Universals
I'm not sure I get the problem. Nominalism just seems silly, because universals exist in that we can group things by comparing what they have in common.
All dogs have certain characteristics in common. All cows, all triangles, etc. I suppose it does get a little tricky when looking at evolution and we admit that it's hard to tell just when a particular species began to exist.
All dogs have certain characteristics in common. All cows, all triangles, etc. I suppose it does get a little tricky when looking at evolution and we admit that it's hard to tell just when a particular species began to exist.
Comments (167)
So where all the issues stem from is our need to identify the causes of states of affairs. And following Aristotle, we can make a broad division into the essential abstract causes - form and purpose - and then the accidental or particular causes - the material and efficient.
So particular things are not really individuals but the individuated. They arise because of a hylomorphic interaction between top-down constraints (universal forms) and bottom-up constructions (material contingencies).
Thus talk about "reality" gets confused as instead everything is part of an irreducibly triadic emergent process. An individuated object is really a process, an act of individuation in which the universal stands for the shaping causes and the particularity is about the material contingencies. The object in question is made of this lump of stuff, in this place, at this moment.
So from a systems perspective, universals are real as a critical part of the causes of reality - reality being what we usually mean as the persisting result of causal actions, the individuation that results in concrete appearing states of affairs.
I think the trouble (the conflict between nominalism and realism) stems not from the roundness (which is instantiated in the objects) but in the commonality. The question that exercises the debate is; where is the commonality instantiated? The commonality consists in the roundness but it is not identical to the roundness.
Whereas univeralism doesn't have to explain this, because all instantiations are of the same entity, either as an immanent universal (in which the universal is "stretched" across its various instantiations) or a transcendental universal in which the universal is abstract but instantiated in the real world as well.
Note the reference in this article to a 1948 book by Richard Weaver, from a book called Ideas have Consequences:
The article is related to an historical argument that the rise of nominalism, and the corresponding decline of scholastic realism and Platonist thought, was the precursor to today's scientific materialism. As I say, a long article, but I think certainly worth the effort of reading as it presents a very careful analysis of Aquinas' understanding of universals, and what lead William of Ockham to reject them.
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* Note however that the essay concludes that Weaver's argument was either wrong, or 'right for the wrong reasons'.
Compare to excerpt from my initial Forum post in 2009:
So we have the traditional problem of universals because of a dualistic thinking - the usual divine vs material dichotomy - which then wants to make one side of the argument the ultimate winner.
My view is the systems' one where the ontology is irreducibly triadic. So when we are talking about the formal vs the material causes, those are both real - as causes. And so too is the world of formed matter that is the result of that causal action. So the effect is also real.
At which stage talking about what is real or unreal doesn't really make much sense as what we have is talk about a system for holistic emergence. We wind up with the three aspects of coming into existence which are the two types of causality - formal and material - plus the third thing which is where causes ceases to make a difference and instead we have what we call a stable effect, an individuated state of being.
(Emphasis added.)
See, I think there's a lineage from that, to the idea of semiosis:
C S Pierce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, ed Ketner, p 121-2 (quoted in Nagel, The Last Word.)
So the 'formal realm' is in some sense prior to its manifestation in material form; 'matter is effete mind'.
Where I would agree with you about your usual target here - Scientism or Materialism - is that these too are transcendent in effect. They want to put formal and final cause in the realm of ideas. The only difference is that they add the word "merely" ideas. Scientism pretends that questions about observers and minds and purposes are not real (causal) questions.
But if you are an adherent of immanence, then the job is to account for everything - causes and effects - from within.
And that was what the irreducible triadism of Peircean metaphysics was aimed at.
It's because, in the materialist view mind and/or ideas are a consequence or result of material causes - that is all they can be! - whereas in the traditionalist view (and I think also in Peirce's view) mind and/or ideas are real causes (Peirce was after all an objective idealist). Recall Peirce was writing well before the WWI in the heyday of American idealism, and was still part of the broader idealist tradition (like Josiah Royce and Borden Parker Bowne).
So I would say - like Peirce - you are arguing the wrong way round in saying universals are just a logical way of talking. The Peircean position is that causation is a logic-like process - a universal growth in reasonableness or intelligibility.
Logic works for us not by accident but because the Universe itself operates "logically".
As to ideas and change, it is Platonism that treats forms as eternal abstract objects. A systems view treats them as informational constraints. So forms capture limits on free material variety. They are thus the directors and channellers or actual change. Also forms can develop or evolve in time. Or more accurately, as limits, they only get fully expressed at "the end of time" - that is, whenever things come to an equilbrated state of rest.
Does Peirce think propositions are a real aspect of objective reality? Kind of like causal dispositions?
So it is about sign relations as a whole - propositions merely being the signs themselves, the targets of some habit of interpretance.
That sounds a bit like Whiteheadian process philosophy. The only way we "know" objects interact is through subjectivity. Objectively interacting doesn't even make sense outside the context of a knowing subject. Whitehead thus makes the speculative move to posit that everything that interacts is through subjectivity- it is subjective all the way down. To interact, is to have occasions of experience for objects.
To interact is to be something related to occasions of the experience of objects. Subjectivity is objectivity. It is to exist, whether known by someone or not.
Now, straight away I think this is incorrect. How could 'a universal' be 'an entity'? All throughout this essay, universals are posited as 'entities' - as if Plato's 'ideal form' is 'an entity'. So, no wonder we're sceptical about them, because I'm entirely certain that whatever else a universal might be, it's not any kind of entity, or thing, or object. It is much nearer to a pure potentiality, the way things are likely to form:
Meaning and the Problem of Universals, Kelly Ross.
Universals are more lke 'the sinews of reality'. They are not entities or things, but the underlying attributes of the cosmos, the lines along which things must form if they are to exist at all.
I'm trying to understand the gist of what you are saying. So you think that some things interact and others do not? Those things that do not interact are still in some relation to each other, and this is objectivity?
What does it mean to interact? Does it mean to experience or cause something? Does it mean to merely think about form (we, for example, have never causal or phenomenologically interacted with the living dinosaur whose bones we’ve dug up) Does it merely mean to express a form? People never seem to be quite sure. Sometimes the idealist seems to be saying we need to be there cause the existence of objects. Other times they merely seem to be saying things must have a form (be meaningful in experience). Still other times they seem to put our experience as causal, but leave open the possibility there is something without experiential form (e.g. Kant).
The subjective/objective split involves the last approach. Supposedly, there are the things we interact with, the subjective, and then there is this other realm (usually consider “unspoiled” by the scourge of human experience) which is outside interaction and relationship to us— all those perfect, definite things which are beyond our knowledge and lives, which have no relation to us… yet we are meant to respect as providing the most profound insights into our being. “Objective knowledge,” to the exclusion of the subjective, is considered the highest and only proper from when dealing with enquiry into the world.
Even Kant, whose turn to the subjective is motivated by this very nonsense (how could such an “objective” ever be knowledge of our lives? It can’t have anything to do with them), still treats the “objective” with a certain reverence. The noumenon is still sitting out there, a most profound instance of knowledge, just always beyond our reach— a knowledge which is unknowable, yet someone manages to still count as knowledge.
This “mystery” has attracted every party interested in obfuscating subjectivity since. In discussing knowledge of the world, Kant is cited for showing how we can’t know anything significant because we only have access to our puny experiences. As if knowing about our world and the things that interact with it was somehow a problem with respect to knowing about our life. Kant’s turn against “objectivity” in human knowledge has ended up supporting because it talks as though human experience is deficient for knowledge.
Where Kant went wrong was failing to reform our understanding of the objective. In falling to eliminate it as a realm distinct from the subjective, he left the beacon of “objectivity” burning brightly. Instead of calling out the noumenon as nonsensical full stop (i.e. not just that it cannot be known by us, but that it cannot be anything to know), he left sitting above us, a thing we could supposedly aim, wishing we could get beyond out inherently untrustworthy experiences.
When I say the subjective is objective, I’m collapsing the subjective/objective split which drives the starry-eyed staring at the mysterious noumenon. Not only cannot we not know noumenon, but there is nothing to know in the noumenon. All knowledge of the world is of our experiences. The only objective knowledge is of the subjective. When we have experiences, we don’t just “only know our experiences,” we know the world (subjectivities) as they are. Our experiences are the means of knowledge rather than always being an inadequate attempt to grasp what is forever beyond us.
Many people do interpret Plato's forms, as explained by Plato, as entities. But I agree that the encyclopaedia entry is surprisingly wrong: modern philosophers however neo-Platonic wouldn't regard universals as entities.
I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows.
