any instability disappears. Scale makes change too slow have an effect. For us, universal law becomes the rule - even though now this "wholeness" starts to look rather particular. It has become "everything that is the case". A singular totality that we can no longer rightfully decompose into predicate parts.
So when it comes to speech and its efforts to logically frame our experience of reality, we can see how it actually wants to target the critical instabilities of the world at our scales of interest. What gives us the most practical information is the distinctions that give names to the points where this instability~stability dynamic is poised right on its cusp.
Are we talking about a part or a whole? Well, what is most useful is to talk about entification which is right on the brink of going either way. As that is the kind of talk which gets at the actual deep structure of the world.
The relata are the stable elements, says reductionism. The relation is the instability, the potential transformation. But then conversely, all relata, all elements, are themselves not entities but processes, says holism. What is solid and eternal are the relations, the structure, the organisation.
Hmm. A contradiction or instead just complementary views? The same critical instability seen from opposite directions?
Sure we can dispense with predicates to emphasise one of the views. And then - which seems to be Sellars' intent - we discover the nominalism that can be found inside holism. Just as holism finds nominalism within itself when it does its own naming of abstracta, its own naming of absolute generalities.
Again, the art of language would be to be able to put a finger on the hinge points - the place where the interesting flips happen.
This horse is white. Whiteness is generic. Here we have put our finger on an instability that orientates us to the way the world really is in its game between what is necessary, what contingent, or what is general, what particular.
Entities both hang together and fall apart. Language - with a predicate syntax, yet also a sentential holism of interpretation - gets that.
Chomsky was at least right about the recursive hierarchical organisation of speech. The unit of comprehension is not the syntactic particle. It is already the irreducible thing of a semantic entity framed syntactically by an above and a below. It is a word phrase that is indifferent to finer distinction, and stabilised by the constraint of the larger meaning intended. The words are detailed or particular enough for ambiguity to be grammatically ignored, while the words are also bounded enough by the habits of whole sentence-making to count stably as a compositional semantic unit.
Zoom in or zoom out, and all this stability falls apart. But keep everything the right distance and it hangs together for long enough to achieve a pragmatic goal.
And that is meaning holism. The emergent stability which underpins entification.
Pressure is a nice example because statistical mechanics was invented for just this purpose, and would be one of the prime examples of explaining how an aggregate entity -- some given volume of a gas -- behaves based on understanding how its constituents behave, the many individual gas molecules. Sociologists and economists dream of being able to pull off something like that! (Full disclosure: just started reading Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior.)
We're headed rapidly toward stuff I don't understand. If you ask next what kinetic energy is, and whether there really is such a thing, I'll be shrugging.
Do you just type really fast, or are you in fact an AI?
Wow, that sounds fascinating.
Sarcasm?
Oh it's not technical at all. He's a far more accessible writer than Sellars, but then almost everyone is.
Man, I was just thinking the other day that I'd take an essay of Heidegger's over a page of Sellars anyday, stylistically speaking.
Also, you had me wondering when in the world Schelling wrote a book called 'Micromotives and Macrobehavior', but I figured it out eventually, lol.
[quote=sx]With respect to isomorphism, he even distinguishes between a 'first-order' isomorphism (where word mirrors thing) and a 'second-order' isomorphism in which what are correlated are patterns in the causal order, which language itself is part of. This is why he qualifies linguistic objects as natural-linguistic objects[/quote]
Ah yeah, the 'second-order isomorphism' sounds pretty close to what I had in mind. One analogy that comes to mind is user interfaces. They don't provide a simple 1:1 graphical translation of the underlying program (which is kind of hard to imagine), but are more like higher-order subprograms that orient the user and structure their interaction with it. That they able to do this means that the 'patterns' of the UI, however different from the underlying program, are still highly correlated with it.
Or I think so, I don't really know much about compsci
De-substantialisation might better be phrased as a closure of language use under any additional realization of language use. No other types of entities are generated or implicated from word use alone. This simultaneously undercuts concepts as abstract objects distinct from how they are used and transposes concepts as patterns of inherited language use.
Concepts aren't things, patterns in word use are, previous patterns promote words following other words causally - like discussing a topic and staying on topic. Nothing more is brought to bear on the word meanings other than their usage patterns - there's no instantiation from beyond speech except from what accompanies speech and remains unspoken.
What I'm interested in is do abstract objects still have some kind of function, or is it better interpreted as an abstracting process that somehow follows a real one. Also how do patterns of usage play a role in the theory - a 'pattern of usage' is a definite thing, 'patterns of usage' are not.
But ideally, I imagine, there is some kind of possible inheritance from a 'patterns of usage' to a 'pattern of usage'. The link between the two could be interpreted in a closed, 'flattened' way where 'patterns of usage' are only ever (negotiated, literally) demarcations between what can sensibly follow on from any given use of words and what cannot. The material basis of word use is what causes word to follow word, and this whole process - including the unspoken accompaniment which underpins words as contextualised islands of sense - loosely the 'meaning in the head' or the interpretation, or regularities in what regularities to apply... language is closed under this recursion and recombinant matching of what is part of use, and always-already part of use.
Or it could be interpreted in a 'bifurcated' way, where the play of abstract objects have their own distinct 'process' and constraints on sensible expression. Some kind of idealism or Platonism in the broad sense. If it's a 'subprocess' - this then names a game we play to organise and reference other games.
EG, when Devin Townsend screams 'Love is about control' as part of the song Love, it's quite clear what is conveyed, despite any metaphysical subtleties. We can also understand reifying word use dealing with abstract objects as concrete things. EG red implies coloured. No matter if this is a proxy for some other talk, the 'game of proxies' - of rule following for user interface specification to transpose into @csalisbury's analogy. I read you as suggesting Sellars has this flattened view, and there's some closure principle whereby words never 'summon' something beyond (like redness) into being through instantiation. This is a way of rendering language as a material process which is closed under operations of abstraction. Another analogy - a Kantian transcendental argument reveals something about (in broad terms) our mind because the kind of possibility dealt with is of impossibility to conceive otherwise. This is ok in some regards, but this can't play the role of a constraint on our minds, just a constraint on generation of concepts about it if done sensibly.
Sellars' arguments are conceptual themselves- so we have to be able to understand what is nominalised and why, and also what it would mean to speak contrariwise to this nominalism even when Sellars' account is true. Which means there should be some role for the dynamics of concepts to play - and I think this dynamism along with the flatness of language undercut the traditional role of the a-priori - you can't sneak up on language to get its back and take the a priori from behind, you're generating aspects of a priori by working through concepts philosophically, and this is just a special case of the closure of language use under abstractions of rule following. So arguments about conceptual dynamics are still conceptual dynamics, and take their cues from what patterns of language use have been about them before. So when Sellars says:
my bolding, I think Sellars' is giving an account of how a historical a-priori localises and is modified contextually. Background from Sparknotes' page on Foucault's 'The Archaeology of Knowledge' for those unfamiliar with the idea:
and positivities:
In the context of this thread, I'm thinking that abstract objects are at most part of discursive practices - stuff we do with language. Steps linking each abstract object to each other are moves in games with well known but modifiable rules and scoping contexts. The abstract objects themselves are nothing but their roles in the game, and reference to one is a kind of summary of its roles.
Archetypal abstract object - a group of symmetries of a square, what is it? Well, it's a bunch of interacting terms that let you rotate and mirror the square in a few ways. Where does that leave the square's area? Richer context - the area's invariant when you rotate and mirror it. Why's the area invariant when you rotate it? A bunch of theorems relating codifications of size of something (measures) with possible ways of changing the object (functions and derived actions). Why is the square a square? Eventually it comes down to how we've set it up and nothing more. It's a sufficiently stable and well demarcated bunch of roles to be a general thing - stuff hangs together. It's so stable that a square is formally a model of the symmetry group of a square, so the object doesn't have to come first once it's sufficiently well described - it becomes a satisfier of various patterns and roles.
The properties of the square might be 'out there', but they're 'out there' in terms of how we can sensibly play with notions of the square and make symbol follow symbol. Analogously, word follow word, exposition follow exposition.
This is a completely different question from how does the square in the above sense mirror 'real' squares, like blocks of flats in inner city grid iron. Part of that is that we built it that way. The thread topic might undermine word corresponding to world, like 'red' corresponding to redness or 'square' corresponding to square-properties, but there's probably another way of accounting for this mapping between what's out there and what's in here... An account of that mapping would still be in here, interestingly.
If I'm not speaking total garbage, anyway. :)
To be consistent, you'd have to say that all of the above is also true of concrete objects. Jupiter is nothing but a role. Or is it that "Jupiter" is part of a language game, but Jupiter is not? "The set of all non-elephants" is part of a game, but what about the set of all non-elephants?
Or am I speaking total garbage?
They're probably part of games in a different way. Real life is surprising, novel, resistant and unexpectedly crap or good.
So is Julie Taymor's work. Her Titus is an abstract object.
Doesn't a thing have to be linguistic in order to play a role in a language game? Abstract objects aren't linguistic.
Nice. The square is a manifestation of a symmetry-breaking. It is an abstract object in the sense of existing as a limit state. If we are going to tile a flat plane with regular (maximally symmetric) polygons, then - Platonically - there are only triangles, squares and hexagons that will satisfy that constraint.
So now I would draw attention to the difference between abstract objects - or emergent limit states - that we might deem natural and fundamental, vs those that are contingent or complex.
The Platonic puzzle is that both squares and horses could be considered as ideals or perfect forms - abstracta in Platonia. Yet clearly there is also some critical difference between mathematically general patterns or forms, and the kind of biological or cultural forms that seem perhaps archetypal, yet not in a fundamental way.
This is where pan-semiosis or an information theoretic perspective comes in.
The kind of abstracta that have fundamental force - that have true universal existence as limit states - would be the patterns of nature that involve the least structural information. Or in your terms, the rules of their games are simply the most general and inescapable that could be imagined.
So simpler than tiling a plane (which is a little bit special really) would be a universal object like a vortex. The universe at its most naked is a desire to entropify. And nature arranges itself so as to always maximise that outcome. The second law is the rule, and least action is the object of the game. A vortex emerges rather universally as the simplest form that can achieve that result. Among an infinity of possible flow patterns, the vortex is the limit state abstract object that does the job of satisfying this constraint the best.
Well, it gets more complex as nature is hierarchical in spatiotemporal scale. As when hexagonal convection currents first erupt to speed the cooling of a thin oil film - a Benard cell - the vortex is simply turbulence seen on a confined single scale of being. A bath drains with a spiral because as a physical system, there is already other fixed constraints impinging on its free dynamism. There is just the one little plughole a large body of water has to gurgle through.
But a system with minimal information, minimal fixed context, will express turbulent flow over all its possible scales of being. The system will become chaotic. Fractal. Scalefree. Its fluctuations will so lack constraint that those fluctuations no longer have any typical scale.
So when we get down to it, a square is still a fairly high level abstract object in having fixed constraints concerning its scale. A least constrained state - the state where an abstract object stands for some emergent Platonic limit on form - would be more like this kind of fractal notion of "cubic space tiling" ...
So if we want to talk about abstracta as being real, then symmetry maths is our best "game". It is the way we drill down through a story of contextual constraints, stripping away all the superficial or contingent ones - like the kind that might produce a horse - to arrive at the bare minimum of information needed to generate stable order.
Platonism works because there really is some fundamental basis to the very playing of "games of constraint". If objects are the inverse of their contexts - the emergent order that puts a concrete limit to the scope for disorder - then vortexes, fractal branching, and other dissipative patterns are the actual bedrock of physical existence. They are as near as it gets to "bare materiality" in terms of there being "necessary order".
So we have a baseline for abstracta. The patterns generated with Platonic inevitablity in dynamic situations with the least imaginable constraints. The games with the fewest given rules.
And from there - pan-semiotically - we build our way back up to contingent objects like horses and castles.
Horses and castles are also still - at the deepest physical level - just dissipative structures. Horses are nature's way of turning oats into shit, producing at least 80% waste heat along the way. Even castles require great effort and thus great friction and dissipation. As a focus for battles, they become a real magnet for entropic action - a man-made vortex for energy and materials.
But horses and castles are abstract objects - ideal limit state forms - in terms of what is now a complex environment. They are the inverse reflections of a world with the kind of history that has accumulated much information - like grassy, oaty, ecosystems; or feudal human cultures regularly in local conflict.
So what we have is an ontology that is dualistic in information theoretic fashion. The world is its material flows. But also its informational constraints. Reality emerges pan-semiotically because both information and entropy are completely, equally, real. One is not imaginary, the other the proper deal. And physics now makes that pan-semiotic fact centre stage.
Take a tornado - a vortex ripping across the prarie. The information part of the equation is the context that fixes its particular set of constraints in place. Or to put it more simply, everything that is a fact about the recent history of the weather.
Conventionally speaking, the tornado exists in the present. The critical instability that roars away right now is the "material object", the thing that we grant substantial ontic reality. Again conventionally, the past is no longer real as it is dead and gone. And even the future isn't real as it hasn't happened.
But the larger information theoretic view sees past and future as part of the triadic whole, and so also just as real. The past is real in that it actually shapes the current context in its every detail ... and the tornado is simply the limit state object that expresses the violent weatherbomb game which has been set up.
Likewise the future is real in the sense that it contains the entropic goal. Overall, the future is going to be the past left now in a more degraded or entropic state. In informational terms, a store of information is going to get dissipated. A world that was momentarily more complex - having built up some informational density in terms of a weatherbomb temperature gradient - will be left more simple, having got rid of the information of those very constraints.
If there was a town standing in the way of the tornado, that simplication will be evident in its materials winding up being more fractally distributed across the landscape. The man-made returned to a more natural symmetry.
So abstract objects are a story about contextual constraints. Constraints are information that produce material patterns. They produce the regularities of form that are stable material being - instabilty reduced to its dynamical limits.
And as such, there is a sliding scale from the universally necessary to the locally contingent.
Some forms - like vortexes and fractals - are so simple that they will appear everywhere. The most minimal information, or material history, is needed for them to be the manifest case.
While others like horses and castles still reflect these kinds of global symmetry-breaking games - principally the mandate of the second law. However they also are the product of far more elaborated histories - the contexts represented by ecosystems or cultures. They become real abstracta - optimal limit state answers - only in that more highly evolved or highly specified sense.
(All this, by the way, is why Stan Salthe had a dualistic stories on hierarchies. I earlier described the semiotics of hierarchies of entities. This is now the more sophisticated model that is a specification or subsumptive hierarchy in Salthe's jargon. This is now the infodynamic view.)
I think this is basically exactly it. One way I like to think of it is that all 'definitions' - whether of words, names, concepts or whathave you - are, at the end of the day, stipulative. This being the case even when we appeal to historical precedent, as when we say, 'this word means such and such because that's how it's always been used': the fact that we appeal to historical use is itself a stipulation: 'this is how I want you to treat the word/concept'. As you say, 'it comes down to how we've set it up and nothing more'.
And this is perhaps nowhere more true than in philosophy itself, which can perhaps be called the ars conceptualis par excellance, in that one generates concepts which allows one - or rather commits one - to parsing the world in such and such a manner, and milking that parsing to see what falls out, as it were. And this is of a piece with Sellars' basic move in his rejection of the given, which is basically the idea that the sensual order has intelligible or propositional form. In rejecting this idea, the question is then how then to track aspects of the real using a process (i.e. language) which does not mirror that real. And it's the recourse to stipulation - with whatever attendant commitments that follow from any such stipulation - that allows one to do that.
I don't know. Golf and sex are similar because one should never confuse holes.
How does more stipulation do that?
No, that's not what I had in mind at all. But let me rephrase the whole argument in order to make it clearer.
The first thing to notice is that the existence of "Jumblese" is not an argument for nominalism, since the mere existence of a language with certain features can't be considered decisive when choosing between rival ontologies, as, presumably, these rival ontologists could all craft a language suited to their needs (so, e.g., someone who did not believe in objects, but only in properties, could use Quine's predicate functor language). Hence, there must be a further argument as to why we should think that Jumblese is better suited to our ontological needs.
One such an argument is that its (supposed) ontological commitments are more parsimonious. So theories couched in Jumblese would be more "economical" than theories couched in a more expressive language, say the first-order predicate calculus. Of course, parsimony, as a virtue, does not trump all other considerations. We want to, say, do science in such a language. Is that possible at all? I contend that it's not.
For one, notice that Jumblese is very good at translating atomic predicates. So, given a (finite?) list of atomic predicates, we could in principle introduce a new graphical convention to express each predicate in the list. But we don't want to work with only atomic predicates: there are also predicates defined by complex logical expressions. A typical example is continuity: a function f is continuous at a point b iff for every e>0, there is d such that for every x in the domain of f, if |x-b|
This is a typical challenge to the defender of a nominalist language: to show that it is adequate not just for run-of-the-mill atomic predicates or sentences, but that it can also capture complex scientific language. As far as I know, the only philosopher who took that challenge seriously was Hartry Field, in Science Without Numbers. There, he showed how to nominalize Newtonian mechanics; his nominalization involved an ontology of continuum many spatio-temporal points and many logical resources, as well as "platonistic" resources in proving that the non-nominalistic theory is conservative over his nominalist one. I'm not entirely sure what is the advantage of trading an ontology of abstract objects and properties for continuum many spatio-temporal points. Regardless, notice that he was able to do that solely for Newtonian mechanics. He didn't even attempt to face the challenge of developing a similar nominalization for quantum mechanics, and as far as I know most people are skeptical that this is possible.
Of course, one can then simply say: well, so much the worse for our scientific theories! If they do not employ a nominalistically acceptable language (if they are not formulated in Jumblese), then they do not accurately reflect our preferred ontology and, in spite of their usefulness, they should be taken with a grain of salt, to say the least. But then comes my argument: the nominalist herself is not employing a nominalistically acceptable language, when, e.g., formulating Jumblese. Notice that Sellars, for instance, talks about sentence types when setting up the translation of "X is above Y" in Jumblese---presumably, he is not talking about a translation of a particular inscription of "X is above Y", but a translation of the sentence itself. And that is my point: although perhaps Jumblese itself is free from commitment to properties, our metalanguage when talking about Jumblese is not. So the only way of avoiding reference to types is to use Jumblese itself as its own metalanguage. But I don't see anyone doing this.
Exactly, that was part of my point. It is because language is this messy that reference to types is unavoidable. A typical nominalist strategy to do away with types is to employ a resemblance relation between the tokens, and explain reference to types as really being reference to a resemblance between particulars. As you yourself noted, however, this is impossible, because many tokens of the type bear little resemblance at all to each other. So the nominalist's explanaton is implausible.
Incidentally, I don't disagree with anything else in our post.
I think there's a misunderstanding here. It is not the case that jumbelese is better suited to our ontological needs. Ordinary language is fine enough. All jumblese is is a pedagogical tool - Sellars uses it to show what is already at work in expressions like f(a) or [Apple is red]. Jumblese isn't doing anything that ordinary language isn't already doing, it just makes what it is doing more obvious. Let's use Sellars' own example(s). He asks us to consider two expressions, both of which express the same thing, the first in ordinary language, the second in jumbelese:
(1) Red a
(2) A
Here is Sellars: "it must be stressed that nothing in or about (2) is doing the job done in (1) by 'red.' Obviously the fact that (2) is in a certain angular style is essential to the semantical role that it is playing. But that fact does not do the job done in (1) by 'red.' Rather it does the job which is done in (1) by the fact that 'a' is concatenated to the left with the token of the word 'red.'" (my bolding). That is, even in (1), the predicate qua predicate isn't doing anything. Jumblese simply makes clear what is already going on in expressions with predicates. Perhaps to really understand what's going on, it's worth briefly going through Sellars' theory of meaning, which expressly invokes both types and metalanguage... in a particular way. Here is an expression:
(3) 'Rouge' means red.
How does Sellars read this? He reads this as correlating the function of an unfamiliar word ('rouge' in French) with the function of a familiar word ('red' in English). The focus on functions is crucial and tells us that 'red' in (3) is not being used in a normal way, but in a metalinguistic manner: it is functioning as what Sellars calls a 'illustrative sortal', where a sortal is, roughly, a 'count word'. To make this clearer, Sellars will reformulate (3) as:
(4) 'Rouge's' (in F) are 'red''s (in E).