How for instance do words change their meaning over time, and how do our names for the 'same' sort of thing change over time? They change as our understanding shifts, as the worlds we move in shift.
I know not "seems," but only what "is." Or would prefer to. I've not read Peirce, so I don't know how he argues for what you're trying to say. I think Cartesianism is best solved by Kant. Causality is just an a priori concept of the intellect that structures and indeed constructs the world of appearance. The Ideas are not in space and time, and so are not causally efficacious.
I think he admits this, though.
I get this idea. Do you agree then with Whitehead's speculative theory of actual occasions? All matter/energy is actually the cumulative process of actual occaisions whereby what "seems" to be a non-subjective object (electron, let's say), is actually an actual occasion subjectively interacting with other actual occasions? Objectivity then is simply an (society of) actual occasions interacting with other actual occasions of experience. These actual occasions could be split into two categories:
1.) aggregate occasions- organisms which have a centrally coordinated series of occasions (and may contribute to having what we call "consciousness")
2.) corpuscular occasions which are non-organisms and have no centralized coordination of occasions (and hence do not seem to possess what we call "consciousness").
I'm not much of a fan of Whitehead. His process philosophy is too vague and consciousness centric. It dismisses the presence of many concrete states under the guise of accounting for the endless becoming of the world.
For me, he does not give enough respect to subjectivity. He makes individual's into sums relations when they ought to be understood on their own terms. Matter/energy is not cumulative as much as it is cumulative. Any state is as much distinct as it the result of sum of it's past, present or future relations.
I might say the election is an instance of subjectivity interacting, but I would mean in the sense of a state of the world, with a meaning in experience, interacting with other states of the world. The presence of consciousness or otherwise is not important. Objectivity, for me, is any actual occasion, any state of the world (and so of subjectivity too), whether it "interacts" (appears in? causes?) experiences or not.
I'm at least half the materialist Whitehead opposed. More or less, I stick becoming of the world and the reality of consciousness with discrete material states. Becoming is not opposed to the discrete, but rather extends it into, more or less, infinity-- the range of possible discrete states is basically endless. Rather than being a measure of what is actual, becoming is a a measure of what might be at any given moment.
Well I think Whitehead would say, any material is a process (actual experience) that aggregates with other occasions (either democratically in non-organism structures) or monarchically (in organism-like structures). Thus, the point you seem to make about objects not being in causal/experiential interaction with a particular subject is moot, as everything is deemed to be experiential, and thus interacting with something at all instances.
Doesn't Aristotle conceive of matter as potency and form as act, though?
As I understand it, it's rather like (no coincidence) Heidegger's distinction between 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand'. Matter has potential, dynamis; form is actuality, energeia or entelechia.
But sparrows and redness are names of qualities. So how did you get from quantification to that?
It would make more sense to say that we are differentiating creatures and then generality or quality arises in the limit where differences no longer make a difference to what we are talking about. A sparrow is still a sparrow if it red or blue, plastic or flesh, fat or thin.
So universals - as ideas, conceptions, qualities or the many other terms we have to denote bounding constraints - are not merely merological composites of all their possible instances. They stand just as firmly as the ground to acts of differentiation. For differences to make a difference pre-supposes the simpler state of differences that don't change a state of affairs.
Again, the real point is that the realist-nominalist debate is founded on a metaphysical dichotomy. And so the resolution lies not in an eternal battle to decide which is the real, which is the epiphenomenal. Being a dichotomy, each requires the reality of the other to be real itself.
So there can be no particularity without generality. And vice versa. You need a symmetry to have a breaking. And the breaking is what reveals there was a symmetry.
The problem with universals and Platonic ideas is that they are not generally understood in a hierarchical fashion. So roundness and sparrows and teacups are all names for individuated ideals. Platonia quickly fills up with a bestiary of perfect representatives of classes.
Nominalism is right on that score. We humans freely name abstractions without really being systematic about the formal and final causality that the names mean to refer to.
But reality is organised hierarchically. So teacups are ideals that have their formal and final cause very locally within the sphere of human culture. And sparrows likewise are the product of very local biological and ecological constraints - the symmetry breaking information to be found in a genetic and ecological developmental history.
So if we are talking about the truly universal, we are talking about the cosmologically fundamental. And roundness becomes a good example of that.
The reason for roundness is rotational symmetry. Along with translational symmetry, it is simply one of the basic facts of their being spacetime. And it is a universal in the fashion I specify - a difference that doesn't make a difference. To spin on the spot is inertial. Rotation freely happens because it makes no difference.
So roundness becomes the name we give in recognition our (geometric) reality has this fundamental boundary property. A circle is a representation of the symmetry which is an unbreachable limit - you can't get more round than this roundest thing. The circle embodies the difference that doesn't make a difference because it could be spinning madly, it could be standing still, and you couldn't see any change.
And then from that state of cosmic Platonic perfection, even the slightest deviation becomes the symmetry breaking, the difference that makes a difference. Mark the circle with the tiniest dot and now it's state of motion is made a counterfactually definite thing.
So the whole realist-nominalist debate is a result of the usual wrong turn when faced with a metaphysical strength dichotomy or symmetry breaking.
The way to make sense of an apparently fundamental opposition is to step back to the triadic or hierarchically organised point of view where you instead see how it is a case of two complementary principles in mutually formative interaction. Each extreme is making its other in a mutualised symmetry breaking.
Wayfarer should recognise this as Budhist dependent co-arising even if he doesn't get the more advanced formulations of systems science and Peircean semiotics.
I think you're actually advocating a subtle dualism here, though - 'ideas' being in a 'mental realm' which is causally inactive, i.e. can't effect changes, and the 'objective domain', which you presume is the really existent domain.
But recall the Kantian insight that reality is not simply given to us, we're not passive spectators of an already-existing vista. The mind orders and constructs according to judgements and the categories of the understanding. In that context, universals are not simply psychological constructs, but an aspect of what brings order to experience, the lineaments of reality, inasmuch as 'reality' is an aspect of experience.
So on a deep level, it's not as if mind and ideas are in a separate domain, they're not 'in here', as opposed to what is objectively given. Mind and ideas are constitutive of reality in a way which I contend we have now generally lost sight of, due to the 'habit of objectification'. (Prothero had a good thread on PF about Whitehead's views 'bifurcation of nature').
The scare quotes can only impute metaphorical dualism to my position, not the real (Cartesian) thing. And objects exist just as much as the Ideas. I propose no chain of being whereby some things can exist "more" than other things.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes and no. Reality is actually given to us, according to Kant, it's just filtered by the forms of understanding. So the product of the filter is constructed, not reality, though the filtered construction then becomes reality for us.
Have you looked into Whitehead? His metaphysics seems like a good vehicle to concretize Schopenhauer's Will.
Everything is not experiential (an actual experience) in the sense Whitehead talks about. Nature is, to reference Prothero's thread, bifurcated all the way down (and up, and around, and throughout). Experiences are not the things they are experiences of. Every object (including each instance of experience) is it's own state distinct from everything else. Bifurcation of nature is not contrary to relations, process and becoming, but rather how they are all expressed. Everything is its own thing, yet also in relation with everything else and always becoming.
In taking the following position Kant doesn't.
[quote="Thorongil]Yes and no. Reality is actually given to us, according to Kant, it's just filtered by the forms of understanding. So the filter is constructed, not reality, though the filter then becomes reality for us."[/quote]
He's still treating as if the is an "unfiltered" reality out there we can never access. What we filter is still mistakenly understood as a "flawed picture" rather than understanding of the world wider than ourselves. More critically, he still treats the "unknown" as if it is outside our filter. But this cannot be true . Since any unknown state if in relation to us, it must be within the filter, be something we might know.
The filter must be reality. Everything must have an understandable form regardless of whether anyone knows about it-- that's why there is an unknown state. There can be no reality to know beyond how things might be filtered to experience.
Yes, the thing-in-itself.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I have no idea what you're talking about here.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The thing-in-itself? Yes, because it is outside the filter.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is a non-sequitur.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It is. For us.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Kant would agree with this.
I'm convinced there is a reality behind the great chain of being, the loss of which is basic to this discussion and to the subsequent 'flatland' of empiricism.
Okay, but the word reality is not the same as existence. I'm fine with degrees of reality, but not degrees of existence. The latter is nonsensical to me.
Quoting Wayfarer
I don't think I was ever disputing this claim. My original purpose was to point out the distinction between a cause and reason and warn one not to conflate them.
The article you linked about William of Ockham looks interesting. I'll try and read it here.
The "why" of things, though, may be thought to be spiritually immanent in the how of things; just as the spiritual may be thought to be fully immanent in the physical, not transcendent, but merely hidden from us, due to our inability to be open to it.
Looked at this way the world is its own purpose; there cannot be some transcendent reason (a reason utterly beyond the world itself) as to why it exists, because, really such an idea can make no sense at all. Even if such an idea, ad absurdum, were granted coherency, it could never be any use to us at all; so why would we trouble ourselves with it?
I'd be interested in reading what you have. I can't say that I ever thought that a connection could be made between Aristotle and Schopenhauer, considering Schopenhauer is indebted to Kant, and Kantian metaphysics is strikingly anti-realist in comparison to Aristotelian realism. If anything I would have thought Schopenhauer and Plato would have been similar...but Schopenhauer with his transcendental rejection of the immanent world paired with Aristotle's embrace of the teleological immanency? I don't know...
Final causation has merely been turned over to other values, a transcendence of scientism, progress and consumerism. It's just been shorn of older traditions and values (e.g. religion, God). The desire for transcendence, the notion our lives are worthless and need to be rescued, remains all over the place. Indeed, it drives the nihilistic outlook because it can't locate meaning or any guiding principle within ourselves.
Reason actually is instumentalised within the transcendent; the means by which humans are saved form their (supposedly) inherent ignominy.
If that's is true, one can say: "and you purpose is X" even if someone disagrees or is otherwise. "God's plan" is probably the most obvious example. Anything terrible is turned from the pain of an injustice to something that's meant to happen. Or to use a more modernist example: "Technology will give us utopia we deserve." where terrible events of the world are hidden beneath the manifest destiny of a world which transcends suffering. "Purpose" is a fiction we use to enact power over the world, particularly our discourses.
What if it is just the case that it makes no sense to you, because that way of thinking has been forgotten?
As for 'the world being it's own purpose' - that is what makes no sense. Consider the vast amount of literature, drama, art and philosophy churned out in the 20th Century about the purposlessness of the world. The idea of 'telos' in biology is a complete taboo, you're not even allowed to say it.
The originating quest of philosophy was to discern purposes, reasons, causes that were invisible to the ordinary eye. It was about 'discerning causes'. Now, science is still about that, but the only causes it wishes to discern are those that have instrumental value, as Horkheimer notes above. (I have discovered that this 'critique of the instrumentalisation of reason' is fundamental to the so-called New Left, I'm not well-schooled in that thinking but I think this aspect of their work is important, although as Marxists, they rejected anything transcendent in the Platonist sense.)
For anyone who recognises pointlessness, it is, well, pointless. It has no impact on their lives and holds no consequences. They go about their lives, meaning and all, without being haunted by existential dread because they aren't empty without purpose.
Modernity has moved the insight of the pointless world into the popular, but alas it has not, at least for many, granted the insight of the world without a point. Instead of recognising the world without a point (life and meaning), they've maintained nihilism of the transcendental and think it's all meaningless unless it's given a purpose.
In which case, they're not likely to be troubled by philosophical questions, right? Like most people. But that is what is being discussed here, although sometimes that can be hard to discern.
In a certain sense, for sure. But being troubled is not the same as asking a question or understanding something. To be troubled in this way is not merely have an interest in philosophy or ask philosophical questions. Anyone can do that.
It is to feel a deep pain or longing to be something beyond oneself, to have a purpose which is more than just one's own existence. A search for the idea that saves the world from meaninglessness. In the past, these ideas (God, miracles, final cause, purpose) occupied a prominent place in how we understood the world and metaphysics. Knowledge that the world wasn't saved from its nihilism was considered impossible. God was necessary.
In modernity, this has changed. The shift of knowledge to the world, and away from what is supposedly beyond it, has undone the necessity of God. Now this "saving" God is understood as impossible. There is no being saved from the world. Logically, there must no God and we are stuck with the world as it exists.
The "troubled" no longer have an answer and, more importantly, philosophy precludes one. Not because gods, magic or the afterlife are impossible, but rather because it now recognises something outside our world cannot act upon us or save us. It recognises this saving God is just a fiction It promise is nothing more than a story we tell ourselves to feel better-- akin to consumerism, scientism, modernism, utopianism, fad diets, etc.,etc. While there is no doubt it works for many, makes their lives better, fills the troubling hole, someone paying attention can't help it works by telling the falsehood one's live is given by that which is not their life. Such fictions can no longer work for such people unless their willing to participate in doublethink or are content to know they are pretending.
It's realisation which is more destructive to belief in God than any empirical proof or ethical question. It removes the promise of God. Now not even God can save us, for our lives can only ever be are own. We are alone. No-one is there to ride in and save us. Nihilism prevails (or so it is thought).
But Nihilism only prevails because people are still looking to the beyond. They're still using the nihilistic approach which views the world as inherently inadequate. The hole is only there because they are unwilling to say: "The world is and the world means, in-itself." A trait shared with all the other fictions (e.g. consumerism, scientism, modernism, utopianism, fad diets, etc., etc.) of final cause or purpose which have come to dominate modernity.
One might say that we can be rather bad at learning how the world matters, so we often approximate with fictions that simultaneous confirm our worst fears (Nihilism) but also promise everything we want (Meaning), without undoing our own ignorance how the world means.
So no doubt people who recognises pointlessness are not "troubled" by philosophical questions in the way you suggest, but that's sort of the point. They've abandoned the nihilism which requires the fix you propose. Yet, seemingly, you would say these people a philosophically ignorant because they no longer look to the "beyond."
And this is the problem with your approach. You treat some of the philosophically wisest people, those who understands the world matters, who know that the horrors of the world are no excuse to say it doesn't matter, as if they are ignorant. All because they dare to overcome Nihilism and do not require the transcendent fiction to understand the world matters.
For instance? Who would be some of the 'philosophically wisest people'? Any particular school of philosophy? Books or examples?
Nietszche, for example, felt that nihilism could be overcome by the will-to-power; Schopenhauer by aesthetic enjoyment; Camus by the heroic act of self-making in the knowledge of its ultimate futility.
Are those the kinds of examples you have in mind?
Nope. Nietszche is still seeking the beyond. Nihilism is still there for him, to be overcome by power and greatness. He pines for God even as he destroys him.
Camus gets bit closer. However, heroic act of self-knowledge is treated as the consolation prize to the inescapable futility of life. Still, the world is considered futile and inadequate, our act of knowledge is to know we are meaningless and their is nothing we can do about it-- nihilism still governs.
I'm talking about where nihilism is wholly rejected. The position where world is neither futile nor inadequate, where the world means in-itself. Where the transcendent is not required to save us because we were never meaningless in the first place.
Spinoza is probably the first name that came to mind. But lots of people understand this way, some interested in philosophy and some not. My point is not about any particular philosophy or author per se, but rather about how you limit philosophical wisdom to the context of soothing nihilism, rather than allowing it to positions which point out nihilism was never true in the first place. You would have say "Nihilism is true," just so people are "troubled" and can find the wisdom of the rescuing God.
Nihilism. I couldn't possibly be saying anything meaningful because that's not found of this world. You insist the only wisdom in this context is to think the world is meaningless and have the transcendent save it.
If someone doesn't think the world has a hole, if they are not "troubled," then anything the say is meaningless. They (supposedly) don't grasp what matters and lack any philosophical insight.
My posts don't mean anything? To the Nihilist maybe....
Yes, I'd like to see that. Sometimes one philosopher makes you think about another one differently. For example, Whitehead's actual occasions are not really at odds with Schopenhauer's ideas and can in fact provide a generalized mechanism for Schopenhauer's dual-aspect theory. Schopenhauer was a sort of dual-aspect theorist. Actual occasions are a process/event.
[quote=Schopenhauer, Arthur from IEP] The mental and the physical are not two causally linked realms, but two aspects of the same nature, where one cannot be reduced to or explained by the other. [/quote]
[quote=Schopenhauer WWR Book II]The double knowledge which each of us has of the nature and
activity of his own body, and which is given in two completely different ways, has now been clearly brought out. We shall accordingly make further use of it as a key to the nature of every phenomenon in nature, and shall judge of all objects which are not our own bodies, and are consequently not given to our consciousness in a double way but only as ideas, according to the analogy of our own bodies, and shall therefore assume that as in one aspect they are idea, just like our bodies, and in this respect are analogous to them, so in another aspect, what remains of objects when we set aside their existence as idea of the subject, must in its inner nature be the same as that in us which we
call will.[/quote]
Now compare a summary of process philosophy from IEP:
[quote=Process Philosophy from IEP]The most counter-intuitive doctrine of process philosophy is its sharp break from the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, that actuality is not made up of inert substances that are extended in space and time and only externally related to each other. Process thought instead states that actuality is made up of atomic or momentary events. These events, called actual entities or actual occasions, are “the final real things of which the world is made up,” (Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18). They occur very briefly and are characterized by the power of self-determination and subjective immediacy (though not necessarily conscious experience). In many ways, actual occasions are similar to Leibniz’s monads [link], except that occasions are internally related to each other.