(3) and (4) exhibit and show how 'rouge' functions, it does not say the meaning of 'rouge'. So much for 'red'. 'Rouge', in turn, is also functioning in a metalinguistic manner, but instead of an illustrating sortal, it functions as what Sellars refers to as a 'distributive singular term' (DST). A DST functions like the expression 'the lion' in the sentence 'the lion is dignified': the singular term 'the lion' refers distributively to particular lions existing in space and time: hence, a distributive singular term. So what you have with (3/4) is a correlation of two types of metalinguistic functions: the correlation of a distributive singular term ('rouge') with an illustrating sortal ('red'):
(5) DST :: Illustrating Sortal
The purpose of all this wrangling is to show that what are being correlated here are particular linguistic tokenings rather than abstract linguistic types. There is, in other words, a kind of short-circuit between types and tokens, insofar as meaning is a matter of illustrating functions 'all the way down'. At every point you simply have exemplars. Functions are exemplified by other functions, and at no point do you reach a 'hard-core' of 'fact'; instead you simply have (particular) linguistic objects correlated to other (particular) linguistic objects and whose rules of correlation are themselves functions of uniformities of behaviour by language using animals.
I'm apologize for the density of this presentation, but I've tried to fit a theory of meaning in three paragraphs! The point of all this wrangling is that for Sellars, language already functions in the way that jumbelese does: it is already free from commitment to properties. Jumbelse just makes it easier to 'see'.
That looks a whole lot like what others would call the extension of the predicate "... is a lion."
I wonder if there's a place here for the medieval distinction Lewis revives in Convention:
(Lewis will argue that the expectations that underwrite convention are primarily general in sensu diviso.)
And this is where we disagree. As I said, Jumbelese can (perhaps) handle simple translations for atomic properties, but what about logically complex properties? How do you represent the property of "for every e>0 there is d such that for every x if |x-a| < d then |f(x) - f(a)| < e"? That is, how do you represent the iterated quantifiers and the implication sign?
In other words, in the case of "a is red", it may be the case that, as you say, the predicate is not doing any job. But what about in cases in which it is doing a job, such as in the case above? Or even in cases in which we quantify over properties, such as (to use a random internet example) "Alice is everything that Bill hopes to be"?
Quoting StreetlightX
But here you end up with the problem I pointed out before. What is it that makes it the case that this particular inscription is a token of, say, rouge? What binds all the tokens of rouge together in a single class? Notice that, if you are a nominalist about properties, you can't even invoke any property that all the tokens share; are we supposed to just take that as a brute fact?
But what role does the type play in determining whether two given inscriptions are (intended to be) tokens of the same type? We can imagine an effective procedure for comparing two inscriptions directly and determining whether (following some community standard, ignoring differences of typeface, for instance) they're intended to be the same.
Type plays no role in the comparison. How could it? If it were necessary instead to compare each inscription to an abstract type, rather than comparing them directly to each other, then we would seem to need some meta-type to enable comparing the given token to a type. We'll never get there.
That just leaves the examples that involve talking about things in some general way. Some of the standard examples can be readily dealt with as a kind of shorthand (where we're in essence just talking about extensions), and eliminated, at least for countable domains. That just leaves the mathematical examples that even Quine, great foe of second-order logic, thought required sets as first-class objects.
Math is always the odd case.
Whatever all the objects on the table might be, we're rarely tempted to count as objects, just like those, the various sets of objects we could conjure. (So that instead of three objects there would be eight?) Whatever sets are, they're different.
Hey, sorry, I didn't mean to ignore this, I just literally only had time to make one reply the other day! As an immediate point I think yes, any attempt to treat the language-world relation in the way Sellars does would require - I'd prefer maybe to say entail - a particular theory of truth. Sellars only deals with truth in a relatively schematic way in the book I'm referring to (I'm not super familiar with his work outside of it, although I am reading Science, Preception, and Reality right now!), so I can only sketch an approach.
As far as I understand - which is not far - the very concept of truth for Sellars cannot be thought of outside of the normative rules that govern what might be called 'games of truth'. At the very least this implies that the truth of a statement is not only given by the fact that it corresponds to some state-of-affairs (as he puts it: "This connection of features of 'a is triangular' with ought-to-bes suggest that the truth of 'a is triangular' is itself an ought-to-be"). There needs to be something 'in language' as well (and not just 'in the world') which enables statements to be true. This 'something' is what - I think - Sellars calls 'semantic assertibility' where "the specific varieties of truth-in-L, e.g., true atomic sentence of L, would arise from the varieties of criteria for the semantical assertibility of specific kinds of sentence in L".
Exactly how to think about semantic assertibility and it's role in enabling truth is something I'm somewhat fuzzy on right now. At best though, I just want to say that truth is definitely at issue here, and it isn't foreclosed by a nomianlist approach to predicates.
I suppose I don't quite understand how (S) is a property, at least in the sense that 'redness' or 'triangularity' might be a property. I honestly mean this out of sheer ignorance - what is the subject of that property (the iterability is confusing me! - I'm much better at natural language than math)? How do you make sense of (S) as a property?
Quoting Nagase
Surely it's the fact of it being asserted to be so. This might be a disappointing answer but I really think that's it: consider the case of one misspelling (as I used to do alot!) rogue and rouge, where I meant to say rouge. Where someone to call me out on it, where it's obvious that I mean to use rouge (esp. in the context of 'rogue [sic] is red'), my immediate response would be something like 'oh shut up you pedant and deal with the point at hand'.
This is why I've insisted so strongly upon the fact of exemplarity at work here: examples are neither tokens nor types, but are, as it were, tokens that assert their own typicality. To put it in a strong manner: everything is exemplary: the very capacity to assert something as token or type is parasitic or derivative upon exemplifying a token as a token or type as type (each typically in relation to each other of course...). This is why I particularly like Sellars' example of { 'und' (in German) means 'and' } where the first thing he points out is that 'and' is obviously not functioning here as a sentential connective, before going on to point out that this sentence "doesn't merely tell us that 'und' and 'and' have the same meaning; it in some sense gives the meaning." In truth I think that even thinking in terms of tokens and types as anything other than useful shorthand or tools for conceptual organisation is philosophically dangerous and should be kept to a minimum.
One interesting thing about Sellars, in this regard, is that - again, as far as I understand it, and I'm still working through it - he actually takes perception to be modelled after lingustic categories. So to perceive something [I]as[/i] something, is already to operate in the space of reason and conceptuality, and thus in a cognitive or intentional capacity. Thus Sellars distinguishes sharply - in a Kantian manner - between perceiving and sensing, where only the former belongs to the conceptual order. Like truth then, I think Sellars will argue that our very perceptual forms will in-form what it is that we perceive in a way that is not just 'out there' So there's definitely a connection to your concerns here, although I can only trace it somewhat elliptically.
This is an interesting example, as the formulation of the epsilon-delta definition of continuity was, historically, an answer to various problems about limits.
Initially, limits were implicit in Newton and Leibniz in their treatment of differentials - fluxions and the dy we know today both manifest as limiting phenomena. At this phase of conceptual development they were just implicit, and famously criticised by Berkeley (and less famously criticised by Marx in the mathematical manuscripts). Treated as a quantity which is 0 at some points in a derivation and nonzero at other points.
After this, while the level of mathematical precision required for pure mathematics still allowed definitions in plain text, you end up with things like this:
Euler's understanding of continuity is now equivalent to the intermediate value property - the old idea that a continuous function is a function which can be drawn without lifting the pen from the page.
The modern one is Weirstrass', as you posted. Darboux proved that the intermediate value property does not imply continuity by constructing a pathological counterexample. See Darboux functions. This level of precision then allowed the construction of the modern notion of continuity - as an instance of topological continuity. There's thus a construction like P(x) for continuity of x, which while being equivalent to x being continuous in the sense you wrote (Weirstrass'), you can now simply write:
[math]P(x) \Leftrightarrow x \in \boldsymbol{C}(\mathbb{R})[/math]
to cast it in that form. I imagine a similar trick would work for every logically complex property - by transposing its logical vocabulary into set form (which is always possible up to the objects being too big).
If the difficulty you're highlighting is with regard to predicates requiring higher order quantification, I imagine that this is an obstacle in terms of details rather than one which refutes the central idea Street's been expositing.
Reference on the history of limits which tells roughly this story with greater historical refinement
The subject of the property in question ("being continuous at point a") is a (real valued) function, say f. Continuity at a point is a property of functions, and a rather important one at that. Be that as it may, my point was the following. Jumblese can handle well simple properties, which are generally represented by atomic predicates. But there are other kinds of properties, complex properties, which are not represented by atomic predicates. A more prosaic example may be the following: x is soluble iff if x is put into water, then x dissolves (this is a very rough characterization of solubility---a more exact approach would need to use counterfactuals and ceteris paribus clauses, but bear with me for the moment). The property of being soluble is not an atomic property, but a complex one, since it is structured. My point is: Jumblese cannot capture this internal structure of the property.
Quoting StreetlightX
But in the example at hand, you're grounding the type-token relation on the intention of the speaker/writer to use the relevant type. So the type is (again) explanatory prior to token, and in fact it must exist, for how else would you intend to write it? You can't intend to write a non-existent thing!
Quoting StreetlightX
Well, I'm of the complete opposite opinion: I think types, and abstract objects more generally, are indispensable and that nominalism is a bankrupt approach.
I think you're misreading the problem here. The point is not that the type itself explains the relationship between its tokens. Rather, it is that in order to explain the relationship between the tokens, we will generally have recourse to some type, though not necessarily the type of which they are tokens. More generally, we will need at the very least to invoke some properties (of the token, of the linguistic system, of the community, whatever) to explain this relationship, so I don't think a nominalist about properties can get around this challenge.
I strongly disagree with this statement. I actually think the opposite is true: by paying attention to the history of mathematical concepts, we see that they emerged not because we "made it just so", but were rather forced on us by the nature of the entities in question and the problems surrounding them. To my mind, mathematical entities form natural kinds, and the most fruitful mathematical definitions (such as continuity) capture the structure of those kinds.
That's not the difficulty I'm highlighting. Yes, we can use "tricks" to introduce atomic predicates to stand for logically complex one---but that has nothing to do with the complexity of the properties in question. In fact, my point was in the opposite direction: a property does not become less complex just because you can symbolize it with a simple expedient. Notice that this has nothing to do with higher order quantification.
Can you take another run at this? This says that to explain the relationship between tokens we will generally have recourse to something that does not itself explain the relationship. The only sense I can make of that is that objects don't talk, people do.
What would you say about the ontology of abstract objects? Why is math a valuable tool for describing the world?
I don't know how you got that out of what I said. There are a number of approaches to explaining the type-token relationship. You can do it the way you originally proposed, by exploiting action types. You can do it Bromberger's way and exploit properties which are projectible across the type. You can try to exploit structural properties shared by the tokens and which figure in certain scientific explanations. There are a myriad of strategies, but all strategies which I know of exploit the existence of types (e.g. action types) and properties (e.g. projectible properties), and hence are incompatible with nominalism.
I'm not sure what you want me to say about the ontology of abstract objects. I don't hold any systematic views on the topic (e.g. I don't know if they are grounded on equivalence relations, as proposed by neo-Fregeans, or if they are more fundamental). I do however hold a very generous ontology of abstract objects, and I also don't think that the usual way of distinguishing them from concrete objects is all that useful---I think that some abstract objects (say, works of art and fictional characters) exist in time, for instance.
As for the unreasonable effectiveness of math, I'd say that math is effective because it carves natures at its joints. It describes types of objects and structures that are natural. These objects and structures then play (at least) a double role in describing the world: (a) some mathematical structures constrain the space of possibility, thus effectively ruling out some possibilities from happening (if you adopt a Stalnaker-like approach to inquiry, this means that part of our knowledge is won by eliminating some worlds from the space of possibility); (b) relatedly, some mathematical structures are instantiated in the physical world, so their physical instantiations inherit their mathematical properties (e.g. groups).
I didn't want you to say anything in particular. I was just curious about your opinion. Thanks!
Maths bit.
This isn't meant as a refutation, it's an honest series of questions to see if you've got any internal distinctions between 'mathematical kinds'.
Are transfinite cardinals or ordinals natural kinds? Are categories natural kinds? What about partially ordered sets or finite fields?
I suppose I just don't see how they could be anything but man made, in response to a history of problems and the conceptualisation of new problems. I quite like the idea that 'natural kind' as a type is part of the discursive play of concepts, same with the type-token distinction. All of these are part of the self annihilating critical battery of philosophical abstractions.
From a modern perspective, mathematicians like Euler and Fourier would have gotten away with their 'intermediate value property = continuity' blunder/equivocation because continuity, differentiability and the IVP apply to most of the interesting functions these mathematicians studied. It was only after the axiomatisation of these properties that you get pathologies like the Weirstrass W function and these Darboux ones. It's tempting to read the history like that, but it's very retrojective.
I prefer to read it as the evolution of a concept whose boundaries are fuzzy - something like a composite of continuity/differentiability/IVP - becoming more demarcated when the level of mathematical precision was elevated through the emphasis on axiomatisation. I don't see what insisting that mathematical objects are real does to help someone actually doing/teaching maths (the community thereof + history is where mathematics comes from).
Now for the other bit.
If the questions is 'what makes the tokens stick together in the type' - why isn't 'they're used together with some commonalities between them' a sufficient answer? Something like 'I see red' and 'I see red', if there's an underlying redness it better also reference anger; 'red' is a lot more complicated than 'redness' in the colour. Where do you get the ontological or epistemic resources to glue tokens together relationally? Also, how's this furnished through there being an abstract object or natural kind to save us and instantiate itself?
The same thing would apply for continuous functions; in demarcating a collection of functions from other functions there's an equivalence between partitions of this space -into discontinuous and continuous- and that property of continuousness, so 2 functions are equivalent iff they are both continuous. That gives the partition, and they all represent it as exemplifiers and generalities - representative of class and class.
The question becomes how are the representatives taken as representatives, and how are two things related to each other (this is probably related to the sortal idea).
Edited for clarity, did my usual 'leave a sentence fragment' error.
Not the intention, the fact of it being asserted to be so (and not: 'the fact of it being asserted to be so').
Quoting Nagase
I need to respond to this in more depth in a bit, but I don't see why this would pose any problem, in principle, to a treatment in terms of metalinguistic illustration: there is a way of speaking about an x, such that, when the thing so designated an x dissolves in water, we call x soluble. And to learn this way of speaking, is to understand just that language game involving certain rule-governed correlations between linguistic and non-linguistic objects.
Is this an absolute difference in kind?
The complexity of solubility, in the example above, comes out in its being defined --- which is to say it comes out in explication. Another way to put it: If I make a 'move' in a language game calling some x soluble, I thereby implicitly approve of other, more complex moves about x. Explication is only possible given a previous, implicit, familiarity. You can only define or explicate something if you're already in some way familiar with it. Knowing how 'soluble' is used - knowing, through exposure to patterns of language, what things can or can't be said of x after it has been established that 'x is soluble' - this then allows one to approve or disapprove of more complex elaborations.
For instance, as @fdrake's example draws out (I think)- we've only been able to so precisely define what it means for a function to be continuous through a process of explication based on implicit familiarity. @Nagase is right, I think, that we're led to this definition by the object (?) itself, but we're only able to do so if we have a pre-explicit understanding of continuousness. In other words: For a mathematician to recognize a new formulation of 'continuousness' as valid, they have to compare what they've been tracking by the term 'continuous' with what this new formulation tracks. The scope can't be too wide or narrow. It's only because we already 'know' what it means for a function to be continuous, that we can recognize a new formulation as accurate, even illuminating. (There's a kind of meno thing going on here)
But isn't this true of any property, even the simplest ones?
The 'internal structure' isn't really 'internal' - it's laid out in patterns of usage and webs of explication.
In other words: Any property is susceptible of being indicated through a simple notation, and any property also harbors a complexity which comes out in explication and usage (I think that's the significance of the 'myth of the given' - things aren't simply 'given' because to know what something is requires having some minimal ability to explicate)
As I suggested in an earlier post, all properties (predicates) are really relations, and relations may be more or less complex, of course. Seeing predicates as relations dissolves the problems with predication that Sellars is trying to address, as far as I can see. I agree with @Nagasse in that I don't believe any form of nominalism can provide an adequate solution.
Quick thought. When we say 'the apple is red' we don't mean 'the apple is red to me.' If Tom, god bless him, were to see the apple, he'd see red as well. But we also don't mean by 'the apple is red' 'the apple is red to tom and me'. The relation as you describe it, above, is a relationship between three 'things' (for lack of a better word). But the relation of 'is red', if it is a relation, doesn't involve any particular percipient. (Though, of course, a particular percipient is required to stand in front of a red apple in order to say, to their loved one, 'listen babe, this apple is red'. By which I mean: the meaning of the sentence and the conditions required for someone to say it are two different things)
I don't know if that really means anything significant, or is relevant to the conversation at hand, but figured I'd throw it out there. (tho it does kinda echo Sellars' short fable about colors and ties in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind)
You both may very well be right, I'm not sure, but I don't understand the connection between this statement and predication as relation. The way you formatted the post suggests they're related, but I'm missing something. If anything, your discussion of predication-qua-relation seems anti-universals.
Quoting csalisbury
The funny thing about the "atomic" is that it is not the ultimately simple. It in fact represents the complexity of a dichotomy. The atomic is both maximally located - point-like in space - and also of maximal duration - unchanging until the end of time.
So the invocation of atomism is often a metaphysical sleight of hand. We ought to be talking about events, instances, accidents or fluctuations if we want to drill down to the simplest localised spatiotemporal existents. An atom already has to explain why it endures in "uncuttable" forever fashion.
If reality is indeed a web of relations, then what preserves the individual identity of some located entity? It has to be something else that is going on.
So the very idea of the atom is irreducibly complex. It binds together two extremes of being in being both spatially local yet temporally unbounded.
Hence a good reason why logical atomism came unstuck. A logical holism - a logic of relations - is needed because the story is irreducibly complex. As I've already argued, following Peirce, a logic of relations is indeed irreducibly triadic or hierarchical.
To stabilise real atoms, they must be in causal relation with a void. Old school atomism of course treated the void as a second a-causal backdrop - not really a relational thing. But modern physics has found that it actually does require causal relations between its local excitations and its global spatiotemporal frameworks.
Again, where reality goes, logic ought to try to follow. :)
This is gonna bring things far afield, but I'm interested.
I can't say much of anything about physics, because I don't know much of anything about physics. My hunch is the research probably bears out what you're saying. I'm just gonna approach conceptually what you've thrown down conceptually, to see if you can help me untie some conceptual knots.
My feeling is that when people naively resort to atomism, the whole maximally-located, maximally-durable thing is exactly what they mean by 'simple'. I mean any term, right, has to include its opposite and differentiate itself from it. The very act of trying to locate some 'simple' necessarily takes place in non-simple discursive space (for lack of a better term). The spirit driving the search for the simple, I think, is one that sees anything less-than-maximally located or less-than-maximally-enduring as relying on things that are maximally-located, maximally-enduring. It says this (everything) comes from that.
[quote=apo]An atom already has to explain why it endures in "uncuttable" forever fashion.[/quote]
'has to explain.' Does it? So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing. Does it have to explain itself or not? and, if not, why not? It just is? The world is messy and complex and all sorts of weird stuff etc etc, but, if you look it it the right way, looking for the fundaments, then maybe eventually you end up with Peirce. I'm not sure. But what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship.
"it already has to explain."
Why?
Yep, commonsense would tell you that the world is composed of substantial parts. It is a very natural starting supposition - especially for humans who specialised in constructing things.
And atomism is an especially convincing idea once you have the mathematics to show that there are such things as the simplest forms - little spheres. Or the Platonic solids.
So matter is already ultimately simple in being located generalised "stuff". And mathematical form tells you the simplest possible shapes of that stuff.
It is all so superficially attractive as an understanding of basic simplicity. And I am emphasising how logic has simply echoed that metaphysics - even to the point of winding up calling itself atomistic. A calculus of objects with properties, rather than a matrix of relations with emergent regularities.
Quoting csalisbury
Yes, we should expect dichotomies as soon as we start asking fundamental questions.
Matter vs form already reveals itself in atomism. It was the way to unite the two aspects of reality in some kind of ultimate simplicity. Atomism is convincing as you had the simplest matter in its simplest forms. And then the causation was divided so that atoms owned all the change, the void was an a-causal backdrop.