The enduring objects one perceives with the senses (for example, rocks, trees, persons, etc.) are made up of serially ordered “societies,” or strings of momentary actual occasions, each flowing into the next and giving the illusion of an object that is continuously extended in time, much like the rapid succession of individual frames in a film that appear as a continuous picture. Contemporary commentators on process thought suggest that individual actual occasions vary in spatio-temporal “size” and can correspond to the phenomena of sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, cells, and human persons (that is, souls). Likewise, these individuals may aggregate together to form larger societies (for example, rocks, trees, animal bodies). According to this model, a single electron would be a series of momentary electron-occasions. Likewise, the human subject would be a series of single occasions that coordinates and organizes many of the billions of other actual occasions that make up the subject’s “physical” body.[/quote]
It isn't hard to make the leap from acts of Will and actual occasions. They can be conflated to be, for all intents and purposes, the same metaphysical idea. Actual occasions are the vehicle for which Will constructs reality- interacting, configuring, etc. To bring in the element of "suffering" (Schopenhauer's perennial theme) I actually inadvertantly ran across this blog that brought to light another possible connection between process philosophy and Schopenhauer's Will/Pessimism.
[quote=https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/objectiles-and-actual-occasions/]
Third, Whitehead retains the notion of final causation in the becoming of actual occasions, arguing that occasions are pursuing “satisfaction” or completion that they accomplish through the integration of prehensions in a novel and aesthetically pleasing unity. Consequently, it is the final cause that accounts for the becoming of an actual occasion in Whitehead. Where Whitehead attributes becoming to final causes, I attribute it to difference or disequilibrium. Objectiles become because they contain disequilibrium within themselves and disequilibriums are introduced into their being through interactions with other actual entities. Becoming is the resolution of these tensions or disequilibriums producing new properties or qualities in the objectile, but this resolution of tensions is not governed by final causality but rather by the mechanics underlying the internal organization of the objectile. The resolution of disequilibriums marks the death or completion of an objectile, though the dead entity can still function in the becoming of other objectiles through being prehended by these objectiles.[/quote]
This blog author's idea of disequilibriums sounds similar to the dissatisfaction/deprivation of Will's primum mobile. Constant disequalibriums are causing configurations, etc. Though this is at somewhat odds with Whitehead's other notions (as noted in the article), combining this disequalibrium idea with Whitehead's idea of eternal objects which keep the configurations as similarities (universals) you have a parallel with Schopenhauer's use of Ideas. Personally, I am not sure about the need for the Platonic backing of universals- but you can see that even this, would at least seem right at home in Schopenhauer's philosophy.
These are metaphysical debates. I don't think that 'reality is organised hierarchically' nor that there are ideal teacups or sparrows. Here your language, to my surprise, sounds much more like Wayfarer's, for you sound like you claim a great chain of being, but one derived, as Landru would remind us if he were here, from methodological naturalism. What you are arguing here here is not something you can demonstrate with scientific references, although, granted, you can make a powerful argument from scientific knowledge to the realm beyond science.
I just argue the metaphysics from the argument in your first para - as an anti-ontology: there is no over-arching system to the worlds we move through and that's why our language is non-systematic.
So why is science hierarchically organised in to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology? Did humans just invent a crazy set of divisions for no reason or does that reflect the ontic fact that existence is found to have levels of constraint that range from the very general to the highly specific?
That point was made by William of Ockham - it is closely linked to the principle of Ockham's Razor. But this objection is addressed in What's Wrong with Ockham:
To which the author responds (in part):
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Thanks! Still trying to join the dots…..some of which are a long way apart….
A similar principle seems to be at work even in epigenetics, as illustrated by the following:
Clay Farris Naff.
So the 'form of seeing' might be understood in terms of the requirements to absorb light; however rather than requiring different 'forms' for all the possible kinds of eyes (i.e. reptile eyes, insect eyes, cephalopod eyes), each is the actualisation of the 'form of seeing' created by diverse pathways and utilising whatever materials and means are at hand. In this way, the idea of 'forms' might actually be far more parsimonious than nominalism understands.
(This also suggests the sense in which 'ideas' or 'forms' can be regarded as causal i.e., as an endpoint towards which things are evolving. So not 'causal' in the sense of material causation, but as a tropism. But, I suspect, an idea alien to Darwinism.)
I have no idea what you mean by suggesting that a "way of thinking" could be "forgotten". The way I see it, if the notion of transcendence once made sense; it would have been in a cosmology ( such as the Ancient Greek) that didn't count the starry realm as being part of the world. The idea was that what appear to us as the stars are holes or portals in the firmament of the world through which the celestial light illuminates the world.
How can we today make sense of the notion of absolute transcendence without returning to such a cosmology and rejecting the current scientific paradigm? The ancient Greeks knew just where the boundary (the firmamental dome) between the earthly world and spiritual world was situated. In any case the realm of Platonic ideas was not utterly transcendent in the problematic sense, because it could be known by the pure intellect.
The point about the world being its own purpose has nothing at all to do with reductionist science that denies telos. The idea of immanent spirituality is that everything that happens in the physical world has a spiritual meaning and purpose. This notion is incoherent if you think the purpose of the world is utterly transcendent (which is itself an incoherent thought). This is the incoherence of the Early Modern view of God, which led to the idea of an utterly mechanical nature, and the utterly transcendent 'ghost in the machine' God and human souls, and the ineradicable problem of Dualism, which is to explain how there could be any interaction between the utterly transcendent realm of God and res cogitans and the physical world.
Remember it was Nietzsche who pointed out that nihilism is inherent in (particularly Early Modern) Christianity with its absolutely transcendent, omnipotent God. This idea leads inexorably to the devaluation of physical reality, to the turning away from this world and the longing for an unimaginable, impossible transcendence. It also leads to the idea that God is utterly unknowable, absolutely beyond. I am surprised, given your own Gnostic leanings that you will have any truck with this problematic, and ultimately unintelligible, idea.
I would suggest forgetting about science; it has nothing to tell us about Theology. It was, on the contrary, certain developments in theology and religious philosophy that led to the very possibility of modern science and its reductive mechanistic paradigm.
Science may now be beginning to free itself from that reductive paradigm, and that should (hopefully, if there is to be any escape from the destructive clutches of nihilism) lead to more immanentistic, processive understandings of God and the human soul, and a reinstatement of the idea of gnosis.
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the mysteries of transubstantiation, the Incarnation, and the Crucifixion and Resurrection, are symbolic of the oneness of the human soul and creation itself with God. They are symbols, in other words, of a fully immanent gnostic spirituality that is more in keeping with Buddhism than the transcendent model of Christianity, insofar as the former has no doctrine of absolute transcendence, but rather a doctrine of universal interdependence. "As above, so below".
Right! Well, why didn't you say so! I'm completely with you on all the above.
The 'forgotten way of thinking' that I am pointing out, is very much what you're referring to! I am reading a book on the transition to modernity, which points out that the ancient 'sacramental universe' was undermined by John Duns Scotus' 'univocity' (i.e. that God is the same kind of being as other beings). That lead to the Early Modern view you are referring to. So, again, I think we're on the same page. Glad we sorted that out!
I agree. I find instrumentalism descriptive. It's not clear to me that we have any greater or different purposes than the non-human cast of Monkey Thieves. The "lyrical" and perhaps half-nonsensical "why is there something rather than nothing" itself seems to function aesthetically and symbolically as the sort of a thing a noble/superior primate might be overheard "worrying" about.
Also, any cure-monger needs the "disease" of the ignorance of or lack of belief in their "cure." For the most part, ideology tends to boil down to "if only they were more like me, what a world we'd have." (I'm not denying some crooked faith in this prejudice myself, but the better part of me knows better, maybe, perhaps....)
Good point. Aren't universals just concepts? How much can we really say about what it is to have a concept? It reminds me of describing the experience of redness (which may be the simultaneous experience of color and concept). We strangely invent something like a world without spatial extension of roughly shared concepts. I suppose any theory about this ability of ours is going to be justified practically or aesthetically. And any theory about the world that divides into non-concept and concept will itself seemingly have to live in the world of concept.
"Purpose" in these contexts functions as a difference to ourselves. Supposedly, it exists above us and resolves our inherent inadequacy. To put it into context of the discussion around us. It is a form of "univocity" Wayfarer speaks about in their recent post.
[quote=Wayfarer] I am reading a book on the transition to modernity, which points out that the ancient 'sacramental universe' was undermined by John Duns Scotus' 'univocity' (i.e. that God is the same kind of being as other beings). [/quote]
The doctrine of "purpose" treats God as a being just like ours. No doubt it poses God as transcendent, but God is still thought of as like us, a Being sitting out somewhere, forever beyond our world.
Rather than being understood in as immanent to our world, the "spiritual meaning" is given over God, a realm considered to have nothing to do with out own. There might be no meaning immanent to our world, but that's alright, for there is the Being of God of immanent meaning.
Purpose is the fiction told by those who do not recognise the immanent meaning of the world. It approximates that recognition, giving them the sense things matter. As such it functions to create a life with a sense of worth (and that's great), but it is founded on an underlying nihilism.
Sincerely, that is a great question, and it's exactly the kind of question I began asking myself after exposure to philosophy. Roughly speaking, I lump religion, science, and philosophy into something like a generalized technology for living a better life. God-talk and electron-talk and talk-talk have all proven beneficial for various individuals (and harmful for others.) In short, I think that thinking about thinking can lead to more effective thinking. We can define "effective thinking" in terms of happiness or pleasure, but we move into the realm of feeling here. But feeling is the only thing I know of that makes whether a proposition is true or false "mean" a damn thing in the first place.
I also enjoy sharing my tentative "results" with others, especially when I don't see my own approach otherwise represented. While purveying the one-right-truth and offering possibly useful metaphors are related in spirit (proclaiming implicitly the possession of self-esteem-improving and status-boosting "spirit-lore"), I think the difference deserves some elaboration. And, sure, there's the "imp of the perverse" at work in any "unfashionable" position, but surely you can understand that. No hard feelings, I hope.
Sorry, Wayfarer, sometimes I don't make myself completely clear. Also, the nature of language does have a tendency to lead to wayward (mis)interpretations sometimes! I'll have a look at the link to the book about Scotus, sounds interesting, thanks.
Because you would have everyone be "troubled," just so they could be rescued by the transcendent.
I say that the world is meaningful, that it is immanent with "spiritual meaning," and you proclaim my argument is meaningless. You say that I'm wrong to suggest there is "spiritual meaning" immanent in the world and that whatever I say isn't worth listening to.
For anyone who does recognise the "spiritual meaning" meaning immanent in the world, you proclaim they are arguing nihilism while trying to insist them ought to be nihilists themselves (i.e. say the world is without meaning and then fill the gap with the transcendent).
That is what philosophy is. It is precisely 'the absence of wisdom', which has to be attained - not through believing, not through repetition of dogma or performance of rites and rituals, but by discerning the truth - a truth which the ignorant, the many, the hoi polloi, don't discern, don't understand and don't see (which is terrifically non-PC notion in our day). Not only that, they don't even see that they don't see it. And all your posts proclaim that this 'not seeing it' the only thing we can hope for!
Your English prose style is very fluent - I know this, as I am a technical writer by profession - but your posts are totally empty of meaning. I don't know why you choose to amuse yourself by posting on philosophy forums, but whatever the motivation is, it has nothing to do with philosophy. It simply uses the words and phrases drawn from philosophy to get involved in pointless arguments with other contributors.
I am not saying that to be malicious, I have observed your activites over a number of years, and that is exactly what you're doing. So please don't bother to try and refute what I'm saying, it will simply result in more of the tangled roots of the 'willow of darkness'. And that really, truly is my last response to you.
I think there are a lot of neologisms in that work, so it is best to read it with secondary literature. However, you may find that it provides insights that you might not otherwise think about. His use of actual occasions as a basis for his metaphysics could be a good mechanism for Will. It may help overcome some of the paradoxes of Schopenhauer's Will "objectifying" itself.
The notion that wisdom is an absence which is to be obtained is a ritual and belief. A powerful sense that we are going to make ourselves better. Just think some philosophy, at some point, were're going to be great again-- it's like Trump's slogan. Say where going to make ourselves great again, and we get the sense as if it is happening, even though we aren't doing or learning anything.
Frequently, it becomes a substitute for wisdom. People partake in the absence like it's the "mystical" which is always revelatory-- just ask "why" at every moment and you'll be the wise.
It gives nothing at all. If we were to dismiss the immanent "spiritual meaning" by asking "why" whenever the topic came up, we would never gain that wisdom (indeed, you've probably encountered nihilists who make exactly that argument). Wisdom is obtained not in asking why, but rather when we understand the truth.
My posts do not proclaim "not seeing" is the only thing we can hope for. Indeed, I outright argued that opposite: that seeing is perfectly possible, that the there is immanent "spiritual meaning" and that we may understanding this. You responded to this by suggesting my proposal didn't have any meaning. As if it was impossible for us to recognise immanent "spiritual meaning" because the world can just never have this.
When I speak of your nihilism, I really mean it. I argue there is immanent "spiritual meaning" to the world, that it matters, that ethics apply to it, that it is worthwhile, that it expresses an immanent meaning which is not defined by the existence of any state. What do say? That I'm speaking nonsense. There's no way this could be true because the world just doesn't express that sort or meaning.
Supposedly, I'm meant to say: "The world is meaningless. It has no immanent "spiritual meaning." To be wise I'm meant to have a nihilistic hole in my soul which I need to resolve. And you call this notion that the world doesn't matter wisdom. How exactly it wise for me to deny the immanent "spiritual meaning" of the world and become "troubled?"
This is what is so egregious about your argument. Not that you would argue for meaning through the transcendent, but that you equate any recognition of immanent "spiritual meaning" with denying it is an immanent expression of the world.
You proclaim anyone must reject the meaning of the world, have a hole to fill, if the are to understand truth and to be wise. To a point where you cannot even see when other understand immanent "spiritual meaning" through a different means, one which understands that immanent "spiritual meaning" in expression of the world.
Like the dogmatic preacher, you proclaim the world is worthless and needs the transcendent being to save it-- "Believe in God or else you do not understand the truth. You are not wise. Everything you say is meaningless. You will be doomed to burn in the Hell of a world which doesn't matter. " You set fear of worthlessness amongst the flock.
The person who is content with their life, who understand it has an immanent "spiritual meaning," is suddenly confronted with the accusation they've failed to understanding the truth, that they have no wisdom, that they are meaningless. You seed doubt to create the hole they must use your particular beliefs, rituals and practices to fill.
Rather than respecting realisation of "spiritual meaning," you dogmatically advocate everyone must understand it like you or else be pedalling meaningless nonsense. Malicious in intent? Maybe not, like many dogmatic preacher, you think you are saving people from a horrible fate. Terrible in effect? Most certainly, for you make the demand people must consider the world worthless just so they can experience the wonder of being saved by the transcendent. You trying to create the "hole" in the soul of anyone who listens.
Humans arrived at a form of hierarchy for excellent reasons. Hierarchical organisation of understanding makes sense. The particular present-day hierarchy of sciences is however a historically-situated way of organising, that happened for contingent reasons. In other eras or in other possible worlds understanding might be organised quite differently. That's where my metaphysics leads. That's why I'm nominalist about universals.
Regardless of your alternative world scheme, gravity is going to be a more universal fact than sparrows.
I think it goes against all the evidence and against reason to claim that our categories and hierarchies are merely arbitrary.
Things aren't randomly, or unpredictably changing. Similar things share similar histories, and experiences. Without some kind of relatively static, relatively unchanging, or fixed attributes, or natures, similar things wouldn't have similar reactions to similar stimuli, but they do. Things wouldn't change similarly to similar environmental pressures, but they do.
The notion that it's all just stories, lingual categories, or otherwise entirely subjective cannot account for the predictive nature of universals, and the conformity to them, witnessed in nature.
Convergent evolution is a good example of how contexts shape up their contents in teleological fashion. So ecosystems have niches for vultures. In the old world they evolved from hawks. In the new world, they evolved from storks.
So yes. Reductionist science is in line with nominalism in always wanting to discount the reality of formal and final cause. Convergent evolution should make reductionist stop and think. But prejudice normally wins out.
It can actually, where the subjective is the objective, rather than caused or constrained by it. Predications work because, in the future, there is an existing state which expresses the meaning incorrectly cited as a "universal constraint." Gravity is not a universal cause or constraint upon existing states.
Rather, it is an expression which is given by many individual states. If the world works differently, if there is a change in states, then gravity we known no longer be expressed and our theories won't predict what happens.