Quoting csalisbury
Again yes. But is this really the simplest ontology of development?
I am contrasting the atomist conception - where for no reason, the world starts with a bunch of balls in motion in a void - with a Peircean-style ontology where there is less than nothing at the beginning. Beginnings are vague - just unbound fluctuation without a relational organisation. There are no meaningful elements to get a game going. These meaningful elements have to evolve out of the murk via bootstrapping self-organisation.
And this is the new physical view of reality. Atoms only exist because the Cosmos expanded and cooled. Protons last forever (or near enough) because the Universe eventually got too cold to melt them.
So the fact that localised matter can endure is an emergent property, not an inherent one. Physics has proved that. Even a point particle like an electron only endures until it meets its anti-particle, a positron, and the two disappear back into the radiative void in a puff of energetic symmetry-restoration.
Metaphysically, physics is showing that the localised does not endure except due to a global thermal accident. Everything would be merely an event, a fluctuation, if it weren't for the way that some of the cosmic radiative crud didn't get trapped for a while as localised atomistic matter. Wait a while and it is all going to get fizzled back the Heat Death end of the Universe. The true simplicity of smeared-out events will be restored to Nature.
Quoting csalisbury
Of course it must explain itself. And the point is that it does. It is as near to a bootstrap ontology as human metaphysics has imagined.
So pragmatically, it is the metaphysics that works. And it is a metaphysics that arose out of Peirce's foundational contributions to logic. That is what I am drawing attention to. The bootstrap Cosmos expresses a bootstrap logic.
This is not arbitrary. This is delivering on the Platonic promise that logical atomism couldn't fulfil. This is about the form or relational structure that was always inevitable and so foundational to existence.
Instead of taking the commonsense approach - believing in uncuttable matter and wondering what would be the simplest form it could take - this is instead going direct to the principles of symmetry and symmetry-breaking themselves.
A sphere is as simple as it gets as a form. But why is that exactly? What context, what unbounded set of possible relations, makes that so?
From there, it is a simple flip to see the endurance of spherical atoms as instead the universal confinement of excitations by thermal symmetry-breaking. Electrons persist as local features because they can no longer self-annihilate back to a vaguer radiative state.
And they are not spheres but point particles. Or rather, they are no longer any kind of located material being at all but simply chiral twists in the vacuum fabric of reality. They are trapped knots of broken symmetry that can't untwist any more.
So physics has gone right through the mirror and reflected through to the other side. It has gone from hard material spheres, through point particles with no external material presence at all, all the way to purely formal strings or loops which are representations of mathematical symmetries, not material things at all.
Analytic metaphysics is catching up on this shift with its Ontic Structural Realism. It is what has happened. Reality is being explained by the inevitability of mathematical structure, not by the mystery of material substance. Symmetry-breaking principles tell us why the primal state of things - an unbounded sea of fluctuations - would evolve a stabilising structure of final habits.
Quoting csalisbury
Well, it works better. So at worst, it is the least infected metaphysics.
I mean atomism works - for us at our very cold and large classical state of being. We are only a couple of degrees above absolute zero and so near enough to a Heat Death.
But physics is about seeing the bigger picture. And atomism melts away as you return towards the initial conditions of the Big Bang. It will even radiate away when the Cosmos does finally reach its Heat Death, with even protons and electrons being fizzled to cosmic background radiation by dying super-massive blackholes. So atomism is, at best, a passing phase of complexity in the great journey from one form of maximum simplicity to - reciprocally! - its other form of maximum simplicity.
(You can't say that physics ain't completely precise about these things. :) )
Quoting csalisbury
It is a fair point that this cosmology/logic needs still some kind of base of initial conditions. The argument on that is the Peircean view - which is built on a Vagueness, a Firstness, an Apeiron, as the least imaginable kind of starting point. A Vagueness is literally less than nothing - nothingness simply being a void, and a void being ... a hole, a concrete absence, in some thing.
So yes, the focus is on the engine of structure creation - a triadic relation. But the problem of a starting condition is not denied. The claim is that it becomes the least concrete kind of starting point that could be imagined. The achievement of a Peircean approach is to do the most to minimise this aspect of the Cosmic mystery ... while also managing to shed the most light on the engine of structure creation that explains everything the Cosmos has then become.
Hmmm. You seem to be working your way up to "The apple is red to speakers of English," which is not only not an unreasonable thing to say, but just the sort of thing people say when teaching a language.
Not if you just assert that the apple is red to speakers with a shared neurology. No need to take things to the Whorfian extreme on colour perception.
The thing I really wanted to focus on was the "has to explain" part. As in "An atom already has to explain why it endures in "uncuttable" forever fashion."
So we can easily trip up the atomists by saying that their search for an explanation failed by their own lights - they stopped too soon, and without realizing that they were being false to their own, implicit, ontological/methodological directives.
What is an explanation? would be another way of going about this. How does something explain something else? And why do we think what we talk about when we talk about explanation is baked into the structure of everything?
When you talk about Peirce, it seems like you're talking about the terminal state of a certain way of looking at things. It seems quite refined, and finished. But why should I think this represents a core metaphysical truth rather than a completed way of thinking about the world? The final formalization of 'explanation' maybe.
[quote=apo]The achievement of a Peircean approach is to do the most to minimise this aspect of the Cosmic mystery[/quote]
That's a sad achievement though, isn't it? Why would that minimisation be an 'achievement'? What's left, after that achievement? But to trumpet the achievement? louder at first, then softer. But trumpeting nonetheless. because there's nothing left anymore, but to....
I just can't get on board with the Whorf-Sapir thing. I know there's still controversy, but I like to think of it as refuted for color perception.
I think LW had a bit about "Because I speak English" being a perfectly good answer to "How do you know that's red?" A little like Austin answering "How do you know that tree is real?" with "Well, it's not fake."
In one sense this is just annoying, a sort of pretended obtuseness. So my reasonable sentence above ("This is red to speakers of English") turns out to be an explanation of how the word "red" is used, not an explanation of how perception works.
But I have some residual affection for this move, and I think it might be because it is sort of anti-Whorfian. There's a presumption that whoever you are and wherever you're from, you can't really be struggling with the concept of [red], so you must need help with the word "red". (There's something else here but I can't quite put my finger on it. Will mull ...)
My hunch is that the peircian engine only explains itself, and casts the whole world in a way that makes it fit. It's supple that way. Even that which exceeds it, gets brought back in the fold. But why does it have to keep demonstrating itself, as if compelled to?
and if youre smart to boot, really perfect that hammer
then
Well, the argument is that metaphysical reasoning says it is one thing or the other. Either the stability the material parts is fundamental, or instead it is their dynamism that is fundamental. So we have two competing hypotheses. And we would ask which delivers the more complete ontology we are seeking?
So both views have something they must explain. A foundational assumption of stasis has to then account for the possibility of flux. An assumption of foundational dynamism has to then account for the emergence of stability.
I was saying no more than that.
Except that atomism also has to explain how the void could arise, how its localised form would endure, etc. It is already a complex ontology. And as I say, in particular, folk take the unwarranted view that to endure forever unchanged is something natural and not in need of explanation.
Quoting csalisbury
But I also say that the world - at the very cold and expanded scale that supports our own being in the Cosmos - is fairly accurately described by atomism. As an ontology, it really works for us.
It is only because we can no go deeper in terms of the observable that we might want to reconsider - get back to the kind of holistic ontologies we have been ignoring since Anaximander.
Quoting csalisbury
Isn't terminal the new foundational here? And the reason I see Peirce as metaphysically complete is the ontology is the epistemology. He started with the logic, the reasoning method, that makes the world intelligible to us. And then realised that the same logic was what made the Cosmos intelligible to itself - the way it developed its own rational state of being.
So it is an epistemology that works as that is how the ontology itself works. And we "know" that because modelling the reality that way is what works.
Neither our minds, nor the Universe itself, could escape the essential simplicity of the symmetries of a sphere. Neither epistemology, nor ontology, gets a choice about what we discover to be the mathematical or rational strength essentials of existence.
Now many folk don't like that kind of totalising talk. But let's see their counter-argument against the structural facts.
Quoting csalisbury
Huh? So now you want to play the unsatisfied totaliser?
If I say - as part of my univocal metaphysics - that certainty only asymptotically approaches its limits - then you say, well, that ain't good enough for you. The glass that is 99.999...% full is, gulp, sad.
Maybe you prefer complete mystery or radical uncertainty to my story of things only ever being "almost sure". Takes all sorts.
But you added here the constraint of a particular language. And there is no warrant for it's addition - given you agree about the evidence from anthropology.
So if we say speakers of a shared language with a shared neurology, that would cover off both the cultural and biological factors involved here. We wouldn't get hung up on either distinction by becoming overly specific and thus nonsensical.
But Whorfianism does still apply. Redecorating our house, I discovered the infinite number of shades of white. I learnt a language that did anchor the memories that allows me to make more reliable hue discriminations.
So that was a controversy presented as a black and white story (by Whorf, not Sapir). Either social constructionism was the case, or biological determinism. And the actual story is that both levels of semiosis are constraints on our habits of interpretance. Quite a different psychological model - like a Vygotskian sociocultural one - is needed to capture the connection between nature and nurture.
Your view. My view was formed by encountering the fundamental problems of neurocognition and philosophy of mind, then finding Peirce sorted out the epistemology/ontology for life and mind in general. And for 20 years, biosemiosis has been roaring away.
So if we must do battle by cheap metaphor, why not say Peirce is the key that unlocks every door, or the language that expresses every thought? Who said rhetoric was dead.
That's the lines I was thinking along, but it's hard to say "When you talk about concepts you're also talking about how we use words" (details to be filled in) without it coming off as "When you talk about concepts you're only talking about how we use words." (And to top it off: when you talk about things, you're only talking about "our" concepts of things. Yuck.)
This tangent is strangely on-topic.
Should have addressed that. The full version is: "If you don't know that's red, either you don't speak English or there's something wrong with you."
There's a difference, though, between works-because-it-establishes-some-relation-with-the-outside and works-because-it-totally-captures-the-outside.
Think of it - logic-genius (which I'm sure he was) tussles with logic for a long time. Then he realizes this logic he's been tussling with is part of the fabric of the universe itself. A strange and beautiful revelation. How does he see the world now, the parts of it he allows himself to confront? Through what lens does he view it.? Does he or does he not edge the fragments of the world he experiences toward this or that aspect of his solitude-won system?
Yes, exactly.
My metaphor wasn't about the fullness of the glass. It was more like: its sad to drink alone, at the end of the world.
No, I'm sure you're smarter than me, and I mean that.
But
"The language that expresses every thought" is....
"The key that unlocks every door"
I don't want to drag you into tawdry battles you'd normally avoid, but these kinds of metaphors....How do we fold peirce upon himself, in order to talk about unlocking everything or expressing everything through reference to one thing?
Being pedantic, is that the fullest version? It could be the case that you both don't speak English and you are also not neurotypical.
So I prefer my: "If you know that's red, you both speak English and there's nothing wrong with you in the neurotypical sense."
That better reflects the holism of what I mean - the fact that this is semiosis doubled up.
Well doesn't regular logic depend on the commitments of an object-oriented ontology? Don't the laws of thought seem to work because they get something unarguably right - if you believe in the counterfactual definiteness of individuated objects that possess sets of properties?
Reductionism believes it describes a reductionist reality.
And remember that Pragmatism accepts upfront that it is only telling stories about the world. That is why I said it can only then minimise our uncertainty about our models of reality. It is totalising only in Pragmatism's usual falsification-seeking fashion. We are setting things up so that we could know that we were wrong.
Quoting csalisbury
Yes. But experimentally verified.
After all, Peirce said reality is propensity-based, for instance. Chance is fundamental. And then shortly after, along came quantum mechanics.
He also proposed experiments to see if space was curved before general relativity came along. He wasn't just some armchair metaphysician. He had a day job with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey working on the actual basics of scientific measurement, like defining the standard metre.
Quoting csalisbury
It's true of Peirce that he was very much drinking alone. Most of his writings were never published. Although CI Lewis sat in a pile of them and Peirce's influence seeped through Ramsey to Wittgenstein and others in ways only recently reconstructed.
Quoting csalisbury
My point was that metaphors do nothing here. I am happy just to stick to actual arguments.
And yes, my argument is that a triadic relational logic is a universal mechanism. It unfolds every complexity into its greatest possible simplicity ... which is still always complex in being relational and hence triadic.
You seem to think we can get somewhere discussing the sadness or brilliance of Peirce rather than the validity of semiotic structuralism. I am always happy to discuss his character. But also, it is irrelevant to the argument. I wasn't arguing from authority, just citing my sources.
I'd say that yes, those are examples of natural kinds. As Frege would say, they have all passed the "acid test" of concepts, namely their fruitfulness.
Quoting fdrake
I have the opposite idea. I think the semantics of mathematical kind terms is very similar to the semantics Kripke-Putnam sketched for scientific natural kind terms, in the sense that mathematical kind terms are (primarily) non-descriptive, i.e. their semantic value is their reference. That is why we can say that Euler and Cauchy were mistaken in (e.g.) treating convergence as uniform convergence (yes, I'm aware that the historical debate here is controversial). So, according to my story, it's not that we started with fuzzy, open-texture concepts and proceeded to precisify them; rather, we started with a collection of examples and proceeded to unveil their structure. Of course, this story needs to fleshed out, and fleshing it out is one of the projects on which I'm currently working.
I don't know if this narrative would have pedagogical value, though, it seems to me, it's almost the standard narrative that you will find in typical history books (say, Stillwell's famous one), just not articulated like this. Be that as it may, I think there's a real philosophical gain here, since, in my opinion, it does better justice to the mathematical practice of starting from examples and then generalizing (as we can see with the history of continuity, algebraic integers, group theory, etc.).
Quoting fdrake
In some cases, I do think there may be enough structural commonalities to ground the existence of the type, but in general these commonalities won't be acceptable to a nominalist-about-properties. And in some cases there may be superficial commonalities that are acceptable to a nominalist-about-properties but which don't correspond to anything structural, and hence don't form a natural kind (say, the case of jade, which is not a natural kind). So the ontological resources come from accepting both structures and properties as bona fide entities. Types come in with that.
As for the epistemic resources, the story is more complicated, because we need (as per Kripke) to distinguish epistemic possibility from metaphysical possibility. To give Kripke's example, given that tigers are mammals, they are (metaphysically) necessarily so. On the other hand we might discover in the future that tigers are really well-crafted robots, made by an alien space to test us in some way. This is an epistemic possibility, i.e. for all we know we could be wrong about tigers. Of course, if we are not wrong, then this epistemic possibility doesn't correspond to any real (metaphysical) possibility.
Quoting fdrake
There are many things to discuss here. Roughly speaking, when abstracting from equivalence relations, there are three possibilities: (i) either you take a canonical representative the class to be your "abstracted" object (if memory serves me correctly, that's Kronecker's approach to quadratic forms, because you can use the canonical representative as a calculation tool); (ii) you take the equivalence class itself as the "abstracted" object (in some cases, such as when dealing with quotients, this may be the only sensible option); (iii) or you introduce a new object corresponding to the abstraction (that's what Dedekind opted for when he introduced his cuts; he explicitly rejected Weber's suggestion of simply identifying the real numbers with cuts, preferring instead to say that each real number corresponded to a cut; this is also the neo-Fregean way).
Generally, option (iii) gives a cleaner theory, in the sense that you don't end up with "junk" theorems such as "2 is an element of pi" or whatever (Dedekind mentioned this as one of his reasons for preferring (iii)). I myself was attracted to some kind of abstractionism that introduced abstract objects via equivalence relations. Unfortunately, there is a catch here: if you allow for too many abstraction principles, you end up with an inflated ontology (this is a real problem: Kit Fine has shown that the resulting theory may be inconsistent---cf. his very interesting The Limits ob Abstraction). So you need some way to select which equivalence relations give rise to abstracta and which doesn't. The most appealing way of doing this is to appeal to natural equivalence relations. But then you need to explain what it is for an equivalence relation to be natural (or you could take Lewis's route and consider "naturalness" a primitive, but I don't think that's very satisfactory). And I think that when you do so, it may open the door to use naturalness itself as a ground for the existence of abstract objects, bypassing the appeal to equivalence relations.
So if you didn't assert it, it wouldn't be so? And what is a fact?
Quoting StreetlightX
That may be so (though note that we have an appeal to types of rules here...), yet to learn this way of speaking is not to learn Jumblese.
I definitely agree with this, in that I'd hold that most properties that appear simple aren't really simple (I was just agreeing that, even if redness or triangularity are simple, there are other properties that aren't obviously simple). Of course, they can't all be complex, since any theory must have its primitives. So there is a distinction here to be made.
My only disagreement is that I don't think (Carnapian?) explication is what is doing the work here---rather, I think just plain explanation is. We are not explicating a usage, we're explaining the structure of the world.
It's strange to me that whether something is natural, rather than reflects what is natural, depends on their role in discourse. I can make sense of this if 'is a natural kind' is interpreted like 'is a useful model', but abstract objects like categories and transfinite cardinals are not, currently, a model of anything physical but themselves as interpreted as discursive formations.
Physicists think about things quite differently from mathematicians. The former should principally be dealing with mathematical objects that reflect nature or simplify previously established theories of nature. The latter deal with mathematical objects simpliciter. Like physicists taking the real part of imaginary quantities because real quantities aren't imaginary - pedagogically this is the mantra 'take the real part to find out what's real'. Or looking at bouncing as a geometric series - the mathematician would say 'infinite bounces are required to stop bouncing', the physicist says 'that isn't physical, it will stop at some point despite the model'. This 'despite the model' is a big difference between mathematical quantities qua physics and mathematical quantities qua mathematics. In mathematics it's only the model and the properties - with some imaginative background which is reflected to make it a model. In physical uses of mathematics the imaginative background mirrors, represents, tracks, call it what you will, the world.
Regarding the history - it's really a methodological distinction. Do you prefer to read the history retrospectively from the current heights of modern insight, or do you prefer to try to look at it as it developed? I'm quite sure that there's a reading either way in terms of non/nominalism that furnishes it with some historical weight. The former looks to me like a history of mistakes, the latter looks to me like a history of expressive writing. Prefer the latter, it makes the mistakes interesting.
I don't agree that mathematical terms are primarily non-descriptive, mathematics concerns itself with the relationships of abstractions and sometimes abstractions to real world. To me this seems like saying 'logic doesn't describe anything because its elements are just a universe of discourse'. Put another way in a series of examples, the interesting things about a group aren't the underlying set - hence group theory. The interesting things about topologies aren't the underlying set - hence topology. The interesting things about their intersection isn't the underlying set - it's algebraic topology, all those loops and holes and shit. A group just is something which satisfies its axioms - something which functions in the specified way.
Mathematical abstractions, in terms just of their reference, are usually 'part of the background' when studying or producing new maths. Expertise allows you to adjoin some of their description to their reference - hence 'trivial' and that mathematical papers usually aren't written as logically valid arguments -. This scoping context reflects the use of the abstractions, and which things may be considered constitutive of them will depend on the context of the math. This is also part of what makes it so hard for people in different sub-(sub-sub-sub-...-sub)fields to communicate, and interdisciplinary work so insane (and interesting).
It feels kind of dirty to be arguing about a specific counter-example to a far more general idea, if you'd want to transfer this discussion about how mathematical abstractions work to another thread I'd be interested in it. We're not really talking about Sellarsian nominalism any more, we've simplified to an avenue which the logical falsity of the idea turns on but we're not learning much about the idea through the discussion. At least, if you're similar of mind to me on how to learn about stuff.
Yes, the statement that the apple is red is not the apple being red and requires intersubjective conditions. As to the apple being red, I probably should have said "a percipient" instead of "the percipient", with the further qualification that a percipient has to be suitably equipped to see red.
Quoting csalisbury
The point is that nominalism only covers half the story: what we say, and does nothing to explain what we see. We don't see universals (absolutes) we see resemblances (a kind of relation); it is language which reifies the resemblances as absolutes or universals. As I mentioned in an earlier post resemblance itself becomes absolutized. It is the web of intersubjective experience and expression that provides the context that saves us from an infinite regress. Or to put it another way around; it is forgetting that context that leads to an illusion that there would be an infinite regress without universals to form a terminus and foundation. The salvation of the virtuous hermeneutic circle.