The subjective does not conform to universals, it constitutes the expression of universals in the world--Gravity is only expressed so long as they're a states which express that meaning.
That's a broad question. It's just basic in systems science and theoretical biology. But for example there would be Robert Rosen's relational biology and anticipatory systems books.
It's worth noting that 'cause' is a translation of 'aition', plural 'aitia'. Some argue that this is closer in meaning to 'explanation', so Aristotle is giving answers to the question Why?
I don't believe I proposed that at all. I'm just opposed to the opposite naturalistic thesis: that our present-day categories reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered.
I'm just a historicist. Our categories and hierarchies change and develop in a dialectical relationship between our ways of understanding, on the one hand, and the way the world seems to present itself to us, on the other. These things change radically over time. Apo's example of 'gravity' is a case in point. Pre-17th century physics had all sorts of (what now seem weird) explanations for why stuff tends to fall to earth. (I've just been to my old gits' philosophy group where we were discussing the amazing physics of the Epicureans, for instance, and how they rather remarkably accepted the notion of atoms but believed they had to 'swerve' to justify animal action in the world) The word 'gravity' originally meant 'seriousness', which nowadays seems like a secondary use. Its very naming, and our view of the phenomenon named as a universal, are part of how our modern era makes sense of who we are and where we are. I don't see why we should expect that a physicist in say 400 years' time will see universals as the same as we do now. It certainly hasn't worked out that way so far.
Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.
To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here.
There's a difference, though, between what universals exist, and whether or not universals even exist in the first place. For the metaphysician it doesn't really matter what the different universals are, what matters is whether or not we can identity a property as a universal. For metaphysical positions are largely empirically equivalent: whether or not universals exists, things at least appear to be similar.
How universals, if they exist, are instantiated in the world would be a job more suited for science: we can see how hierarchies evolve, how systems communicate, how the general structure of the world emerged from a heat bath in order to dissipate entropy. But I don't see how any of this would ever be able to change our views on the existences of universals. Nothing changes if I adopt a trope theoretic position or a nominalist position, because metaphysics is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is. Its goal is to explain what's "going on behind the scenes" so to speak, outside of the immediate reach of scientific instruments, the features of reality that everyone is exposed to in every second of their conscious awareness. These questions are "epistemically metaphysical".
I'm hesitant to say this but I doubt the vast majority of practicing physicists know or care of the various positions on similarity and constitution. It's the job of philosophy of science and metaphysics to elucidate these prior theoretical devices, because physicists have more important things to work on.
That our world works the way it does is a feature of itself, not "universal rules of constraint" which sit outside of it. Our world is a lucky accident.
Far from being "optimistic" speculation, we know this to be true for else we fall into the incoherence of defining the world based on logic rather than what exists. Else we assume that because we have seen the world work one way (the "universal"), that it must necessarily do so.
It's classical materialism's error of concreteness repeated--an assumption there is one "equation" ("the universal") which predicts whatever we might encounter in the world.
You miss the point of science talking a hierarchical naturalistic view on the question. It does mean you can go out and measure universality in terms of generalised simplicity vs particularised complexity - gravity vs sparrows.
So the debate about universals carried on "metaphysically" in the hands of scholastic realists vs nominalists. Meanwhile science continued on with Aristotle's natural kinds metaphysics where universals were really various grades of a genus~species dichotomy.
Peirce in particular took this forward by identifying the universalising tendency in nature with constraints or habits. So the naturalness of hierarchical organisation is explained by the naturalness of developmental/evolutionary processes. Which in turn, is explained by symmetry breaking structural principles.
So the conventional metaphysical debate is non-naturalistic in being between the platonic idealists and the hardline social constructionists. The Aristotelean tradition is the metaphysics that science has cashed out with great success via Pragmatism - even if Reductionism/Scientism/Positivism is a further modern anti-universals tendency (being that part of science's success that quixotically wants to reject its own philosophical grounds for social reasons.)
But if our categories and hierarchies are not merely arbitrary then they do "reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered." Of course, I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary.
Another ontological point that distinguishes Pragmatic naturalism here is that it indeed embraces the arbitrary along with the necessary.
So the traditional Platonic conception of universals (and natural laws) is they are necessitating or determining principles. Universal causation applies because every effect must have its prior cause.
However Peircean pragmatism was explicit in saying universal causation may be the generalised habit, yet there is also actual spontaneity or arbitrariness in life. And this claim was made on the basis of the emergence of probalistic thinking in science, particularly in thermodynamics and evolutionary theory. Of course, this doctrine of tychism also foreshadowed quantum theories demonstration that existence is fundamentally spontaneous in this fashion.
So Aristotle got it right at the beginning in accepting brute accident in nature, as well as the fact of nature being organised by a hierarchy of increasingly generalised constraints or lawful habit. And that more subtle metaphysics is what Pragmatism picked up on, and post-quantum science is now really driving home.
The scholastic argument about realism vs nominalism seems hugely quaint in that light. It is of historical interest having become such a familiar part of the general culture of the humanities. But metaphysics/science has long ago moved on to much more sophisticated conceptions.
(Even if, as I say, most scientists have their own rather culturally wonky take on these philosophy of science issues because - in usual dialectical fashion - science seeks to define itself as other to the humanities, returning the favour.)
Quoting apokrisis
You talking about sexual ethics essentialism here?
Quoting apokrisis
This strikes me as a scientific model. The star is condensed and then explodes in a supernova. The pupa transforms into a butterfly. The tree goes from complexity to degeneracy as it decomposes. And generalised simplicity becomes particularized complexity - none of these actually tell us whether or not universals exist because all of this can happen under a nominalist scheme, because neither are empirically weighted.
Generalised simplicity and particularized complexity seem to require properties themselves, namely, generality, simplicity, particularity, complexity, etc. These might not be real properties, only descriptions of a state of affairs. But the state of affairs is general, simple, particular, or complex or what have you depending on the history of events, and events transpire depending on what properties exist. Explaining how generalised simplicity becomes particularized complexity doesn't really tell us whether or not universals exist, because at any moment of time, a property is instantiated in virtue of the fact that something exists.
I think what matters about the medieval debates was, as I said before, a fundamental change in metaphysical attitudes, the consequence of which was ultimately the undermining of reason. How so? The essay I linked to puts it like this:
Now, certainly, a great deal about medieval scholasticism is indeed quaint, but there is an issue here which remains important.
Generally I'm not following your post (sexual ethics essentialism???).
But I draw attention to the synchronic supposition upon which you try to argue your case. For you it is natural to talk about what exists at some moment in time. But it is fundamental to my position that spatiotemporal scale is itself what is hierarchically organised. And this is now standard physics - as in lightcones, event horizons and quantum events.
So generality is defined by it being the very largest possible spatiotemporal scale over which action is being integrated - that is, the visible universe in the case of physical law.
A sparrow is made up of protons and electrons. Those parts are standard across a universe over a scale defined by the particle horizon and the electro-weak symmetry breaking temperature.
But the organic chemistry that is the sparrow is a far more local and specified state of affairs - generic only over about a billion or so years.
Then the genomic sparrowness of the sparrow is information that impinges on a location in a substantial way (such as we would say - there's a sparrow) over perhaps a few million years of evolutionary memory forming.
And so we could continue on to what makes this particular sparrow about to spread its wings and have the property of being scared (the sight of the lurking cat).
So you make pointing at particulars seem like something we can freely do at any chosen moment. But that is to confuse epistemology and ontolology if you are hoping to talk about the complicated and hierarchical structuring of nature that sees a sparrow emerge as a natural kind - a genus - let alone produces some particular bird before us.
Where does this sparrow emerge from? How is this "ancestral" generality not a particular? The fact that we can identify it and communicate about it shows that it's something. Maybe not like a sparrow, a chair, or a hydrogen-fusing hypergiant star, but something regardless.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, you said that many today are disregarding universalism because of social issues - universalism is closely tied to essentialism, and essentialism has a rather blotchy history of labeling non-conformers as dysfunctional.
Luke Barnes
Could such 'fundamental constants of nature' be considered as analogous to universals?
This is a different sense of 'arbitrary' than what I was referring to, though. In agreement with Peirce (and Whitehead, with whose philosophy I am more familiar) find the idea that, at the level of the very small as well as ever-increasingly in the (self) organizationally complex, there is genuine spontaneity, more plausible than the idea of universal and rigid determinism.
Perhaps (at least some of) the invariances of nature themselves evolve, which would be in keeping with the idea that human scientific understanding has changed,and will probably continue to change. I am not making a claim that the changing history of science is due to changing laws of nature, though.