I see you're still clinging to that mouthful of illogical incoherencies. Why don't you just give it up? Obviously this "new physical view of reality" which you profess is nothing but nonsense.
If you wish to do so, I have no qualms about it. I may not be able to engage it fully, however, since I'm rather busy at the moment (posting here is basically a way of procrastinating correcting tons of undergrad logical exercises...).
I'm a nasty combination of busy and having a fever at the minute. Unlikely to happen. Oh well.
Gotta show my cards here - I'm fairly ignorant of most analytic philosophy. I've read a little Wittgenstein, and a few papers (Quine, Davidson, Sellars) but, when it comes to AP, I'm more like the guy fixing drinks at the country club and listening in while the others talk. Frege & Carnap (even Russell) quit the club long before I started working, so all I know is what I've heard the others say about them.
All of which is to say: You seem to have a comfy familiarity with the language and customs of AP. I don't, so most of the words I use (like 'explication') I'm just using ordinary-language-wise, and any shades of technical or esoteric meaning will likely be totally accidental.
The point I was trying to make was that, given that any property can be notated simply (has this janus-faced thing of being complex while nonetheless being able to present itself in a single symbol or word) I don't understand the criticism of jumblese on the grounds that it can't handle complex properties.
It seems like the argument would be not that jumblese can't handle complex properties, but that it can't handle explanation. That may be true, I'm not sure, but it seems like a significantly different thing. And my first, gut-level thought, is why can't it? It seems like explanation is just a concatenation of different 'moves'. Something like: I ask you to hold this thing in mind. all the moves I make will be a way of expanding our communal understanding of that thing. And then you make the moves. Predication is one convenient convention for doing that, but making use of that convention doesn't commit one to any sort of metaphysical or ontological truth. That's at least how I understand it.
Unless you just mean on a typographical level, like how if we're bolding a word, or changing its position etc, how is it typographically possible, in jumblese, to do represent all these moves?
Are there any properties, in this relational scheme, that wouldn't require a percipient/sapient? Property-as-relation, as you've outlined it, feels like it tends, as if by some innate propensity, toward a kind of transcendental idealism (which is fine, I just don't know whether you'd agree with that characterization.)
I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. I don't mean that in the sense that you're saying one thing, but what you're really implying is another. I mean that if i came across this paragraph and read it on a surface level, just for what it intends to say, it would strike me as being anti-universal. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here - I'd have to think about it - I'm just confused as to how you intend it to be read.
So I do regret that. But stilll. I mean if i see your name pop on on any thread, despite the subject, I'll have a hunch about what you'll say, and I'm usually right. I may not get it, quite, but I'm in the ballpark. You never come out and play - you always bring it back to peirce. The scope is limited, I mean. If the whole world is an x-partite thing, why do all your posts have to carve away illusions until they fit in that x-partite scheme? If your posts distill everything, then isn't there another dynamic which is the world undistilled-versus the world brought back to the distilled-core? And isn't that dynamic itself a core part?
Sometimes, talking with you, I imagine a hyper-smart guy on the stoop who wants to frame everything on the street in terms of the stoop. Whereas its more like - come out here and tussle man! we like you, lets have some fun! Its not a matter of Peirce is right or wrong here. It's more like - to what extent does wrapping up this - and any - conversation into the same peircian thing further or enrichen the convo? Your posts didn't enlighten me on Sellars, I mean, but they did remind me of what you believe. I could apply that to any convo tho. Just come and tussle!
What @Janus says, in the post that you quoted from, rather reads to me like a form of pragmatism. Janus had insisted that nominalism only provides one half of the story. This is also how I view the Sellarsian thesis that kick-started this thread (as merely advancing one half of the story, that is). The advocacy of nominalism is prompted by a rejection of a correspondance theory that reifies the intentional content of the predicates of a language. However, neo-pragmatism, as I conceives of it (in a rather neo-Kantian sort of way) doesn't rest content with objecting to the reification of universals and rather seeks to account for their disclosure (of 'situated-' or 'pragmatized-universals', as we might call them) within a web of embodied practices (scientific or otherwise) that language can never be disembroiled from.
Never a problem.
Quoting csalisbury
Of course. I have a TOE - a holistic one. And it stands in opposition to other TOEs - like standard issue reductionism and standard issue pluralism (which are essentially the same thing anyway).
So yes, the same basic battle repeats. Why not?
Quoting csalisbury
That is ridiculous. I will always come out and play if people can muster their own moves.
And Peirce just happens to have done a surprisingly thorough job of tying it all up in a bow. There are hundreds of others I can cite on a systems approach to metaphysics, and indeed do cite. But why shouldn't I choose a pivotal modern philosopher as the anchor for discussions? Be reasonable.
Quoting csalisbury
What is this non-Peirce part then? What is being left out exactly?
Remember that the triadicism incorporates dualism (as the dialectical or the dichotomous) and the monadic (as the vagueness which is the pure potential, the ground of being).
So it is holistic in that it incorporates all the standard arities of metaphysics. If you can show that reality is quadratic, or polyadic, or whatever, then go for it. But there are good arguments for why three dimensions are both the irreducible minimum for analysing reality, and also thus the most you need.
The simplest possible world has to be triadic or hierarchical - that is complex enough to be contextual, relational, or constraints-based. But then also, those three dimensions are enough. Four or five would be unstable.
Its a mathematical fact. You can tie a knot in three dimensions, but it will unravel in four.
Quoting csalisbury
I'm baffled. Having worked so long and hard to achieve some clarity, you think I should abandon it? You are saying perhaps I would make more friends that way. But what if I'm actually really lazy and I need that hostility to motivate me to keep working on the arguments long after I am already satisfied with them? :)
From the point of view of triadicism, nothing at all has been left out. There's the stoop, the non-stoop, and the third thing. You don't have to leave the stoop to understand it. Heck, there's war, non-war, and the third thing. Lazily explain that to the soldier going by, 'oh no, i get it, trust me'
Or to take another metaphor (cringe). You can create a theory of literary criticism that goes like this: All literature is three part: It's the struggle against the father (the canonical author who precedes you), the refusal to struggle with the father (a rejection of the struggle), and the underlying thing (where the struggle comes from, what causes us to either struggle or refuse to struggle. ) (this isn't just metaphoric, this is Bloomian criticism, a real school)
The very structure of this criticism ensures that, if I'm committed to it, nothing will fall outside it. Eliot struggles with Whitman. Pynchon struggles with Melville. Ashbery appears not to struggle with anyone, but thats just the flight from the struggle, which is its own struggle. The structure is such that I can recode anything within the structure.
"you're leaving something out' says the doe-eyed writing major. "ok, what" says the professor. "Well, the, um, like that bit in josh's story, it loses something if" "No, it falls well within. So. Josh talks lyrically about this, but its exactly the thing that Cheever, Josh's favorite, would never talk about, so he's clearly evading the struggle, ok, so...""
If you're satisfied why keep working? And why would you be lazy if you didn't? And why, god help you, is hostility the crucial ingredient?
No way. You'll come out and play if you recognize their moves as something you can beat with your own. This is how it gets rewritten in the mind 'their moves aint shit, less they're moves that i can countermove to'. lo and behold: Everyone worth moving against, can be beaten.
That's possible. I've located a copy of Naturalism and Ontology but I haven't had the time to dig into it. There are conflicting strands in Sellars's thinking. Brandom and Rorty like to portray him as a heir of American pragmatism and a progenitor to them, but he also appears committed to viewing the ontology of the natural sciences as being foundational in some sort of way. Sellars's own students Paul Churchland and Alex Rosenberg appear to have inherited the scientistic foundationalist strand of his thinking. John Haugeland, however, credits Sellars's neo-Kantianism (and Heidegger) as a main inspiration for his own account (with his 'beholdenness theory of truth') of the comparatively greater generality of scientific ontologies with respect to more mundane ones, while disclaiming any foundational priority to the former. The gain in generality is paid for in loss of specificity.
I would say percipients are required to experience, judge and formulate relations. This is the old question; do the processes we observe in nature exist without us? I would say they do, but as perceived they are both something more and something less than they are as unperceived. Perception and conception obviously adds a (tremendously rich) dimension, and yet at the same time is not exhaustive.
Quoting csalisbury
@Pierre-Normand expresses very well, and probably more clearly than I would have, pretty much what I want to say in answer to this. :smile:
One thing I want to add, though: My criticism is of nominalism, not of Sellars. It seems that @StreetlightX has characterised Sellar's thoughts on predicates as being (more or less?) nominalistic. I'm not sure whether that is an accurate characterization or not. I haven't read much of Sellars.
Aren’t you confusing life and metaphysics? I don’t lose one by doing the other. They get to take turns.
Quoting csalisbury
Surely Bloom is working at the dialectical level - the production of individuation - rather than seeking the final triadic or hierarchical state of stable resolution?
So he is in the ballpark in being dialectical. But it is different in a key fashion. The assumption is that individuation - the young poet managing to be seen as original and distinct from what has gone before - is the terminal goal. And Bloom lists six dialectical manoeuvres to achieve such individuation.
But my hierarchy story is about the final overall resolution of a dialectic. It is about the further thing of a dichotomy going to equilibrium in being expressed evenly, homogenously, fractally, over all possible scales of being.
Hence in this case, it is the view of the whole poetic system as it develops in time. Thus if the point of individuation is to disturb - actually disrupt the old order - then equilibrium becomes the state of development where new poets no longer really disturb much by their presence.
One way of doing that is if all potential poets - that is every person in a population - is trying to be a poet. And modern civilisation, with its universal literary education and self publishing, goes along way towards that. There are so many individuals trying to individuate in Bloomian fashion that you wind up with the scalefree statistics of a hierarchically organised statistical equilibrium.
They call it the fat tail effect in publishing. Tons of individual authors with tiny readerships and a few with truly outsized success.
So a hierarchy theory/dissipative structure theory analysis makes specific statistical predictions of the world. Literature output looks to conform. Once you have a crowd trying to individuate, you get a world where success has the characteristics that the maths of a triadic metaphysics predicts.
So Bloom was on to something. But like Hegel needed to be completed by Peirce - oh how Bloomian! - Bloom is only talking about the first step of individuation. The second part of the story is how disruption itself gets homogenised and normed.
We all end up thinking we could be young gun poets, or instagram stars, or scriptwriters, or whatever. But unlike the first Romantic poets, any actual disruption these days has a truly vast legacy of influence to overturn. Individuation has become both more equal opportunity, and also way more challenging due to the weight of all that has already been achieved.
My triadic approach predicts this. It’s maths has arise out of observation of the way the entirety of nature must work.
Sounds a bit like the "end of history". :nerd:
So - and I've just started catching up on this thread, so this might have become apparent in other posts - his point is that predication is something we do, and hence predicates are not something we find but something we use?
As Austin?
Here is a relevant paragraph from the SEP article on Wilfrid Sellars:
"Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic linguistic structure, predication itself, involves a commitment to abstracta, for common explications of predication make essential mention of properties, relations, and such. Sellars argues that this gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact, misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic correctness. Sellars offers a different explication of predication, according to which the focus is not on any relation between an object and some abstract entity, but qualifying and arranging names to suit them for certain linguistic purposes. So understood, the Platonist’s treatment of predication seems, again, to be an elaborate and misleading way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. At the most basic, atomic level, predication is a matter of endowing the names with counterpart characteristics of the objects they purport to name, enabling some true atomic sentences to ‘map’ or ‘picture’ objects in the world. Predication thus commits one only to natural objects potentially correlated with each other. See NAO, chapter 3, for the most complete statement of this view."
This is a bit of a head scratcher since, although it betrays a clear resistance to the reification of abstracta, it still seems to express a commitment to "real" material objects ('substances' or 'continuants',) seemingly individuated quite appart from our individuating practices. I guess there is no shortcut but to delve into chapter three of Naturalism and Ontology (or pay closer attention to the excellent earlier contributions in this thread ;-)
I don't know what Austin's view on predicates or properties is.
Interesting - and subtle.
Quoting StreetlightX
So we might have a world of objects, and a language consisting entirely of proper names? AM I on the right track?
Roughly, that there is nothing had in common by, say, red things, but instead we just use the word "red" in a way that suits our purposes. The meaning of "red" is nothing more than it's use to refer to those sorts of things. To pick the red sports car from the yellow one; the red of the sunset from the grey of the associated clouds.
I actually meant that primarily as a self-admonition since there appears to be some good contributions that I either skipped or only read very obliquely.
Not too happy with the analysis of truth in the Stanford article. so
Hm. x is rot, in German, iff x is •red• ?
then
This is described as a pragmatic approach, but looks to me more like a redundant approach - "P is true" just means P.
In what text did Austin express that?
Earlier in this thread, @Nagase and @fdrake had an interesting exchange regarding the the sorts of constraint that the references of our predicates might have on our predicative judgements. Nagase was focusing on the case of so called natural kind terms (while appealing to the sort of semantics developed by Kripke and Putnam), while fdrake was stressing than even in the case where we may appear to have cut nature (or the quasi-Platonic realm of mathematical entities) at its joints, there always remain the liability that may arise unforeseen particulars that aren't neatly sorted by our extent predicates. So, it would seem that the sort of pragmatism advocated by fdrake is close to the form of pragmatism that you are attributing to Austin.
However, while I like my pragmatism to be "radical" in the sense that it doesn't leave any room for a residual core of self-individuated natural kinds (entities, that is, that are individuated as they are in themselves quite appart from our interests in sorting them out and reidentifying them in specific ways), I also seek to resist the sort of linguistic-idealism that attends to some forms of social constructivism. The trouble with this idealism, on my view, isn't that it's too radical but rather that it is not radical enough. Through picturing us as being entirely free to sort out bare particulars into whatever kinds we might deem useful to sort them into, it tends to portray us as purely intellectual subjects who are encountering them passively in experience rather than as embodied agents who are dealing with them in our Umwelt and our social worlds. Hence, a truly radical pragmatism must seek, in my view, to account for the efficacy of the concrete practices of individuating objects and their properties in such a way that the issue of capturing us in the process of individuating them from sideways on (to use McDowell's phrase) -- that is in such a way that we can make sense of the separate existence of (material) objects, on the one side, and of (intellectual) subjects, on the other, prior to the existence of embodied practices of individuation -- is entirely dispensed with as an unintelligible possibility.
In the wake of Davidson't work on truth and 'radical' interpretation, disquotational theories of truth have come to acquire quite a bit more substance than the redundancy theory of truth. That's because while the claim of redundancy still applies to individual instances of Tarski's T-schema, the whole theory that generates the schemata, and which rest on a substantive (and pragmatic) interpretation of the language as a whole, has a richer content than could accrues from merely providing any finite bunch of those schemata in extension.
Are there a priori concepts?
The argument proceeds by showing that understanding a concept is no more than understanding how to use the associated terms. So understanding the concept red is just being able to use the word "red".
Thanks! I see it's the second chapter in his Philosophical Papers, and only 22 pages long. I'll read it. Austin is one of my favorite philosophers.
But here we have Sellars saying that there are no facts, only objects.
Yes, I don't buy that. Ordinary facts, objects and properties come as a package, on my view (but not "events"). But Sellars is such a deep and brilliant thinker that, even when he's wrong, it's worthwhile figuring out why it is that he's asserting something.
I quite enjoyed it although it doesn't top Three Ways of Spilling Ink. Austin wittily savages Mr. Mackinnon's and Mr. Maclagan's musings on the alleged non-sensuous acquaintance with universals. He doesn't propose any positive pragmatist account of the mastery of general concepts, though, but he makes suggestive comments that are reminiscent on Wittgenstein (regarding the unintelligibility of private languages) and Anscombe (regarding the intrinsically causal character of several concepts of action). He guards in one early footnote against the general-specific and particular-universal confusion of distinctions. Later on, Richard Hare and, following him, David Wiggins have also been insistent about the philosophical perils that lay in the wake of failures to attend to this distinction among two quite different distinctions. It's interesting to see Austin bringing this to bear to philosophers's troubles with the metaphysics and epistemology of universals.
I'm still entirely against the idea of 'natural kinds', which I can only see as idealist in the worst possible sense of the word, as if there were God given entities bestowed upon the world from beyond it. They make no sense to me whatsoever, and their prevelance has always struck me as a confusion of logic with reality, or at least a attempt to model reality after (a very narrow brand of) logic. And just as a minor point while I'm on the negative, I've always had a bit of a visceral aversion to the label of 'pragmatism', which always strikes me as a kind of self-bestowed honorific - - who doesn't want to affirm their 'pragmatism'? Which is not to say that I don't like the 'content' of pragmatism, but gosh I despite the label.
But substantively, I think there there is a real question about how we 'cut up the world', and the status of that 'cutting'. What I like about Sellars' is that he tries to achieve a kind of middle ground between (1) the (idealist) idea that our conceptual parsing of the world simply mirrors the way the world 'really is' parsed, and (2) the idea that our parsings of the world are simply arbitrary and willy nilly ("frictionless spinning in a void", as it is so often called). Sellars rejects both positions and says that even as our concepts don't reflect reality in a one-to-one manner, they can still be used to track real things/events in the world. The question is how then to do this, if we reject (1).
And one outcome of Sellars' attempt to stick by these parameters is to construe language as belonging to the natural order (to use language is to use objects, in the most banal sense of the term: a rock and the word 'rock' (qua graphic inscription or sound pattern) literally belong to the same order), where reference is a matter of correlating objects in the appropriate manner (where 'appropriate' is a matter of cultivating certain habits, abiding or rather hewing to certain rule-governed patterns, etc - pace Wittgenstein). And the reason these correlations are not simply arbitrary is because they end up implicating us in commitments which are not simply of our making: sense-making (to make sense by use of words) is to constain action (where uttering some words and not others in some particular order(s) and not others is as much 'action' as 'doing' things) which are necessary on pain of undoing sense altogether.
The insistence on necessity is particularly important to me personally insofar as it jibes with my wider metaphysical commitment to transcendental philosophy (in the Kantian manner, which is to say not transcendant philosophy), in which it is the necessity of thought that answers the challenge of skepticism. This means that I'm interested in extending Sellars' project in a way that puts it into contact with a Deleuzian ontology of 'problematics', such that thought answers to problems or 'encounters' which force thought or rather sense to be made in certain ways and not others. This whole last (sketchy) paragraph is all very much outside the scope of the OP and its limited focus on predicates, but that's the general context in which I'm approaching much of this stuff.
In general, yeah, these are more or less what I'm after. I'm also not familiar with Austin's take, so I can't really comment on that either. What really interests me though are the specifics - I'm very attracted to the idea that language is a matter of 'natural-lingustic' objects insofar it places language on the same plane as 'things'. Sellars' effects this incredible leveling where he essentially abolishes the metaphysical distinction between the linguistic and the extra-linguistic (and with it, the question 'how do words 'hook up' with things') and instead sees the linguistic as a species of the extra-linguistic. There's a naturalization of language which I think is absolutely a step in the right direction.
If it's a concequence of this that language only consists of names, then so be it, but I'm open to saying that there really are predicates or whatever variety of linguistic objects one might care to classify, with the caveat that what matters at the end of the day is how they do whatever it is they do. I'm interested in the function of words and what they do. I suppose they just call this pragmatics, but again, this is word that bothers me so I'd rather not.
Quoting Banno
Yeah, Sellars actually specifically rejects the Wittgensteinian view, and says as much: "We must be careful not to follow Wittgenstein's identification of complex objects with facts"; and elsewhere: "Let me begin by commenting on a feature of Wittgenstein's treatment of picturing which, as I see it, contains the key to the answer, but which he put to the wrong use by tying it too closely to the 'fact pictures fact' model. For, although this model enables him to make a sound point about the logical form of elementary statements, it loses the specific thrust of the idea that whatever else language does, its central and essential function, the sine qua non of all others, is to enable us to picture the world in which we live. It was, indeed, a significant achievement to show that it is n-adic configurations of referring expressions that represent n-adic states of affairs. But of itself this thesis throws no light on the crucial question: What is there about this specific n-adic configuration of referring expressions that makes the configuration say that the items referred to are related in that specific n-adic way?"
It's with this concern in mind that Sellars proposes replacing facts with objects.
An earlier version of Davidson's "always already interpreted", perhaps, in that it seeks to dissipate the map - territory distinction.
Quoting StreetlightX
But is it? If we have a picture of the world, then that picture is distinct from the world, and so maintains the 'metaphysical distinction between the linguistic and the meta-linguistic". The sort-after naturalisation seems to have taken a step backwards.
I don't think this follows. One can speak of parts of the world picturing other parts of the world (if approached in the right way). Actual pictures (the kind we frame after holidays) are exactly that. And in fact, that's precisely Sellars' point. Although I too take issue with the sine qua non line. Why not say language is used to cajole, to affirm, to celebrate, to promise, to soothe? There is a non-intentional aspect to language which is run roughshod over in Sellars' primacy of picturing. But I think his point can be well taken for all that regardless.
Thanks for those! I'll read chapter 3 in Naturalism and Ontology, to get a better grasp of Sellars's motivation in dispensing specifically with the idea of references of predicates but not with the references of singular terms. It's hard for me to understand the rationale for that. I'll comment later.
Quoting Nagase
I'd say that a fact in this context is something which commits us to certain undertakings. If there is a type-token distinction that is parsed in some way and not another, it can only be with an eye to doing something with it; one fixes distinctions in place so as to be able to make intelligible moves in discourse. But of course the kinds of moves we want to make are not entirely up to us: one has to get the grammar just so in order to capture what is relavant about whatever it is we are trying to discuss.
Quoting Nagase
I'll grant this, but - and I think Csal basically made the point already - the obvious rejoinder is: yes, and? I don't see how this ultimately has any force against the idea that properties can nonetheless be treated in terms of learned manners of speaking or writing, where placing 'if' here or there entails treating words in certain manners, committing and entitling us to certain other words and practices when used consistently. Remember that Jumbelese isn't the basis out from which the nomimalist thesis rest, but a model to bring something out of normal language as it is already used.
"I saw them [the battle between philosophical systems] at the beginning through my father's eyes, and perhaps for that reason never got into Pragmatism. He regarded it as shifty, ambiguous, and indecisive. ... 'Time is unreal.' 'Sense data are constituents of physical objects.' 'Mind is a distinct substance.' 'We intuit essences.' These are issues you can get your teeth into. By contrast, Pragmatism seemed all method and no results." He's speaking in historical-autobiographical terms though, so he's probably more open to it than he really lets on.
Quoting csalisbury
The problem with this triadic ontology is that it is really just a veiled process monism. The logical contraries of being and not being do not allow for the third option by the law of excluded middle. When we allow for the third option, becoming, and assign reality to becoming, then the two ideals, being and not being appear as the limits of becoming. These ideals are no longer real because the reality of becoming cannot reach the limits of being or not being. So unless we give priority to the dualist position and give reality to these two distinct categories, the logical ideals, and becoming, reality is apprehended as being completely within the one category of becoming, and the logical ideals cannot be real.
To relate this to the op, yes it is very possible to dissolve the division between the subject and the predicate, as the example of Jumblese demonstrates, and this might serve us very efficiently in common instances of communication. In relation to ontology though, this is probably not a wise thing to do. The subject/predicate division provides us with a distinction between the object (subject), and what the object is doing (predication). The ontological results of the dissolution of the subject/predicate division are evident in the concept of "energy", and the ideas of those who reify "energy". The reification of "energy" transforms its apprehended existence from being the property of a moving object, to being an object itself. Now "energy" is often understood as the subject/predicate combined, the object and its activity combined into one, and this produces a wave/particle obfuscation. This is the ontological difficulty produced by dissolving the subject/predicate division.
I keep circling around what I think of as a thoroughly naturalist and nominalist approach something like this: the difference between, say, a particular triangle and an "abstract" triangle is not that the latter is a different sort of object at all. The "abstract" triangle is still a particular, the one you imagine, the one printed in the book or drawn on the blackboard. The difference is in how you handle it. If you ignore none of its particularity, that might be taking it, say, as a work of art. But if you ignore many of its particular features -- its particular materiality, the thickness of its lines, etc. -- then you can treat it as an abstract triangle.
@Nagase can answer this view though quite readily by pointing out that I am now relying on types or classes of actions to explain (away) types or classes of objects. Can I then try to explain these away following the same procedure? It looks like any attempt to avoid classes and types altogether is doomed to fail, even if we can avoid treating them as objects per se.
And there's an analogy here, perhaps more than an analogy, to the problem of talking about concepts. Frege himself makes the point several times that when you talk about a concept, you're treating it as an object, so you're never talking about the concept as concept. That you cannot do; you can only show how it works. (I'm also convinced that no Fregean should think propositions are objects.)
Where I want to end up is with an explanation of how the ideal actually comes to have a role in our lives. Grice speculates that maybe we never quite mean anything, in the strictest sense, but we approach the ideal of meaning something and deem that success. Lewis also, in Convention, reaches the surprising conclusion that maybe no one ever does speak a language in the Fregean sense -- again, we only approach this as an ideal. We huddle together in vaguely defined equivalence classes speaking languages that are near kin to each other. (And then there's Davidson: "We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions." My bias is showing but how do you get away with that last clause in a paper that doesn't so much as mention David Lewis?)
That appeal to equivalence classes again looks like it demands something we've just said we can't have, real ideals, real types to ground the equivalence, and that backing off to our practices instead is no help. My suspicion is that it does help because the project of communal living gives you a choice: provisionally deem someone to be speaking a language you can understand or give up.
I can't see how this view would not be an appeal to natural kinds or at least kind, which I had thought was what Sellars is purportedly wishing to get away from.
It would be a kind of absolute monism where there is only one (of course natural) kind of thing; a kind which includes everything both linguistic and extralinguistic. I can't see how sense could be made of such a view, though, when all our sense-making seems to be in the dyadic terms of intentionailty. It would seem to be a most extreme form of eliminativism.
Although I've mostly withdrawn from the discussion, the Sellars-Davidson thematic link is pursued by Rorty. It's an interesting transposition of the 'very idea of a conceptual scheme' into a mere interpretive apparatus - locating such things as at most a common thread among a community of language users. This also dovetails nicely with Rorty's appropriation of Quine's critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction - something being analytically true is still formally conditioned upon an interpretation. IE concepts unfold and are discursive functions.
This dovetailing destroys representationalist accounts of concepts just as much as it problematises the eternity implicit in the a priori; a realm where what is true will remain so since it's there already. Prosaically, the 'there' is seen as a fictitious projection of the structure of things to a conceptual landscape containing the same things but in expressed form. The world then takes the character of their grammar (logical syntax) in the expression.
Schema and their conditioned elements are entangled as (and through) discursive practices (no scheme/content distinction), destroying the logical priority of what conditions each analytic fact on one axis. And historicising the schema through the aforementioned entanglement destroys its logical priority in the usual sense of the term on another axis. Schema mutate over history independently of their function as constraints on interpretive possibility; destroying the pristine eternity of the logical space of true conceptual relations.
Those two axes that were independent [pure relations of concepts and instantiating conditions of satisfaction] and used to chart conceptual spaces in their representational character [what else does a representationalist epistemology need other than facts to mirror world and a semantics of the mirror]? are shown to be interpretive tools which are an artefact of a way of looking at the world.
Edit: snake's biting its own tail, there's a Laruelle-ian decision taking place for the representationlist but there's also an amorphous one left in the shadow of highlighting it. The space of reasons for that criticism is still vouchsafed by the very commitment to its ambiguities... Just a note since I remember there are a few non-philosophy interested people here.
See the problem. @Nagase pointed it out too. Thinking of them in terms of equivalence classes adds an extra layer of complexity for little gain.
If you step back from things, you can see that much of this comes down to maths targeting form - structure, constraints, etc - and energy, or material cause, being left out of the picture.
So that is why a pragmatist/semiotic approach wants to tie conception to action, to behaviour, to embodiment. It is a way to get energy back into the picture. Rational structures have to be re-connected to material actions to be fully real.
This is why we need a triadic metaphysics like hylomorphism. We need a division or dichotomy - such as matter understood as opposite to form - which can then explain the emergent substantial actuality that then becomes our world of individuated objects.
So when it comes to Platonism, structuralism, universals, etc, the surprise is that a pure energy-less account can even be given. Every substantial triangle is messed up in its imperfect materiality. Yet we can discern the perfect geometric triangle that stands as the ontic limit to all actual triangles. The goal of an ideal triangle exists - in a spacetime beyond energy.
But puzzles are created because folk don't analyse the material or energetic half of the story the same way - as the complementary ideal limit. Instead, energy is treated as actuality. Matter is taken for granted as having enduring fixed existence. It is the brute stuff that doesn't get metaphysically questioned.
However if we do analyse the material half of the story like we do the formal half, it does dissolve into a primal notion of fluctuation or potency. We wind up with nothing solid at all, just whatever unformed action would seem like at the limit of being. Pure contingency. Directionless impulse.
It is only when you have the third thing of material cause and formal cause combining in interaction - as constraints organising degrees of freedom - that actual substantial being arises. You get the kind of individuation that is a triangle - that someone expended energy to construct. And so a triangle with all its material imperfections - all the fluctuations or historical contingencies that represent both the imposed necessities of a form, and also some pragmatic fact of indifference, a point at which the suppression of any material raggedness in shape ceased to matter in practice. The triangle was triangular enough to fit its contextual purpose.
So this pragmatic/hylomorphic view of the actual world is inherently dichotomistic. The paradoxes are removed by accepting that forms are imposed on material possibility, and also in matching fashion, energetic exceptions or fluctuations are only ever suppressed towards some practical limit. Substantial reality then becomes the third thing of the resulting equilibrium balance - the point where individuation survives and persists as any fluctuations have been reduced to the point they are differences that no longer make an overall difference.
The imperfections are a noise. But the form and purpose of the whole is clearly apparent to be seen. A triangle is easy to recognise.
And so this is the triadic reality that our language and logic would want to target in turn if we are going to carve nature at its joints.
Meaning holism would get this. Language use is about formal constraints on energetic (ie: behavioural) fluctuations.
When we talk - even logically - it sounds like we are referring to Platonic objects. We are pointing towards the ideal triangles, horses, bald heads and Socrates that our words name. But pragmatically, the words are meant to act as constraints on behavioural variability. They should narrow our scope of action - our substantial and individuated expressions - to some point where any remaining uncertainty or contingency is simply a tolerable noise. Differences that make no difference.
So nominalism is deeply flawed. It points at universals and say they can't be real as clearly they are only transcendental limits. Nominalism can see the pragmatic trick that is going on there.
But nominalism is then bad at turning around to see that it does the same thing in presuming that it is the foundationally real - that the world is a sum of substantial particular, a merological state of affairs.
The material, the concrete, does dissolve if you turn the spotlight on it. It does proved to be simply energy, potential, fluctuation corralled by a context of imposed structure. Matter is as insubstantial as form.
Then the third thing of substantial actuality - the actual ground of being - is itself merely emergent. It is energy or fluctuation corralled by imposed constraints to the degree something or other had reason to care. Close enough was good enough.
Language and logic want to gets its teeth into something firm and definite. It targets this notion of the real, the foundational, the monadically essential.
And it always comes up disappointed. And that is because the reality is the whole of a triadic or hylomorphic relation.
Substantial being is what you get emergently once the opposed tensions of energetic fluctuation and structural organisation have played themselves out to some stable persisting balance. A language of objects with properties can sum it all up - especially in a Universe grown so large and cold, near the end of its own history. But that can't be the foundational view, the true view, of what has gone on.
Maybe so, but it's a structure I'm fond of, and it gets close to my intuition of classifying as taking a shortcut. You see that this rock is similar to that one in ways that matter to you, so maybe what worked for moving that one will work for moving this one. (But maybe not for lots of reasons.)
It's a learned behavior. When kids are just starting to read (already knowing their letters and how to talk) they treat each word as a unique challenge to be sounded out or guessed at, even if they've already read that word several times, even on the same page. Learning to see words as tokens of types is learning how to take a shortcut -- say what you said last time and see if dad corrects you or makes you try again. (The move from attention to habit.)
Eventually we learn, one can hope, how to be careful with how we classify, with the cognitive shortcuts we take.
Just briefly 'cause I'll be out all day, I think it is neither desireable nor possible to avoid 'kinds-talk'. The whole question is over what we are doing when we invoke kinds. Or better: what kinds of thing are kinds? To simply try and catch nominalism in a kind of performative contradicition ('ha, look, you've invoked a kind!') simply will not do. As Sellars puts it somewhere in NAO: there are attributes, but there aren't really attributes. One wants to say the same thing about kinds, with the appropriate qualifications. More later.
I'll await your return, but in the meantime: do you read the above as some kind of phenomenal/ noumenal distinction?
Or is it more of a phenomenological distinction between experience and understanding? Or something else?
Kinds are not things at all, they are the activities of things. As concepts they are the habits, activities, of the human mind. As properties of objects, attributes, they are an object's way of existing. Just don't conflate these two, and say that an object's way of existing is a habit.
Edit - oh they just didn't display. Refreshing the page a few times made them appear. Weird.
The Myth of the Given: Nominalism, Naturalism & Materialism.
That Which is Not: Plato, Kant and Sellars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UiV-vMOueY (Naturalism and Ontology from the (drunken) horse's mouth)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTfonwGzL1o (Robert Brandom on Sellar's critique of Empiricism)
Say we've got two apples. We say that the apples are two tokens of the type 'apple' and we do so precisely by abstracting from the particularity of this apple such that we discard certain of it's features (this apple is bruised, that one is not, yet we ignore this). Already at this level we can see that particularity is abstract from the get-go: that this is a particular apple (read = 'belongs to the type apple') and that that is a particular apple is already to ignore, paradoxically, the particularity of this apple and that apple so as to be able to speak of them as particular apples at all.
Or another way to put this is that particularity itself is already a 'type' qua particular. This was, by the way, Hegel's point viz his critique of 'sense-certainty' that opens up the Phenomenology - that every attempt to capture singularity by means of speaking about a 'this' is already implicated in the universal. But - and this is the crucial point - the implication of the particular in the universal cuts both ways: apple qua type is, in equal measure, a 'particular type': we can see this if we subsume 'apple' as a token of the type 'fruit'. At no point in this whole dialectic do you end up with 'real singulars'; instead all you have are types and tokens whose roles are reversable depending on the point of view one takes.
There is no ground-level of real singulars from which the type-token distinction builds itself off from: the whole conceptual machinery is realized 'in one fell swoop', as it were. As soon as you have tokens, you have types. And, worse, types and tokens are promiscuous in the sense that one can be transformed into the other: a token is always-already a type by virtue of it belonging to the type 'token' ('cuts both ways'). So the question is: given this promiscuity, what, at the end of the day, indexes tokens as tokens and types and types, if not some God-given ontological scaffolding qua Great Chain of Being? And the answer can only be: whatever it is 'we' are trying to do with them. This is why I think rejecting the reality of types also entails rejecting the reality of particulars, insofar as even particulars already belong to the order of types (and vice versa!).
--
Another way to make the above point is by recourse to Jacques Lacan's dictum that 'there is no metalanguage': no matter how long you spend going up 'up a level', from token to type to next-level type, you will never arrive at some final Capital-T Type which accounts for the distribution of tokens and types among the lower-levels. This is, among other things, an anti-theological point, or, to put it more positively, a naturalist one in which types and and tokens are made and produced and not 'given'.
Nah, I don't think either of those map on very nicely to what's going on here. If there's a classical distinction that might be relevant here I'd say it's that between primary and secondary qualities (Locke), where secondary qualities (color, taste) are always relative 'to-us', and primary qualities (shape, size, number) are not. One wants to say something like: kinds are secondary qualities, and not primary ones. But this is still a loose way of speaking because it effects too heavy a divide between 'us' and the the rest of the world (as if we are not part of it!).
Right, this is why dismissing the predicate would be a mistake for any ontology. It breaks down the categorical division between the object (particular), and what the object is doing (universal). What follows is the appearance of vagueness, and the illusion that vagueness has real ontic status, when the vagueness is really just due to this sloppy use of language. As I described, this is very evident in the concept of "energy".
Good. The best possible outcome.
I must be real bad today, the worst, I actually got a reply from you.
Oops... I now realize that I had Jay Rosenberg and Alex Rosenberg confused in my mind. Jay, who unfortunately passed away 10 years ago, was Sellars's student, not Alex.
I had them both correctly pegged as 'scientistic foundationalists', though. I'll say more about 'left-wing' Sellarsians (Rorty, Brandom, McDowell, Williams) versus 'right-wing' Sellarsians (Millikan, Churchland, Jay Rosenberg, Dennett, and also, I thinks, Brassier!) in another post.
Also, Brassier is apparently writing a book on Sellars, altough his latest publication was on Marx, so y'know, a few plates in the air.
An excellent point. The picture of the world is part of the world. Another argument against the idea that we have a mental model that we refer to, which is distinct from the world it models.
Don't worry. I also often postpone responses for a long time because I want to think things though first or do some more readings about the topic. There is no harm done in resurrecting dormant threads, or revisiting an old point within a thread, with the statement of some new thought. In fact, it's better than keeping up with the flow of the discussion while expressing half-baked or knee-jerk opinions. Also, truly philosophical questions tend to retain most of their relevance for two and a half millennia or more.
But the boast of metaphysics is that its providing the ultimate. Everything can be explained and understood by reference to [metaphysical model]. The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety.
[yes, but you're doing the same thing, now, with variety and texture, that your 'metaphysician' was doing with 'otherness'.]
This is the finger pointing to the moon. I can engage in that texture and variety and experience. I can, sitting at my computer, conjure up a whole host of precise, singular, memories etc. I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. I find that what I'm doing, when I do this, is a single kind of activity among many. However, this particular activity has the strange distinction of wanting to say that all the other activities are somehow linked back to this one.
[quote=apo, regarding a new and improved neo-bloomian approach]My triadic approach predicts this.[/quote]
Yes, but you've missed the point of the Bloom example entirely. You asked what your approach leaves out. I used the Bloom example to point out that, given a Bloomian lens, nothing will ever be left out. It will always find that the material it looks at fits into its system, in the same way an engine will always find the same use for gasoline. But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. Tweaking and improving it to make it even better at leaving nothing out is...well, an anticipated response, I guess.
tldr; I think there's something askew with 'the very idea' of metaphysics. 'metaphysics,' I think, represents a useful activity ( recursive cognitive modeling) that has metastasized (other things can do this too though: religion, myth, a photographer who can only see the world as composition etc etc. Group em all together under Midas-ism)
[so romanticism then?]
Nah, I think Blake railing against the demonic mills and all that is well-within a triadic model. The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. A poem about how poems are better than reason is very much prey to the sort of thing you're talking about. A poem that communicates is something else.
[so lets talk about that 'something else', then]
If I do so, on your terms, you'll always be right, because you've set down the rules. e.g. [show me, on this table, something that isn't on this table.] But now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc.
As usual, I would point out that you are treating as a bug the exact thing I would call the feature.
So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").
But I am saying that ideally, the two activities would be complementary extremes. The "doing well" would be doing both well in a reciprocally-defining fashion. So one doesn't ever have to lose sight of the other. Indeed, both knows what it is by keeping its "other" squarely in its sights.
Practically speaking, this might mean being conscious of how a learnt habit of analysis or critique can interfere with "just living life". So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?
Can becoming more analytic foster its corollary? Or must it simply replace it?
A balanced life would be where you can live the contrasting extremes of being both on the inside and the outside in a fully expressed fashion. The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance.
Quoting csalisbury
Again, you have this fixation for either/or and missing my point - it is the dialectic of "possibly either/or" that leads you to the resolution, the synthesis, that is "definitely both".
So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.
What I am pointing out to you is your fixed habits of thoughts. If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.
And that is fine. There is always that corollary. But my argument is that my brand of systems metaphysics incorporates the reaction to every action. I am already including the pluralism that makes my totality the complete one. In Peircean fashion, I am saying contingency and particularity are basic ... and that makes no difference. Even the contingent and the particular - the individuated - makes no sense except in the context of necessary and the general.
Pluralism depends on unity and couldn't just exist on its own. (Or the other way around.)
Quoting csalisbury
Poems and literature can be a way to distance yourself from lived reality. They can be bad metaphysics.
Even at school I told my teacher I wasn't going to analyse the set texts as it would spoil any enjoyment they might have. I rejected the idea of creating a critical distance.