Most people do tend to think in terms of the law of the excluded middle, though. So, on that view, our models either do or do not reflect the nature of things. I am convinced that they do, if only because we are part and parcel of nature; and it beggars belief that our incredibly complex modern sciences that form a more or less unified body of understanding about nature with great predictive power could be so unified, so successfully predictive and so technologically efficacious purely by chance. If that is right then nominalism is false, and some form of realism obtains.
I think science is "other than the humanities", that is that there is a valid distinction between them and their methodologies, although the differences consist in a continuum, not a sharp dividing line between the humanistic and the scientistic extremes.
It could go either way. The big problem for fundamental physics is that the constants seem instead to be the most contingent of all particulars. So they just are brute numbers that are true of our universe by some kind of random accident. That view of the constants is why there are multiverse theories. If the constants are particulars, then there is no reason to limit the values they take and no reason for there not to be an infinity of universes.
The other view is that the constants instead represent some kind of deeply rooted equilibrium balance or geometric ratio. So - if we had a theory of everything - they would pop out of that as the only possible ratios, in just the same way that pi, phi, e and Feigenbaum's constant are all explained as straightforward ratios that result in these really arbitrary seeming numbers.
So most physicists would lean to the idea they are contingent particulars. The more interesting alternative would turn out to be that they express a pure geometric relation that we might one day discover.
The sparrow emerges from the capacity of information to organise a dissipative flow of matter into an anticipated, purpose-serving, structure. It's negentropy and entropy, constraints and freedom - the usual systems story.
And sure we can say something about a sparrow. But again, don't mix synchronic epistemology and the diachronic ontological issue of universals.
Quoting darthbarracuda
What? Are you saying a liking for systems thinking is like homophobia?
Not to take this away from this universals topic, but I just wanted to see your reply to the idea that semiotics has an already-baked-in observer which still has to be accounted for in the problem of philosophy of mind. The interpretant is essentially the already-baked-in observer here. Whence interpretation? My prediction is you will say that we cannot go any further than this semiotic ground and thus just a brute fact. If that is the answer, I would then reply that this is still leaving the observer/awareness aspect unsolved and just taking it as a brute fact, thus begging the question.
No.
Quoting apokrisis
The metaphysician isn't concerned with how universals evolved. He's concerned with whether or not universals exist. The evolving structure narrative can be explained without universals.
So metaphysics doesn't include process philosophy in your book. Great. You win.
That's a good point. And it is the point of the semiotic view to generalise or universalise the notion of the observer.
So in the panpsychic view, this is done by spreadiing mind about everywhere, over every scale of being. But who knows what this "mind" is? It is a concept without causal structure or useful meaning.
In the pansemiotic view, it is interpretance or the sign relation that is spread around every scale of being. And so observation is modelled in terms of an ontic process.
Of course that is just a broad brush sketch. Then you have to cash it out in more useful ways. Which is what modern thermodynamic/information theoretic descriptions of the Universe have been doing.
This infodynamic perspective for instance adds formal and final cause - the story of the top-down constraints - to the bare science. The development of structured being is granted an entropic shape, direction and purpose. The universe becomes "mindful" in this self-organising regard. The universe can be considered a dissipative structure that is dissipating hot quantum uncertainty so as to produce a cool realm of robust classicality.
So the panpsychist starts with a reified notion of "mind" and simply imagines diluting it - thinning out its substance until it is there in fundamental particles in some deaf, dumb and blind fashion. The basic question of "what is observation" is simply brushed under the carpet by fading it away to nothing except the regular physics of mechanical masses and forces.
Pansemiotics is part of the new information revolution where observerhood is defined at the Planck grain in terms of "the questions that could even be asked" of a physical locale. Quantum uncertainty is due to the fact of hitting a physical limit where you can no longer ask all the questions you need to to precisify the state of a locale. So the breakdown of observation is exactly determined. Hence the beginnings of (classically certain) observation is also made physically measurable and theoretically tractable.
Once you can say where things stop and start in terms of concrete existence, you are away. And that is what physics can now do.
Every physical constraint is a sign. It is information to be read as a constraint on free dynamics. And information theory can account for both the negentropy of constraints and the entropy of degrees of freedom.
That view of things is now being take back into mind science to account for the kinds of things that brains do in terms of forward modelling or Bayseian information uncertainty reduction.
Consciousness becomes not the generalised substance of panpsychism but instead a massive ensemble of accessible modelling states - a massive ensemble of particulars. In any moment, the brain could be in any number of states that represent a meaningful observer~observables modelling relation. The fact that just one state is selected, the rest suppressed, is what gives brain consciousness its exceptional adaptive variety.
So in pansemiotics, the observer is the interpretance, which is the habits, which is the constraints, which is the negentropy. That is how you go from the highly complex specificity of observing brains to the most simple, universal and fundamental level of observation that is the basic entropic condition of the Universe described through dissipative structure theory.
Thanks for restating your conventional reductionist understanding of reality. But assertions aren't arguments.
Give me a understandable explanation of why my reductionism is wrong, preferably without using unnecessary jargon, and I'll change my views. I'm not opposed to systems and processes, but I don't think they are the underlying reality. They're second-order phenomena. Why should I abandon this hypostasis view and adopt your position, and what does your position hold that is different from mine?
The biggest reason why I have so much difficulty discussing things with you is that I have no idea what the hell "vagueness" is supposed to mean or be, nor "structure" in the metaphysical sense, or what the evolution of space and time means outside of an empirical phenomenon happening within space and time.
So there's processes in nature, like a fish tank filled with water and other stuff. But the fish tank isn't a process in the same way a ripple on the water is a process, or the hum of the filter is a process. For each time we postulate a process, we need to postulate a stage in which this process is occurring. Otherwise we're left with a vague and empty term that we cannot possibly imagine. Which in fact was the definition of Substance - that which is predicated upon but cannot be predicated itself. We can't imagine substance, we can only use analogies and appeals to logical necessity. And so if we can't conceptualize Process, then it becomes the exact same thing as Substance - both are the hypostasis of reality. There's no point in calling it Process, then, because it only brings confusion, since Process is something we can conceptualize (like a wave, or system, or what have you) and if the underlying hypostasis cannot be conceptualized, then there's nothing similar between a wave and the so-called primordial Process.
Of course we can say "everyTHING is in flux", and claim that no concrete particular is static. We can say that the entire universe is ever-changing and moving. And so we begin to fall into Heideggerian metaphysics.
Aha! So there's the 'implicit mind' in semiotics. Knew it was there somewhere. ;)
I think this has a counterpart in the idea of 'making manifest'. Up until the point of measurement, you're dealing with something like a latency or a potential; but at that point of measurement, the entity 'becomes manifest'.
Yep. Except to access that, you would have to redefine your notion of "mind" in radical fashion. And you would still want to argue that mind is something transcendent and substantial, no?
And you find this a self-evident and undeniable truth because? .... [please fill in blank].
I mean has science found some such ultimate basis? Surely what science is finding that wind the clock back to beginnings and it all goes quantum vague (indeterminate).
And is it even an intelligible clam? Just because most of what we know from our own scale of being seems to have a substantial underpinning, how can it be turtles all the way down? How can there be a first definite stuff with no cause? Doesn't that do the ultimate violence to the very notion of causality you hope to employ.
So a more radical alternative is already demanded as reductionism can't ground itself. We should accept the fact and move on, opening our minds to the other alternatives out there.
Peirce's semiotic approach - which grants that beginnings can be vague, an unstructured sea of fluctuation - is the one that fits a generally informational and developmental metaphysics (of the kind to be found in physics and cosmology today).
'transcendent' in the Kantian sense, not in the sense of being 'beyond', but in the sense of being 'that which constitutes experience but is not itself given in experience'. (But, off topic.)
Because it's what makes sense to me. I've stated my reasons and tried to make it as clear as I could.
Quoting apokrisis
I view metaphysics as the study of being qua being. Essentially it speculates about what cannot be observed. Indeed, it speculates upon the necessary conditions for observation to even occur. Being, not beings.
A shadow cannot exist without a body blocking out the light. The properties of the world are like shadows and depend upon a body that has no properties.
Quoting apokrisis
That's the point of Substance. It can't be turtles all the way down, under this scheme. There needs to be a first definite "stuff" out of logical necessity, similar to the logical necessity of God in Aristotle and Aquinas' theology. It's why asking "what caused God?!" misses the entire point of the argument - under the metaphysical scheme from which they are operating, God is a necessary component. So the issue here is to explain how the metaphysical scheme is problematic, not necessarily attempting to dissolve an issue within the framework.