Of course, I just wanted to avoid any homework. But still, I really do believe if that an author has an important point to make, poetry is the least efficient way to make it.
I love Tarkovsky's films. However I won't waste time trying to extract a concrete message from them.
Quoting csalisbury
As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.
However, what you frame as either/or, I say has triadic unity. If you have a reason for stepping back from the local level of folk enjoying their culture, then you can start to see the production of meaning in terms of some theory. And that theory will be useful - meaningful at its own meta-level. It will reveal the patterns underlying the mechanics of the human response, the methods used to create.
Yes, if you are operating at the level of an art critic or social anthropologist, you might "lose something" by working at the level of generalised necessity - you will lose precisely the contingent particulars. But why would you lose the complete ability to move between the two levels of experiencing the world?
The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic. My semiotic argument is that both are naturalistic and authentic. Or to put it the other way, the lived level is just as socially constructed.
Quoting csalisbury
Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?
Romanticism set itself up as the other of the reductionist/materialist Enlightenment. And so it tried to express that otherness in every possible way.
If the Enlightenment said humans are naturally socially constructed creatures, then the Romantics wanted to get outside of that with both more extreme views of nature (the innocent savage) and of spirit (the sublime self).
So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.
Quoting csalisbury
I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)
Even though this comes chronologically late in your post, I think its a good place to begin. I'm trying to understand why you thought I thought this would be surprising to you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I've seen you make this kind of point before on the forums. What I was trying to do was demonstrate that I agree with you on this point, in order to show that what I was trying to say wasn't that kind of thing. Strangely, you took this as a starting point to remind me of the same structure I had just outlined. so:
Of course, I'm well aware. I said the same thing, or tried to, in order to orient us both toward a particular obstacle, to say 'hey we both see this, it's a very real thing, and I don't want to go toward that either.'
"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. Art doesn't work that way, for the same reason 'play' doesn't work that way. The pleasure of a poem, or of a work of art, or of a childhood game: all of those are saturated with concepts and myths and associations and memories and knowledge and everything else. The 'raw pleasure' of a picture of some typical scene (say the Annunication) will be a complex mix of tons of things, some of which involve my knowledge of other annunications. "Raw impression" suggests a dude being hit in the eyes with sense-particles. The aesthetic experience is more like: a Scene one must be present to in order to experience, but which is hyper-complex and draws from everywhere else.
Not at all. What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. The 'lived level' from the beginning involves all sorts of Concepts. That's why kids playing tend to cast the play in terms of archetypes.
What I'm arguing against is extracting certain patterns or ways of thinking from out of this in order to say that these are the essential patterns which govern everything else.
Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post?
Sure, but, again, I addressed exactly this distinction between totalisation and pluralism. Maybe it fails, I dunno, but I addressed exactly this point. You seem to suggest that I'm symptomatically misreading you ("Again, you have this fixation for either/or" ) but, from my perspective, if seems like you're symptomatically glossing over my intentional engagement with this exact thing.
so:
Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations.
finally
I don't accept this distinction and find it strange that you ascribe either/or thinking to me while reflexively trying to make sense of what I'm saying int these terms. Thinking or mindless immersion in sensuality? The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think outside of a simplified thought/feeling model.
I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. It's not that humiliating to do poetry and improv, though it will be if you assail yourself for being repulsive for even engaging in it. I struggle to understand how you engage with poems in the way I'm talking about, if the idea of an exchange of poems makes you gag.
To me this is almost the criticism of [s]theology[/s] metaphysics. For me this is tied up with the idea of God becoming flesh. Words like 'flesh' point toward the irreducible texture you mention.
apo mentioned pragmatism. That's a good ism. I like understanding 'theologies' as tools that we carry into the jungle of real life. I'm grateful to the earnest 'theologians' and the itch that compelled them to build tools for the rest of us. Some of them wanted to make all other tools obsolete with their own. They wanted to have personalities big and/or strong enough to engulf and/or cancel all others. In some ways it's a likable trait. On the other hand, we've all been (?) trapped in a pair of word-goggles or trapped with someone trapped in a pair of word-goggles. These 'word-goggles' can obscure the immediate social reality especially.
This sounds good, but it's hard not to doubt the extremity of these extremes. The theoretical physicist can get down to some hip music, but presumably without putting a needle in their arm or living in poverty in the name of the art of the future or just the holy, mortal moment. And the reverse. The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is 'fragmentary.'
Wrong analogy. I did biology and found the dissecting of dead things a chore. I stopped going down the psychology/neuroscience path once I found what was expected in an animal lab. My natural interest was in understanding the living and dynamic - the ecological and anthropological story.
So yes, that is about seeing through to the hidden structure. But - to draw attention to your cheap rhetorical devices - the opposite of thinking the structure that matters is the dead and lifeless anatomy of the bled corpse. The structure I am interested in - the semiotic/systems one - is the "mathematical-strength" one that animates even physical existence itself.
It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.
But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.
Quoting csalisbury
Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.
To the realist, the pragmatist points out that all scientific belief rests on the reading of dials. Numbers replace the thing-in-itself.
And to the idealist, the pragmatist points out that science does read dials. It is materialist only in that semiotic sense of fully cashing out the phenomenality involved in being in a knowing relation with the world.
So here, the pragmatist does say that all phenomenology is simply a play of signs of this kind. It is all an umwelt. And that then becomes the new triadic relation (of interpretant, sign and world) that becomes the generic departure point for our pluralistic metaphysical excursions.
Quoting csalisbury
So it is still "composed"? We are thus still in the land of the reductionist, the atomist.
My argument has been the systems' one of constraints matched by degrees of freedom - so constraints and constructions.
Our lived level is not hyper-varied, as that is just going back to the pluralism that is the direct consequence of atomistic contingency - the world constructed by degrees of freedom. Our lived whole is triadically structured. It divides dialectially into the globally generic constraints and the locally particular accidents.
If you just want to talk about concepts, they would still have this triadic structure - coming in various shades of the three basic dimensions, the general, the particular, and the vague. So there are our most general organising ideas (like reductionism, or holism). There are our vast variety of particular impressions - our concept of what is significantly different or indifferent about some passing conscious moment. And then there is also the vagueness where the lived experience is ambiguous, confused, or otherwise ill-developed and ill-defined. Neither general nor particular, as yet.
Quoting csalisbury
I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account.
Maybe you are thinking it is enough to accept the logic of the dialectic as a qualification to the simple basic approach of atomism/compositionalism, whereas I am arguing for its upfront replacement by a causal holism?
Quoting csalisbury
Again, I don't see how this can be your position if you are arguing so hard against the kind of holistic foundationalism I am advancing.
So there are foundationalists. Then there are anti-foundationalists. But where is your own next move to the synthesis - the one that puts the totalisers and the pluralists accurately on complementary ends of the larger thing of a connected spectrum?
The Peircean point is that this can only be done triadically - as in the form of a hierarchical relation.
So if you reject triadicism, then you still haven't transcended the simple opposition of totalisers and pluralisers. You don't have an actual metaphysical model that speaks to this situation in a manner that is a mathematical theory that could make specific predictions.
Quoting csalisbury
So are you taking proper note of the quote marks here? Remember this is a meta-theoretic account now.
Whatever "mindless immersion" could mean would of course be culturally and historically conditioned. And so of course the analysis - at the meta-social level of the anthropologist - would be triadic.
Fer fucks sakes, who else first embraced structuralism as a mode of analysis? Although I agree that the sad history is folk went for the dyadic semiotics of Saussure over the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Or alternatively, the half-baked material dialectics of Marxism.
But my argument is that a holistic view of sign relations has to be triadic - for all the reasons Peirce pointed out.
So it is not that I can't escape the pit of my own triadic presumptions. I can think like a reductionist as good as anyone else. It is that I chose this triadicism as the best explanation following a pretty exhaustive search.
And if you mention any human cultural activity - poetry, coin-collecting, tennis - then I would consciously apply this particular theory of semiosis to the analysis.
It is not because I don't have other choices. It is not because I am trapped in an unthinking habit. It is because a triadic structuralism is the best way to be a holist. It is as simple as possible, without being too simple.
Yes, society is now large enough that we must all become some kind of specialist. We must all inhabit niches.
This is in fact another direct prediction of the hierarchy theory approach I take - my earlier posts on Stan Salthe's work.
Simultaneously we become both more general and more particular as culturally individuated beings. Everyone knows far more about the Kardashian clan than makes social sense. And every one of us also has narrower interests than can be shared with our immediate social group.
So increasingly, exponentially, we all diverge in these opposing directions as individuals. We have more in common with the world and less in common with each other. We go hard out in both ways - leaving us wondering about the "me" who has to be found in the middle, still holding the extremes of selfhood together in some coherent, integrative, fashion.
Well, again this speaks to the essential differences in viewpoint being expressed here.
Personally, I want to be integrated and whole. I don't want to become a pluralistic bricolage of conceptual fragments and varied impulse.
And that sets me against the kind of PoMo celebration of foundational diversity which doesn't, in turn, recognise its own roots in a totalising notion of humanity - the highly questionable foundation provided by a "one world" Romanticism.
As a psychological model, it just doesn't fly. Instead, my holist approach takes you to places like positive psychology that understand the socially constructed nature of "the self".
The only way to be integrated as a self is to understand the disintegrative forces at work.
Thousands of years ago, poetry and improv were at the heart of personal identity within a tribal social setting. They were the right technology for an oral tradition.
But thousands of years on and we are not in Kansas anymore. That is why I find them inauthentic if taken out of that tribal context and advanced as a viable modern mode of analysis.
Marxism had its analytic moment. Post-modernism had its analytical moment. So lets keep moving right along swiftly.
Sociology now roots itself in biology, and biology in thermodynamics. It is the new ontic structural realism - the theology of dissipative structures. :)
It may be too sciencey for many. But science has only really cracked the back of complexity in the past 30 years or so. So it will be another generation of philosophy perhaps before there is that general catch-up.
But I'm not fun-loving. I'm often moody and paranoid and mean - just look up my post history here. I'm well aware that I can be a total asshole. Again, what strikes me as strange here is you reflexively interpret me as giving myself these qualities in opposition to yourself, as though that were the underlying motivation for everything else. It isn't.
In other words, apo: You want me to be, for some reason, someone for whom life is a spray of roses. I'm not and never have been.
so:
[quote=csal]"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience.[/quote]
Right, but the point of those quotes was, quite explicitly, to impute to me a particular stance and then show why it was wrong. What I was doing was to show how that imputation, to me, was incorrect. What i was saying was: You were trying to frame my approach as something already accounted for in your metaphysics, and I was rejecting being slotted into it. Then: sketching out why the approach you were imputing to me was not my own.
So:
[quote=apo]I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account.[/quote]
I don't see it that way. I feel like I'm very aware of the 'totalising pluralism' you impute to me. I think I've done yeoman's work to show that I recognize what you mean by that and to show that what I'm saying is something else. I know, in my head, that I anticipated everything that I think you're saying now, and tried hard to show I understood that and to maneuver around it. But maybe I should just sit back and let you demonstrate what you mean and why I fit into that mould.
From my perspective, it feels like all these binary either/or things you're accusing me of are things I explicitly addressed, very consciously addressed, and tried to sketch a way around. You may very well be right, ultimately, but I feel like I haven't actually been heard. I feel like I quickly became to you yet another romantic who wants to make you feel lacking in order to make me feel good and artistic. So quickly, and so in spite of my anticipatory points to the contrary, that I feel like I'm being mistaken for something else.
I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them.
Well, tell me what it is that you accept about a global, triapartite, holism exactly. Give an example of how it applies here.
What I've been addressing is this:
Quoting csalisbury
Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?
Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?
Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why?
LOL.
Quoting csalisbury
Double LOL.
As far as I can make out, your position is that you have no position. Hence pluralism is your position.
And that somehow makes this gambit of a position that ain't a position somehow unassailable by the very fact I take a position on position-taking as an epistemic process.
So you get to curl up tight like a hedgehog and complain that I won't come out to play.
Probably run its course then?
So, I'll give it to you
I am a scared hedgehog and I recognize your strength. You won baby!
These are the direct questions which you failed to respond to....
Quoting apokrisis
So first you diverted to the old switcheroo - I have to characterize my position in terms of yours ... to the degree that you do or don't have an expressed position.
And then you retreated to the comfortable histrionics of playing the victim.
What you didn't do was take the opportunity to show where this supposed agreement between us has emerged.
I mean the personal comments are fun and all. They spice it up. But they are not the main dish are they?
I have the uncanny sense of being accused of everything you are doing. I don't mean this rhetorically: I think a sober look at the exchange would bear out what I'm saying. I expressed my position very clearly in my post that began: "the boast of metaphyics." I don't know how to engage with you until you've engaged with that post. I feel that I've been identified as some sort of figure you already know and I'm being systematically rewritten, in your head, as that thing, to the extent that the things I've already said that undermine that idea are being passed over.
For instance: All the stuff I said about responding to poetry viz-a-viz softness, etc came from something you said about gagging and earnestness. You introduced this visceral emotional response, I responded in turn, and then you got very upset about being called out on an emotional level as though I introduced this line. I didn't. Again, I implore you to read back and look at the exchange soberly. I have addressed all your points, but they were covered-over, quickly, by making me a Figure. I anticipated this happening and tried to prevent it early on. I don't know what else to say, man
I can see you hoped to, but honestly I was hoping for a better organised challenge to my position.
Again, you didn't make an argument against a triadic metaphysics in terms of some definite alternative. You didn't make an argument against my version of anti-foundationalism - one that founds itself on the commonality of a core (semiotic) structure or relation. Etc, etc.
Quoting csalisbury
Yeah. So I replied that "engine" is right in the sense that semiotics is a core structural relation. And then I was waiting for the argument of why something I claim makes a metaphysical difference, doesn't in your view make a difference.
We can both agree that there ain't the kind of material foundation that reductionism/atomism needs to presume. But if everything is bound and totalised by something as "insubstantial" as a common emergent structure, then how does your pluralism - in all its ill-defined glory, of course - fare against my totalising project there?
Where did semiotics and its triadic sign relation fail precisely? You never said.
What you did repeat was that any bid at abstract totalising must by its own lights fail to capture the wholeness of an actual world.
Well again, I made the arguments on that. I agreed that modelling is modelling. But then the larger Peircean story is that modelling constructs its own world. And so the actualised wholeness is itself an emergent from the core semiotic process that is the engine producing any reality.
It should be a familiar line - Plato's allegory of the cave. But rather more sophisicated - not least in taking quantum mechanics seriously. The Cosmos only appears to be solidly there because it is - in some literal sense - observing itself. It exists as a globalised matrix of constraints on undirected local possibility.
Now the rejoinder is obvious. Quantum mechanics doesn't account for human feelings.
But I made the argument there too. Semiotics originated in phenomenology. It is rooted in the mechanics of human intelligibility. So it doesn't exactly leave the phenomenal out of it. Instead it accepts the full Kantian force of that and then builds back out so as to recover the noumenal - rescuing it via this idea of a core relational structure that acconts for intelligibility itself.
I can see the vulnerability that creates. Yes, we are projecting a view of ourselves as rational beings on to the apparent rational structure we see in the world. That is quite a leap of faith.
However - pragmatism again - suck it and see. Leaps of faith become justified to the extent they appear to work.
So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.
Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.
But I pointed out that is itself still a position. So why even pretend to engage if you want to be self-consistent to your position of not holding a position?
(Prediction: by now your position has become that you don't have a position on whether you do or don't hold positions ... and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.)
((Yes, in all earnestness, I really am having a laugh by now.))
This is not good at all. The attempt to reduce the possibility of one or the other, to "definitely both", is obviously a mistaken approach. In the vast majority of either/or questions, such a reduction is impossible. To approach such a question with the attitude of "definitely both" is nothing other than a mental laze. That lazy habit is just an unwillingness to take the required steps, necessary for understanding and proper decision making.
Curious.
Correct, the cosmological argument demonstrates that substantial being may be solely formal. That's why the Neo-Platonists posit independent Forms.
[quote=apo]So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.[/apo]
So I have challenged it and was pretty straightforward about what the challenge was:
Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything. Again, I can count on any of your posts to neatly ignore everything in the discussion except some minimal bit which can be used as kindling to fire up yet another recapitulation of the story you've already told - I don't know how many times now. As far as I can tell the only thing your system does is find itself. It seems to be a conceptual machine the purpose of which is to seek self-confirmation of itself. I base that on what I observe you do with it.
No, I do have a position. It's the one above, and one that I've already outlined throughout my posts. It's not a position on everything, it's a position on your system. It strikes me as a kind of cognitive trap, something to be avoided, because look what the results are. And it's characteristic of the trap that someone who's fallen into it can only see people who walk around it in terms of the trap itself. So: my not having a theory of everything is, to you, its own theory of everything - a totalising pluralism as you put it. & you're absolutely right, from within your system. This is why: There is almost never a moment where you're not recapitulating your system. If you're talking to someone, you're talking to them about your system. Any suggestion that that approach seems flawed is immediately read as a position on everything, as, for you, your approach is everything. When that person leaves and does other stuff, not involving your system, they're not doing so in opposition to your system. But, for you, they have to be. (the city outside is read as non-stoop, for example, as though everything either was stoop or something related to the stoop) For example: my posts about romanticism etc weren't disagreed with, they were misread in a very specific way, without you seeming to be aware you were doing that. In fact they were misread in a very specific way, despite their being peppered with neon signs saying I was aware of how they could be misread in that way, and why I wasn't saying that. Now, that's not to say you couldn't have challenged me on whether I really avoided the pitfalls I signalled loudly that I was trying to avoid. But that's not what happened. You didn't even see the signs.
Yes, I think you're right that this is the endpoint of our conversation. I disagree with this characterization, but I cannot show you why, because the only ways to show you why are not considered by you to be legitimate or substantial. I believe they are legitimate and substantial. But how I could show you, using your criterion, that they are? We're at the heart of the thing I consider a trap, and you consider [valuable in some way]. There's nowhere left for us to go. And so I wander off into the vagueness and give you your laugh.
But it is a system derived from the evidence. It is a system derived by others. It is a system with a pedigree as old as metaphysics itself. It is a system derived as a challenge to the now mainstream system.
You are anti systems. And that has become your system. You certainly haven’t offered any critique of my system as a system.
One question I'd like to raise regards this sense of effectiveness. Effectiveness is task-relative, to start with; there's no such thing as generic effectiveness. What's more, even if a given task slots into some hierarchy, effectiveness doesn't automatically cross those boundaries.
Example: father tells his son he needs to get a job; son goes out and robs a convenience store. When the father objects, the son's defence is that the whole point of getting a job was to get money, so he just got money a different way. Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job.
So I'm wondering what task you have in mind when you reference this pragmatic sense of effectiveness, and whose task it is. Does this task belong to the "we" you reference, or to the cosmos?
Well there is in physics. You have the principle of least action which pretty much explains everything. Nature is ruled by optimality when it comes to the breaking of symmetries.
So natural selection is an expression of this at the level of biology. And the second law is its expression at the level of thermodynamics.
Along with its complementary causal principle - the principle of locality - it is as basic to the metaphysics of physics as you can get.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You are taking the Jamesian utilitarian view of Pragmatism it seems - the one Peirce had to disown.
But OK. We can zoom right in on some microcosmic example of exceptional complexity in this Universe. We can take some man, some son, at some arbitrary point in history where there are such things as convenience stores to rob when a desirable job appears hard to find.
Are you saying that I couldn't find any grand metaphysical narrative that would show this to be a particular example of a general principle? Is there something that just rules off this episode from the greater history of the Comos? Or are you too invoking exactly the semiotic/hierarchical distancing effects that I myself have already outlined?
Semiotically, what is going on between father and son - given that this could even be a realistic conversation out in the actual world?
On your version - when forced to provide an intelligible rationale of the context in play - the son says it is all about the least action path to get that money. Jobs and robbery are not meaningfully distinct ... despite social norms that exist because of a larger scale social effectiveness. In the son's view, the father's attempt to draw a distinction is a quite arbitrary one on his own personal scale of being. Jobs or robbery is being claimed as a difference that should make no difference.
So there is nothing about your example that doesn't directly relate to the systems approach I've been taking.
Complexity wants to build up critical distinctions or constraints to provide globally effective order. Simplicity wants to break down any such distinctions that instead stand in the way of a maximal flow.
These kinds of tensions or dynamics are the bread and butter of modern complexity modelling. Stewart and Cohen did a nice little book on it - The Collapse of Chaos - that highlighted the dichotomous or complementary nature of this kind of thing. They said it was about the opposition of simplexity and complicity. These days, for the real maths, you have stuff like constructal theory.
So you could model the prevalence of employment vs crime in terms of global social efficiencies. Why not? Cheaters vs co-operators is a huge field in evolutionary biology. It is an obvious thing that the issue in play is the cost of preventing system "friction" vs that of building the distinctions that would prevent it.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well I am taking the pan-semiotic view that does treat the second law as an expression of cosmic purpose. Or more strictly speaking, I would argue for Stan Salthe's tripartite nested hierarchy of
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.
Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.
So the "we" that is the global constraint being expressed by the Cosmos is the teleomatic level thing of a generalised propensity or tendency. There is both finality in play - entropification as a "desire" is fundamental. But also the telos is appropriately watered down. The mind that has it as a goal is the very least kind of mind with a goal that we can physically imagine. Nothing weird is being claimed. All that is being asserted is a unity of nature where purpose can be expressed over every scale of being.
Then the "we" that should apply in your example becomes the social norms in play. A son that robs convenience stores is far more likely to come from a family and neighbourhood that robs convenience stores. The choice of a least action path to a goal would not really need much further justification.
But given your scenario, the father would be asserting some larger social norm as the "we" with the view on what is effective for that "we". We are law abiding and employed as that is a desire embedded at a cultural level, representing whatever happens to be functionally effective as a generalised habit.
Quoting apokrisis
Nope.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Full stop. I said nothing about norms, and gave no broader justification for the father's view. I thought of all that, because duh, but none of it is relevant to this single question: did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. The answer to that is quite clearly, I submit, "no".
So I see no reason to give up the idea that effectiveness is tied to the achievement of specific goals, or carrying out specific tasks, and that even if those goals can be subsumed under other goals, effectiveness at achieving the higher goal does not pass through to the lower.
I heard a story once about an overnight shelving crew at a grocery store that knew the president of the company was visiting the next day: they weren't going to be able to finish getting the truck worked, so to avoid getting in trouble they threw a pallet of groceries in the big trash compactor.
The pattern here is similar: reinterpret the instruction to shelve everything as an instruction to leave nothing in the back. Reinterpret the instruction to get a job as an instruction to get money.
In some cases, that's fine. Maybe the instruction was unnecessarily specific. In the cases at hand, it's clearly a self-serving dodge. But none of this matters at all. Even in the acceptable cases, you'd be renegotiating the instruction; there's still no question at all about whether you did in fact achieve the goal you were directed to -- you didn't. Whether that's okay is another matter entirely.
You've lost me. How could that have been the gist of your argument?
Are you claiming convenience store robbery is another trade - an actual kind of job, a recognised way to earn money? If so, then - duh. The son is right ... if the social norm indeed doesn't make the distinction that theft is something different from other forms of earning a crust.
But the father wanted the son to earn some money by getting a job. (Well, I'm guessing that as you left it open - the father could have had the more general goal of his son being a responsible and self-sufficient citizen.)
And now the son is justifying his flouting of that norm - respectable paid labour. But is theft truly effective even if the goal is merely money?
Is theft effective simply if you don't get caught? Is theft effective to the degree society can afford to tolerate it as something that doesn't make a difference? Is theft effective in some generic pragmatic sense as your claim, or his justification, is that the only real constraint is some abstract morality that pretends to have an objective base ... and actually, there is no such morality?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That may or may not be the case. Hierarchy theory accounts for both the underlying spatiotemporal continuities and discontinuities here. I've already done a length post on the issue.
So for example, neither the father nor the son can invent perpetual motion machines. The second law prevails on that generic score. But in a complex modern society, living off the free lunch of fossil fuels, the son will have access to the combination of guns, cars and convenience stores.
Locally, the laws of thermodynamics will appear to have no constraint on the son's socially-situated freedoms - until climate change kicks in and collapses the little bubble of modern economic dilemmas that your morality tale is entirely predicated on.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Sure. This is exactly how humans rationalise their moral choices. As if they were poorly programmed robots.
I will simply note how you were forced to admit to the role of interpretance by arguing for acts of re-interpretance.
Yes. Social engagement is all about this kind of semiotics. It is all about claiming the high moral ground to justify your particular choices of action. So there is negotiation and manoeuvring to create exactly what I have been describing - the larger contexts that frame the local particulars. Do that and the outcomes look natural, effective, optimal, legitimate, worthy, to all concerned.
So you are making my case for me.
The right way to think about all these situations is the natural one of a hierarchical order. We have to show how our individual behaviour - our personal degrees of freedom - fit naturally into a general social context. We have to show how in some generalised way, we are working within the constraints given by our worlds. And our actions are at their best when they can be shown to be a part of continually maintaining and reconstructing that said world.
Which doesn't meant that that also leaves considerable scope for personal actions which are simply contingent or accidental. If I wear red socks or blue socks is the kind of choice that doesn't matter - outside the constraints of a school uniform or other social norms of taste and convention.
So there is stuff we do because we believe it is part of the preservation of the very order that shapes us. We seek to be pro-social, being the products of sociality.
And there is stuff that we do that probably matters to no one because it doesn't matter to society in general. It becomes the random shit.
But your examples seem to want to confuse the two. Differences that matter - like paid labour vs theft - are treated as differences which don't.
And yes, they might not matter. They might be random shit according to social norms. But you haven't shown that in your examples.
I posted it twice:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And thus the gist of my argument was:
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation.
***
My point was that effectiveness at achieving a goal at one level may not always count as effectiveness at achieving a goal on another level. It's a question about how exactly you attach the pragmatist appeal to the effectiveness of a procedure to the hierarchical/holistic/systems science analysis. I'm still not clear on that, which may be my fault.
But you said it as if that was something I needed to give some counter to. So how exactly does that - as something particular - contradict the generality of the pragmatic view?
The very definition of hierarchical levels would require this to be the case. And yet - my earlier point - when we talk about hierarchical order in a fundamental fashion, there are no real internal levels. You have the kind of homogenous interior that is a fractal or scalefree structure.
So even the simplest world - the world without levels - is irreducibly triadic. It consists of its opposed limits, and then the generality that develops over all scales in-between.
That is foundational - Salthe's basic triadic system, Peirce's sign relation. And then complexity arises on that foundation by the marking off of levels by grades of semiosis. We get the kind of subsumptive hierarchies like {propensity {function {purpose}}}, which equates to the familiar divisions of matter, life and mind.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
It is the other way round. You are relying on a highly artificial demarcation that seeks to stop us saying anything else about the situation.
That is why I pointed to the strangeness of your scenario. You want to pretend that this could be a real world dilemma - the smartarse son offering a "re-interpretation" of his father's wishes.
We don't believe the son's rationale for a minute because we wouldn't believe that he believed it for a minute. Bullshit was already being called before it became a problem for pragmatism.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. So the thing is that the systems view is constraints-based, and hence fundamentally permissive. If it ain't forbidden, it is not just allowed, it has to happen in the long run.
The other way of thinking about causality - the reductionist, materialist, deterministic, atomistic, etc one - would view things as procedures. There is a program, a sequence, a law, to be followed.
But a holistic approach talks of habits and limits. If there is a fence around the paddock, then the sheep will be found inside. But the sheep are not only then free to be anywhere inside, they must be everywhere inside at some time or other.
So the fence encodes a desire. And at the same time it encodes its own degree of indifference. It only has to be effective in confining the sheep in a way that makes a sharp hierarchical distinction between being inside vs being outside.
If the father's constraint is simply that the son must return with money, theft has yet to be ruled out. It thus becomes - by that definition - a matter of indifference to the dad. The son would be right to complain about being told off for robbing the store. That wasn't a no-no under the job description given him.
But if the father's constraint was to find paid labour, that is an entirely different story. Now the son might go out and be a rent boy - and again complain about being told off when his dad seems annoyed at this particular choice.
So that is how it works. If you pen sheep with a fence, they then fill that space with their motion in an essentially free and random fashion - at least from your established point of view. The field of sheep finds its own least action equilibrium state. If you measured some critical parameter, like the length of the grass, it would be trimmed at a steady rate across the whole paddock in an efficient fashion.
Reductionist metaphysics believes in worlds ruled by deterministic procedures. Holism believes in worlds that self-organise due to generalised constraints.
Think about the principle of least action (PLA). It really is the most profound of mysteries for the usual phyicalist view.
Nature has to know all the different ways of getting to wherever it wants to go to reliably find the shortest path possible. The very success of the PLA killed our normal notions of cauality and locality even before quantum mechanics hammered in the last nails of the coffin.
See for example -
Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf
Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another table. The staff person decides to swap the indicated locations "because it looks better this way." Be that as it may, and whether the event planner agrees, the staff person cannot be said to have done what they were told.
Quoting apokrisis
It clearly was. Leave aside the robbery. Suppose the son just doesn't get a job. When his father asks, here is his answer: "If by 'get a job', you mean, did I follow the principle of least action, the principle of locality, and the second law of thermodynamics, all with an eye to Salthe's basic triadic system -- then 'yes'; if you mean, do I now have gainful employment, then 'no'." The son may effectively be accelerating the heat death of the universe, but he cannot be said to have a job.
Quoting apokrisis
"Did you get a job?" is a yes-or-no question. Humans do highly artificial stuff.
@StreetlightX is likely to find the free sample of the book interesting. One of the three stands that Rouse weaves together appeals to Jablonka and fellow 'top-down integrative Darwinians', as I might dub them. StreetlightX may already know Rouse as the posthumous editor of Haugeland's projected book on Heidegger: Dasein Disclosed. I know him also because of his excellent How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. (Here is a review).
I had said earlier that I wanted to comment more on left-wing Sellarsians versus right-wing Sellarsians (also sometimes called simply 'left-' or 'right-Sellarsians'. But I'm still busy reading a paper by Michael Williams (on Sellars) and another one by Bitbol (on the Kantian boundaries of the conceptual/undestanding. Are they absolute or relative to a conceptual scheme?). So, I'll keep postponing my comment. Meanwhile, here is a useful summary from one of the footnotes in Rouse's recent book:
"The distinction between left- and right-Sellarsians tracks two loosely defined groups of philosophers, each strongly influenced by the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Right-Sellarsians (exemplified by Ruth Millikan, Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, William Lycan, or Jay Rosenberg) draw especially upon Sellars’s commitment to scientific realism, his thoroughgoing naturalism, his insistence upon accommodating a more sophisticated empiricism and a prominent role for conceptual rationality within a broadly reductionist conception of the scientific image, and in some cases, his retention of a role for representational “picturing.” Left-Sellarsians (exemplified by Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, or John Haugeland) emphasize his rejection of the empiricist Myth of the Given, the irreducibility of the logical space of reasons to causal or law-governed relations, his emphasis upon inferential roles as determinative of conceptual content, and the role of social practice in interpreting and justifying conceptual content while downplaying or rejecting his naturalism, scientific realism, and pictorial representationalism." -- Joseph Rouse, Articulating the World, 2015
The idea that substantial being requires both matter and form is derived from a materialist bias. You start from this materialist bias, and when you try to prioritize matter as pure potential, the infinite possibility of apeiron, you realize that this is impossible. The pure potential, prime matter, must have some form or else formal being could never emerge. So you falsely conclude that substantial being is necessarily matter and form. However, if you would release that materialist bias, you might realize that matter is not a necessary condition for substantial being.
I wish I could follow your leaps. You started making some kind of point about pragmatism’s notion of effectiveness. Now you are talking about mechanical constraints. Any chance of an explanation of the connection?
But yes. Constraints can approach the mechanical limit. We can construct bivalent switches - physically or logically. And that is really basic to semiosis too. It is significant that the digital lies at the terminus of the analog. In the end, dynamical gestures can be fixed and remembered as informational marks.
So in all your examples, there are laid out certain constraints - which presumably are meant to achieve some effective action. And yet the actions look to defy them. A "wrong" procedure is employed to reach the apparent goal.
But the point about constraints is that they don't need to specify the procedures - the precise path taken. This is the physical mystery of the least action principle. Nature manages to find that optimal path ... on the whole ... eventually ... to the degree it matters.
Humans of course do it differently. We construct mechanisms to achieve ends. We take constraint to the point where it becomes logically bivalent or counterfactual. Switch is either on or off. The gate to the paddock of sheep is either open or closed. We take informational steps to control nature.
And we kind of expect that mechanical causal paradigm to apply to nature itself. Hence reductionism. But we know it doesn't. Nature isn't actually a machine. Nature is constrained possibilities. It has an essential holism that our black and white logico-mechanical descriptions do not properly capture.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Right. So in reply to me pointing out the contextual social nature of goal-setting, you keep cranking up the degree of constraint to try and close off the possibility of other routes to some goal. You want a path so fixed, so black and white, that there could be no deviation. But that just demonstrates that what I say is correct.
Now what if the staff person switched the flowers and sculpture, then switches them again.
Did this violate the procedure laid down by the planner? The outcome is the intended one. But the planner might feel a little perturbed about the path by which it was reached.
What if the staff person did this repeatedly a few dozen times? Such a procedure wasn't explicitly forbidden. But it might be considered as tacitly excluded for some more general socially constraining reason. The planner would "rightfully" say, mate, now you're just being weird.
So the point is that there is an unbridgable gap between these two causal views of the world - the mechanically absolute and the Peircean pragmatic. But also, it is not a problem that constraints can always be tightened by the addition of further information. Humans in particular have got very good at constructing machines in this fashion.
That is what semiotics is about - the informational machinery that can construct constraints to bind nature to purposes. And complexity arises by layering up this informational mechanism - the codes and memories that regulate physical dynamics. The evolution of life and mind is the story of a succession of ever more generalised and abstract encoding - from membranes to genes to neurons to words to numbers and variables.
You mean that the idea that it doesn't is derived from theistic necessity. It is an article of faith that there are gods and souls, therefore Aristotle's hylomorphism must be scholastically rendered in a fashion that permits matter-less substantial form.
Materialism (or rather physicalism, if you accept hylomorphism) isn't a bias. It is a belief derived from rational theory and empirical evidence.
Nope. In each of my examples, the agent tasked with a specific goal chose instead to pursue a different goal, and in each case the initial goal could be taken as a means for achieving the new goal. But since there were other means available too, the agent can achieve the new goal without achieving the one they were tasked with.
The point was to show how the agent's judgment that what they did "works" could be faulty, unless some goal is taken as the goal relative to which a judgment of effectiveness is made.
Yet another example: suppose I'm trying to prepare for an exam, but my roommate decides to have some friends over for a party. When I remind him I have a test and complain about the noise, he says, "Well, you could go to the library, or -- you could come to the party. Check it out! I bought a copy of the test so you wouldn't have to study tonight."
See the difference here? The suggestion that I go to the library accepts my goal of studying effectively and suggests an alternative method of achieving that goal. The suggestion that I cheat substitutes the goal of getting a good grade, which admittedly was what I wanted to achieve by studying, but it bypasses what I have chosen to take as my immediate goal. If you want to judge what "works", you have to settle first what the goal is, and in many cases whose goal it is.
That is what I've been asking you to clarify. How your occasional appeals to a pragmatic "this, because it works" slot into your system. Works to do what? To study effectively or to get a good grade? And whose goals are we talking about?
I don't get you. Sure, the definition of an agent, of autonomy, would be the freedom to do something contrary or "other". But that freedom is still contextual. You still have people giving some kind of justification, as if that justification matters.
If they did the wrong thing by mistake or misunderstanding, that is one kind story - please ignore my accident. And if they did it for deliberate reason, then it becomes the something else of whose understanding is correct.
But what does any of that have to do with anything here? It certainly doesn't pose a problem for my holism.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Again, so what? How does that change anything for my point of view?
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I am putting forward a completely general scheme. That was the whole point. I am defending a totalising metaphysics.
And you seem worried about the variety of possible particular expressions of that general semiotic machinery - even if every case might be an expression of those general principles.
I've said nature itself is irreducibly telic. There is always finality or a goal in play. And there will always then be some best route to the goal. Nature has no real choice but to follow the path of least action.
So that is the general scheme. And I've explained how it would apply in your various suggested examples.
What else is there to clarify?
And that's just not enough to start talking about what "works".
Here's the last part of the quote I started with:
Quoting apokrisis
Work to do what? Are we talking about the cosmos's goal of observing itself, or maybe its goal of reducing free energy? Wouldn't not making this projection accelerate the heat death of the universe just as well as making it?
You might have said such a leap is permitted -- no constraint prevents it -- so it's inevitable that we do. But instead you said it's justified insofar as it works. And again I ask: what's the goal here that grounds this talk of what works? And whose goal is it?
In the context of what I said, it would be about working for those of us with the totalising metaphysical project of having a workable Theory of Everything.
Neither the goal nor the agent were concealed in what I wrote. I was arguing quite explicitly for the possibility of such a metaphysical ToE. I was dealing with the "paradox" of how we could advance a totalising scheme in such a way that it didn't then just blindly assimilate every possible fact to it.
It is a problem if a totalising metaphysics in fact offers no counter-factuals. It couldn't then discover itself to be wrong.
But I replied suck it and see. Pragmatism says "wrongness" is to be expected. The question then becomes whether the wrongness observed as the general is advanced to explain the particular is a case of signal or noise. Is there something significant not being explained? Or are all the inevitable exceptions to the rule just meaningless noise? A constraints-based ontology does give the grounds for making this very distinction. That is one of the key ways it is "better".
I strongly agree with this.
Quoting apokrisis
Right. For analysis, I agree. But it seems that the role of serious analyst still has a poetic foundation. Why be an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher? How do we decide that it's better (for us) to accurately model existence with words than to blow on a saxophone and create an ecstasy without words?
If a person makes their living that way, then we have (among others) economic motives. But Schopenhauer, for instance, was not financially dependent on philosophy. It seemed instead to be his pride and joy. And even many of those who were paid seem to have been quite passionate about their work. I can imagine a thinker who presents an ugly truth of existence, but even here it seems that this thinker would have to find accuracy itself beautiful. Or why immerse himself in a otherwise optional ugly perspective?
I think I know what csalisbury was getting at. It's a thought that I've had myself, so I'll try to reply to this in my own way.
Any philosophical theory, no matter how grand or successful, is still a mere conceptual piece of reality as a whole. It exists among toothaches, beautiful faces, and screams in the distance at night. It exists among other grand theories, equally plausible or implausible, at least until further investigation.
So (as you may well understand), it's not about opposing abstract thought to sensuality but rather about opposing abstract thought to the richness of an experience that includes all abstract thought, and not just that grand theory.
It seems to me that theories are useful because they are reductive. They ignore the right things. They collapse elements into equivalence classes, for instance. Presumably you'll find all of this obvious. It's trivial, really. Of course a theory isn't life itself, right?
But if a theory isn't life itself, then what exactly remains of accuracy? A theory can't catch the wind in a net, but it can help us decide what to do. Our grand theory and the plurality of little theories it organizes are one part of reality that helps us navigate reality/existence as a whole. Concepts are tools in a realm that includes but transcends concept.
In the quote above, I don't see how [2] cancels [1]. Are you offering a model, a useful perspective? Or something more? Do you grant that theories are not life/existence itself? That all theories are 'smaller' than existence?
What's "theistic necessity"?
Quoting apokrisis
No, that's incorrect. It's a simple fact that Aristotle's cosmological argument, which appears to be derived from aspects of Plato's Timaeus, permits matter-less forms. The temporal relationship between universals and particulars, and the subject of how the forms, or ideas, which were until then supposed to be eternal, could interact with the temporal (material particulars), was extensively investigated in the Timaeus. That Christian theologians saw these principles as acceptable to their religion, though it attests to the acceptability of these principles, is really irrelevant to the logic of the argument, which needs to be interpreted and understood by the individual, interested, human minds.
So it appears like your rejection is based in an anti-theism bias. Instead of approaching this issue with a mind open to the possibility that immaterial forms are real, in which case you might proceed to understand and accept the necessity produced by the argument, you approach with a mind closed to this possibility. Faith in such entities, as you describe, is not required. All that is required is faith in one's own ability to understand, and an allowance for the possibility. The cosmological argument, by means of the necessity of the logic, transforms that faith in one's own ability to understand, into a faith in the existence of such immaterial forms, through the means of "understanding".
Quoting apokrisis
You're wrong here. I have pointed out to you, over and over again, the irrational parts of your theory. Your physicalism is based on empirical evidence along with the rejection of rational theory. Such rejection of rational theory can generally be attributed to bias.
Now, see, that sounds largely reasonable, in the way that pragmatism always does, if a little empty. What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity of your position, and it's probably just the Peirce thing.
On the one hand, there is this sort of messianic quality to your system. From earlier in the post I responded to:
Quoting apokrisis
That doesn't look like the sort of instrumentalist version of pragmatism that this does:
Quoting apokrisis
The procedure by which we model our world is the same procedure the world is using to be.* Where is pragmatism here? Is reality also getting it wrong the way we do? In which case, the noise in our models is also signal, and what sense now can be given to "wrong"? If you put "wrongness" in scare-quotes, is this still pragmatism?
* What's more, projecting this structure onto nature was the "leap of faith" that was said to work. Why does it all look a bit like Anselm's ontological argument?
That's quite right. There is the epistemic version and the ontic version. There is pragmatism and then there is semiosis. So there is the Peirce that is just a story about scientific method or theories of truth, and then there is the Peirce with an architectonic system, a process philosophy theory of the Cosmos itself.
In a nutshell, Peirce starts from phenomenology. He gives an account of how a mind could even know a world. So that gives us the semiotic modelling relation. It is a story of the psychology.
That then lays the basis for a pragmatic epistemology. The reason why minds can work to know a world is abstracted so that it becomes a generalised theory of truth or well-founded belief. It becomes a tripartite system of world, sign and habit of interpretance. The scientific method.
But then this same abstract structure can be generalised ontically to be the story of creation or being itself.
It already starts with a foot in ontology. Semiosis is how minds know worlds and so it is what is the case about actual psychology. It is the theory of how that has to work in a basic way. (And that is also what psychology has agreed, at least in the kind of enactive, embodied, ecological and naturalistic models that have come to the fore once we got over the hump of cognitive representationalism.)
Now also a semiotic ontology is sweeping biology. Theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee, Robert Rosen and Stan Salthe always were taking a basically semiotic view. But these days it is being explicitly recognised by the rise of biosemiosis as a distinctive field of research.
So it is not hard to see the linkage between epistemology and ontology when it comes to life and mind. They are "knowing processes". So a theory of semiosis is about both how life and mind can even be the case, and also what it is that works best if we want to keep stepping up the game through reasoned inquiry.
But then comes the speculative metaphysics. And I quite openly call it that. Like Peirce, the next step seems obviously to consider whether the physical world in general - the Cosmos - is created and organised semiotically. Is the thesis of pan-semiosis true?
I, of course, think that yes, this looks like the final theory. I have a lot of fun arguing for it. And if you pay close attention to current fundamental physics, you can see how it is basically pan-semiotic. It just happens to call itself something else - information theoretic.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You have answered your own question. I use scare quotes to show that noise - being "other" - is also part of any signal in being the background to that signal. It is what is ignored - the void, the meaningless backdrop - so that what matters, some event, can be seen as individuated and distinct.
Meaningfulness - a signal or sign - is created by the discard of information. The more you can afford to ignore, the more preciously you are treating what you allow to remain.
Well yes. I do what I do because it has extraordinary beauty for me. It is thrilling to grasp the true mathematical structure of existence.
And it is not a merely word-based understanding - some kind of formula to incant. It is about actually being able to see and feel this structure in the mind's eye, recognise its form in every encounter with the world.
Quoting syntax
I disagree. As I say, it is instead like learning to see. Except that rather than just seeing the world of everyday appearances, it is seeing through to the very pattern of existence itself.
You know something abstract is right when suddenly everything that was fuzzy or confused clicks into sharp focus. It all connects up logically in a self-explanatory way.
Quoting syntax
But that is why I disagree. The richness of experience is the immersive view, the subjective pole of being. I know what it feels like to live in the world. And so by contrast I know what it is like to be living in the world of the abstract.
As I say, it is not about simply having a theory. It is about being able to experience the abstract realm that is the territory for which the theory is the map. It becomes a place that you can go.
Of course, if your knowledge of maths and science is a bunch of fragments with no metaphysical structure, then you can't have it as this internal Platonic realm that you experience. You actually have to spend a long time building up that integrated picture that brings it fully alive.
Quoting syntax
I answered that more fully in the reply to @Srap Tasmaner a post ago.
And no, I see life/existence as the world of mere appearances - at least in being the foreshortened subjective view of what it is to be me, some bag of flesh and prosaic needs, in some highly particular moment of the here and now. And then the Peircean theory is the map of the abstract or objective reality of which my immediate pressing existence is a tiny accidental shard.
So yes. A theory is just a theory. A map is just a map. Screw one up and draw another.
But then what could really drive me? It is only that you can get to experience the wholeness of reality as it comes alive gradually as a living structure in your thoughts.
Isn't that what everyone seeks from metaphysics? And so, that makes the best metaphysics such a worthwhile journey.
I can relate. I also like what I understand of your view. Reality is (among other things) something that makes sense of itself. It is self-exploring, self-describing.
Quoting apokrisis
I relate to seeing and feeling a structure when in the theorizing mode. Philosophy strikes me as a blend of art and science. Maybe a good theory just has the beauty of efficiency, of bang for buck. On the other hand, a good theory also allows the philosopher to either peer into the 'mind of God' or even host this mind (or more believably co-host the self-knowledge of 'the divine.')
I'm not particularly attached to this vocabulary of 'mind of God' and 'divine,' but I do think it captures the secret thrill of philosophy. The fantasy or just goal (or just one of a family of goals) seems to be to view the 'machine' from outside and beyond it. The hero is maybe dialectically evolving conscious crossing some end-of-history thresh-hold or (alternatively) maybe just braver than all who came before and therefore able to tolerate the grimly beautiful truth. Or even just lucky, even in his own eyes, to be shaped by circumstance into a lens of the perfect shape.
Quoting apokrisis
I still think that we are dealing with a useful and/or beautiful grid placed against the fullness of reality (or rather the grid is an isolated piece of this reality understood as its essence.)
Quoting apokrisis
I can relate to the distance from the 'bag of flesh and prosaic needs.' I can relate to becoming bored with one's tedious idiosyncrasies and the sense of one's life-story as a tiny shard. But the point that I would make is that the grand theory (god's self-consciousness, let's say) is part of an experience that engulfs it. The sense that one's life is a tiny accidental shard is 'within' that shard. Experience is sorted and 'non-essense' is thrown into the no-longer-fascinating merely-subjective bin.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree with all of this. And of course I'm trying to do metaphysics even as I theorize its limits or delineate what all metaphysical visions have in common. If reality is largely sense-making itself, then I'm interested in modeling this modeling. Of course to do so I have to throw away detail. 'Tool' is another master word or skeleton key. Others may be as good, but I haven't found any that are better, I don't think. That theories are tools suggests motivated tool-users. And the word 'tool' isn't as loaded with the 'sentimentality' that inhibits a distancing from whatever vocabulary one happens to have used successfully in the past as circumstances demand a fresh invention. Of course it's nice to feel done with all that distancing too. We want consummation and closure. 'All theories are tools, including this one' is one flavor of that closure, and more traditional metaphysical visions is another.
But all theories are the same kind of tool - a map by which to navigate the territory. So while - like blind men feeling an elephant - that might result in many partial mappings, there is still that single territory being explored.
And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything.
In regards to the contrast between lived life and metaphysical maps, a map is created by abstracting away the accidental to arrive at the necessary.
So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. Chance and unpredictability are basic to actual existence. And inexplicable to the degree they are just accidents.
So I - as with Peirce - in fact take the particularity of individual existence to be ontically fundamental. Unlike other brands of metaphysics, chance is treated as basic. We can't say why some radioactive atom actually decayed at precisely that moment. It really was uncaused and spontaneous.
My approach is thus far more generous to that other side of the story. It treats chance happenings as irreducible. They are not going to get explained away by hidden variables, or still more microscopic nudges.
But then the other side of the coin is that Peircean semiotics is founded also on the growth of global habits, the emergence of structural-level necessity. Peirce called it the spontaneity of tychism vs the continuity of synechism.
And metaphysics - as the mapping of the grand synechectic structure of existence, the very shapes of habits - derives its model of the Cosmos by abstracting away all that is just the accidental or particular about the actual world. The map metaphysics produces is of what is structurally - mathematically - necessary in terms of a globally-organising set of constraints.
It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. The metaphysics wants to boil away the unneeded detail. It wants to create a picture of the world that doesn't tell you what kind of trees grow on that there hill this year, or the colour of the front door that Mr Smith chose a few months back. Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.
So to call a metaphysical model a tool is too general. There are many kinds of tools.
The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details.
You'd then have to have the map being part of it all.
Or, in other words, the map would have to include itself as a proper part.
A bit fractal'ish I suppose, infinite in depth where the map maps itself.
While not impossible, it would give a peculiar structure of it all.
But I am defending Peircean internalism. Now the map is part of its world in being map of one of its complementary bounding limits. It is the view from the inside - while the whole shebang is still developing - of its structure as it will be frozen at the end of time. That is, its Heat Death.
And then as I said, the Peircean view treats chance or contingency as real. That is the other bound, the other limitation on being, that can be seen from the inside.
In terms of a developing cosmos, the most absolute state of chance is that which prevailed at its beginning. The hot and quantum Big Bang in other words.
So Peirce provides a map from inside the whole. In one direction, flattened to its descriptive extreme is our view of the Universe’s Heat Death. The ultimate structural outcome. And flattened in the other direction is our map, our scientific view, of the beginning of the Universe in a state of absolute potentiality or chance.
This is just a metaphor, so whatever, but there are other kinds of maps.
Quoting apokrisis
And that might be simplest for the kind of map you're talking about. But your idea seems to be there is a purest sort of map, a perfectly general and generic map, and that's just goofy, since what you choose to include in your map is obviously driven by your purpose in drawing it. The stuff you talk about leaving out is the stuff other people want.
Quoting apokrisis
And right there -- if you want your analogy to be to "getting around" maps rather than some other kind, you want the current state of accidental history. Is that bridge still up? Does this surface street go under the new freeway or just dead end there?
In fact I can't think of any kind of map that isn't based on selecting certain accidental states of affairs to mark and the rest to ignore. There's never any essential/accidental distinguishing such as you describe.
Sorry -- this just seems like the worst analogy for what you're after.
Your position is reasonable, but I'm not convinced that chiseling the tool metaphor down to the map metaphor is the way to go. Of course I do see that theories are especially used as maps, but I think it fair to emphasize how theories create or become and do not merely reveal reality. What I have in mind is especially the long human conversation about who humans are and who they should be.
Quoting apokrisis
That does seem to be goal. As desirable as such a map is, it's hard to imagine reality standing still long enough to be mapped (or to 'map itself'). Of course I don't think anyone will deny that some of our maps/tools have gotten better and better, at least for certain purposes.
Quoting apokrisis
I also see things this way.
Quoting apokrisis
As I understand physics (not my specialty), we have chance at the very small scale but a kind of law-of-large-numbers pseudo-determinism or determinism-enough at the scale of everyday life. Do you mean something like this?
Quoting apokrisis
This is a great way to develop the map metaphor. But I'm not sure that humans are only mapping human nature. Does a fiction sometimes become the truth in a way that threatens the distinction itself in some cases?
(This coincides with documented (evident) introspection illusions, an illusory information horizon necessitated by a finite self-model.)
Quoting apokrisis
Right.
If we abandon the peculiar fractal'ish structure, then it seems that the only exhaustive map is the territory.
It's just that, by that line of thinking, the term "map" is then implicitly bent around instead (or "territory" is).
Where maps (models, understandings, idealized abstracts, information, memories, etc) are epistemic - they're ours - territories are ontological.
But then, by collapsing maps and territories, we sort of populate it all with us (like a self-externalizing hypostatization), if you will.
Maybe omniscience-granting maps, or otherwise entirely accurate maps, are a pipedream.
Still useful (cf your pragmatism), if not required, just in a domain of excluding particulars, or flattened as you put it (if I'm reading your comments right).
When you say fractal, you could mean holographic or scalefree. So like a hologram, every bit of the reality provides a map of its whole.
And this would be the way I see it. It is what the cosmological principle of fundamental physics presumes. The Universe is homogenous and isotopic. It should look essentially the same, in terms of its basic structuring laws, over all observable scales.
And that would be like a 4D fractal. Zoom in or zoom out and the view remains the same.
So that is what I am describing. It is why from the inside, the complementary limits of the structure and the chance are flattened so that they appear to be at the beginning and end.
Like being inside a fractal, a perfect hierarchy of scales, look down towards the smallest grain and it becomes eventual a continuous blur. Look up towards the largest fractals and eventually they becomes so large that one eventually fills your whole view. The entire world is now inside a single instant of the complete design.
So the larger story is indeed fractal. And our best cosmological theories, or maps, of reality do elevate that fact to the status of a meta-principle. Homogeneity and isotropy are presumed. The laws of physics have to look the same from any possible physical point of view. That’s how the really key maps, like relativity, were derived.
So not just a weak analogy, or a bad analogy, but the very worst analogy that could be imagined?
Sounds legit. I mean you made such a stellar argument for that conclusion. ;)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So I said maps would boil down to a picture of the essential constraints and their resulting degrees of freedom. Obstacles and paths.
Can you present a map which doesnt simplify in just that fashion?
Indeed, if the paths are a mechanical level constraint, like a motorway network or an underground line, you don’t even need to show the hills they skirt, the suburbs they must connect.
And what exactly is accidental about a road or rail line? It is essential that you use them if you are using a car or carriage. The only accidents now are you making wrong turns or getting on the tube heading the wrong way.
My thought here was that the usefulness of a map is showing you what roads happen actually to exist connecting features you're interested in that also happen to exist, and it shows where the features and roads actually happen to be. You could abstract away location, distance, and so on, and just show the connections -- but this town and that city and the road that connects them are still matters of accidental history.
Constraints would only show you what connections could exist, where they could be, etc. We need to know which ones actually obtain.
Granted some features are considered essential to a map, in the sense that they're included when others aren't or needn't be, but it seemed to me those included features are still historical and accidental -- this town might not exist, there might not be a road between these two, etc.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
So the maps have to have enough essential information. And - for the sake of optimality - they would thus leave out all information that is inessential? Do you agree here or not?
If you are mapping the geography of a planet's surface, then sure, all sorts of accidents of time will have become today's dominating constraints. A mountain range is - in plate tectonic terms - just an accident. But for an army, a tourist, or some other relevant expression of a human interest, it is an obstacle, a constraint on our free and easy motion. So that doesn't change the principle of what I said.
A map is an umwelt - the world experienced in terms of some set of signs, some collection of affordances. We take note of all that is fixed so as to see the opportunities that are thus, dichotomously, created.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
They are only constraints if they obtain. If they are accidents, then they are accidents. Like it says on the label.
As individuated events, fluctuations are unpredictable. You can't draw a map of them. Even if you can record a history of them. Or draw a map of a field of probabilities - a map of the constraining context, the obstacle course, that gives a predictable shape to fluctuation now viewed as the generalised thing of a process. A structure in motion.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
You are trying too hard to manufacture problems. Sure history is full of accidents. But if these accidents can accumulate, then they become the constraints that act in the present to limit the accidents of the future.
They are no longer accidents once they become part of the constraints that prevail. So you are simply attempting to make an analogy the worst possible by abusing it in the worst way you can imagine.
That makes nice sense. Yesterday's chance is today's necessity. I understood your project to be pushing back or outward to ever greater generality, to the "purely" necessary. I guess if that's only an ideal, you'll be mapping the ossified accidental just like the rest of us. I suppose that's the sense of mapping "from the inside", as you put it.
Quoting apokrisis
Really not. Since what is essential depends on the purpose of the map, I couldn't see what a truly generic map could be. Since what today is a constraint might not have been, I couldn't see what a map of only the necessary would be. Your response helps. I still don't quite get the big picture, but I'm good for now.
Carry on.
The "map" is of the very fact that accidents accumulate to form the regularity of habits. That is the Peircean ontological story of the Cosmos.
And then the Platonic part of that is that there are structural attractors. Given the accumulation of accidents, certain flow patterns must be expressed. The latent structure will be what emerges by the end.
This was highly speculative metaphysics in Peirce's day. It is now routine scientific modelling - dissipative structure theory, hierarchy theory, chaos theory, constructal theory, self-organising criticality, far from equilibrium thermodynamics. There are a ton of labels for the current mathematical variants of the basic metaphysical model.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Great. I appreciate that.
This pattern I like very much, and I'm totally on board there.
But since we're talking metaphysics, do you have any qualms about the word "fact" here? What kind of fact? Are we forced to call such accumulation itself either accidental or necessary?
I would like to think this is where pragmatism slots into the story, but I don't quite get it. (Metaphysics just not my thing, as you know all too well.)
The fact is a fact about the metaphysical process. It is its distinctive structural feature. Out of individual accidents, collective order arises.
So the story is of this duality. The accumulation is not a case of either accidental or necessary. As said, it is about both. Both the chance and the necessity, the accidents and the habits, the tychism and the synechism. Each are fundamental in being the limits that sandwich the actuality of being.
So history, the passage of time, fuses together the material and the formal causes to produce the hylomorphic whole, the thing in itself. You have a past of congealed accidents that are steadily expressing the necessity of some global structure or order. And then the world as actual substantial reality - the richly varied thing - is the bit in the middle, the present moment in which much is constrained and yet much is still open and free.
That's a nice summary. Chance and necessity make a nice pair of terms in which to explain everything, but I would imagine you could tell a similar story with other pairs (or mores) of fundamental somethings. They all make me uncomfortable, but that's my problem.
Pierce is interesting, on the one hand, for giving Chance a seat on the dais, right? And then you realize that if we are honest, and serious, about our model-building, it too will have a place for chance, at least as whatever it is our theory doesn't account for, the noise accompanying the precious signal. Now we get to match up the epistemic and ontological, as you've noted, and we can be indifferent to questions like, "Is chance real?" We can posit it, or not, but it will always be in the model either way. And this would be Peirce's pragmatism, yes?
Oddly, this matching up makes me even more uncomfortable than the Big Theories do on their own. If the big theories already seem to hang in the air (the way a brick doesn't) on the buoyancy of their own internal coherence, this version seems more like jumping and forgetting to hit the ground.
Again, my problem. If I've understood, what most convinces you you're on the right track is what gives me the willies, which is curious. As always, I appreciate your patience with my questions.
Of course you need many dichotomies here. There isn't just a single dialectic. Discrete~continuous, flux~stasis, one~many, matter~form - we are talking about the deeper thing of the metaphysical mechanism that is dialectical opposition itself.
It would be nice to boil down the list to a single over-arching dichotomy. For me, I think it comes down to a pair of them - a dichotomy of dichotomies.
I would defend local~global and vague~crisp as the two key ones. One talks of the hierarchical structure that is what you have when you have something definitely developed. Then the other talks about the fact of development - the move from a monadic potential through a dichotomous symmetry breaking that gets you to a final equilbrium stability which is the triadic thing of a hierarchy.
But why so many metaphysical oppositions to describe the one nature? It is because you are trying to fold all the rich variety of an emergent cosmos back into the barest metaphysical scheme. It is not about which single dichotomy covers every angle that has emerged. It is about how every possible angle will emerge once you have the singular mechanism which generates that kind of variety.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Well reductionism wants to reduce all forms of chance to some kind of hidden determinism. Nothing could be actually just spontaneous.
So that is the bold move. To actually accept absolute chance as being as real as determinism (or absolute constraint). But then, it is only accepting either being absolute in terms of being the bounding limits of the actual.
So it is a more subtle, or sly, story. Chance and necessity are only absolute and actually existent in terms of each other. They are as real as each other. Which on some views - with them being flattened limits - makes them not really real at all. They are just co-dependently real. One exists to the degree the other is lacking. And neither can be completely lacking for either to actually exist.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
Surely it is the opposite. A dichotomy is the organisation that could bootstrap itself as it depends only on that which it bootstraps. Continuity exists only as an exclusion of the discrete. And vice versa. So each is what makes the other. They have a formally inverse or reciprocal relationship.
The internal coherence of a dichotomy is complete. By definition, a dichotomy is that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. It only needs itself to make sense.