Quoting apokrisis
This is what I'm talking about. What the hell does an "unstructured sea of fluctuation" mean apart from poetry? How can something fluctuate without structure? What does it even mean to be vague, and why did this vagueness suddenly break?
If you want to identify this vagueness as Substance, then you're on my side. Vagueness is the hypostasis of reality, from which all beings are birthed from like an "apeiron" as you like to say. But this immediately runs into problems, I'd say, because there's no explanation as to how this vagueness exists, as if its vagueness isn't dependent upon anything else and is just floating around somewhere in non-spacetime. And if you accuse me of misusing the term "floating" (since there's no space or time in which to float in), then this point equally applies to you're use of an "unstructured sea of fluctuation".
We don't need to do cosmology or physics to understand that there needs to be a fundamental Being.
Vagueness would then be the phenomenologically-closest thing to describe Substance as, since Substance can't even be ascribed any properties like vagueness. Our knowledge of Substance would only be out of logical necessity and not out of direct empirical observation, as this would be impossible. It would be out of a narrowing of possibilities, just as Aristotle and Aquinas narrowed the possibilities and came to the conclusion that a God exists.
Quoting apokrisis
On the contrary, metaphysical reductionism is a necessity. Scientific reductionism, probably not. But we shouldn't confuse the two as the same thing.
Ye gods. Outright mysticism.
So it is necessary there is a first cause. And it must be a first substance indeed. Otherwise your hypostatic reductionist framework is in deep shit. Isn't that a rather personalised invocation of final cause?
Well the obvious retort is that vagueness exists vaguely. And we can speak about that intelligibly as being the antithesis of the crisply formed world from where we ask such questions.
So sure, one has to use a little poetic licence to introduce the idea. But it is of no real interest unless it can be mathematically modelled. Just like quantum foam, virtual particles, zero point energy, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the many other useful physical concepts that depend on a notion of "pure fluctuation".
I mean do you think our 4D Universe "floats" in anything? Do you think the modern maths of curvature only makes sense if you re-introduce a pre-Goethean embedding space? Do you think infinity only exists if someone has counted all the way to its limit?
You are raising quibbles that have long been left behind in science and math informed metaphysics.
You're calling Plato a mystic. OK.
Quoting apokrisis
I adopted the hypostasis view because it makes sense and then adopted the necessary components like substance later.
I hear a bark, I believe there to be a dog. I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance. It would be silly to not recognize the existence of a dog. So why is it silly to recognize the existence of prime substance? It's existence is narrowed down by what it is not, and the stuff we see around us are like "echoes" to to speak of its existence, just as the bark is an "echo" (notification) of the existence of the dog.
In the Neo-Platonic view: if what is meant to explain something is complex, it requires further explanation. That's the reductionism I'm speaking of here. It can't be an infinite chain of complexity. There has to be something simple in which everything emerges from.
So again I'm not against systems or processes. I recognize that a spider web cannot exist without its structural integrity from all its lines and nodes. But I also recognize that these lines and nodes are complex in themselves and cannot exist without silk.
And so the point of metaphysics is to inquire about what the most simple basis of reality is. Its joints.
Quoting apokrisis
At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?
Quoting apokrisis
What is poetry and what is not?
Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?
If these concepts depend upon pure fluctuation, then this pure fluctuation needs to be explained further. Otherwise you're resting science on poetry.
Quoting apokrisis
What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today. You would think that this kind of thinking would have been implemented early if it was indeed sophisticated and coherent.
So either it was ignored in a millennia-old intellectual conspiracy, or it didn't make sense. That, or it's a recent trend emerging from the chaos of 19th and 20th century theoretical physics and the subsequent loss of orientation. Or everyone is lazy and screwing everyone else over with their bullshit so they can keep their tenures (both naturalized and non-naturalized philosophers). Or, if it's because this movement exists within an (esoteric) circle, it's not the fault of everyone else that they don't get it. Coherent communication is key.
Are these quibbles actually answered or are they left behind, pushed into the corner and forgotten about? What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself. They're not concerned with the debate over universals, they're concerned with how similar behavior emerged regardless of universalism or nominalism. These questions aren't relevant to what they wish to study. Which is fine. But it's confusing when you say that this is metaphysics when the overwhelming literature surrounding metaphysics does not match with what they do.
Apo's "Vaugness" is unsatisfying because it's trying to pose it as an empical state. Obviously, this doesn't work because it doesn't place anything in existence. Substance which doesn't exist lacks this problem-- by definition to has no empirical form, not even an absence. Nothing empirical could ever be said about it, as vauge as you can get.
Exactly. Phenomenologically, substance is vague. But it isn't actually "vague".
Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that vagueness is a real feature of reality. Just not the hypostasis. The hypostasis is always there. Vagueness is a contingent feature of the empirical, and thus observable, world.
Also Spinoza is bae.
Well you seemed to be taking a materialist position and that's hardly Platonic form is it? So you make less and less sense here. If you are arguing Plato, say so.
(And it might make more sense if you did that in relation to Plato's own concept of the chora - the material receptacle of his forms.)
Again your use of jargon is confusing. Do you mean prime matter? It seems that you mistake Aristotle's hylomorphic doctrine of substance for material cause.
And I don't think Aristotle's prime matter is a concept that works except as another name for vagueness or apeiron.
So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.
But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle.
My notion instead treats it as the limitless, the unformed, the unmaterial. It is not fixed by conservation or locale. It is just pure open-ended possibility. So it is pre-material in any usual sense of matter, just as much as it is pre-form in not yet having undergone the phase transition which is its structuring organisation to become a something definite.
The change is the beginning of time and space. Those are both aspects of the emergence of a global dimensional organisation. So it is what "happens" in the earlier time, and the higher energy, which would be the "before" of the Planck scale. Except before the Planck scale, there just isn't anything determinate in existence, so talking about the before does't really make sense.
I'm not interested in poetic visions. So I agree. If vagueness and this general way of thinking can't be cashed out in real physics, its nothing in the end. It has to be a mathematical strength model or chuck it in the bin of metaphysical speculation.
Luckily, it is a way of thinking that is increasingly common in science. There is a lot of maths to support it.
Mechanics is not wrong. It has worked splendidly to serve the interest of humans the last 500 years. If you think of existence in terms of the causality of machines, you start to get good at making machines. So mechanics has repaid its makers many times over. And it is not wrong as - in its carefully limited sphere - it works.
But if you are talking about the bounding extremes of our existence - the quantumly small, the cosmically large, the neurally complex - then yes it breaks down and a bigger modelling paradigm is needed.
I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron.
:) Got to agree there
I think 'refraction' would be my preferred metaphor.
I do think this whole discussion has a tendency to confuse the philosophy of science with philosophy. These purported universals are not just words used in scientific method, so they neither stand nor fall by how useful they are to methodological naturalists (I know, the spirit of Landru has entered me, what can I do?). The debate is about whether such entities, or whatever they might be, exist, and if not, what sort of beast they are. This applies to all the language we use, from sparrows (which I confess I still confuse with dunnocks) to the nature of music to love, sweet love and whether Economics is any kind of a science.
(a) I don't see how my view says 'lucky accident, hey'. My view, to which you were replying, refers to a dialectic between how human understanding works and how the world seems to present itself to us.
(b) The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas. History is much more interesting and hard to fathom than that. The modern era in the West re-started, as I'd see it, in the 16th/17th centuries, and from then on laid claim to a Greco-Latin origin to modern ideas that has to leap across previous chasms of centuries when entirely other metaphysics (it seems reaosonable to presume) held sway.
(c) I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate.
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.
As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being.
Quoting apokrisis
Apparently you're willing to sacrifice all other metaphysical theorizing though for a vision that is quasi-empirical and belongs more in the field of science than speculative philosophy.
You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right.
If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that.
And to remind how hierarchies relate to universals, the problem with universals is they refer to constraints - the forms that inform matter - but they lack hierarchical organisation in most people's minds so it sounds like we are talking about a random Platonic collection of ideas. Anything that has a name - like a sparrow, love, the cosmos, my left toe - has an ideal form.
But of course even Plato tried to create some kind of hierarchical order in his realm of perfect ideas. The good stood at the most global level, mathematical truths somewhere further along the spectrum of specificity.
Now here you sound like you agree with my approach, so this becomes very confusing.
To summarise, the argument goes that we patently exist in a world of definite objects. So we start with where we are at. And then we look to what could be different in an attempt to figure out how we could come to be in such a place.
Greek metaphysics started with the idea that form was plastic and so there must be some material principle that is the underlying eternal - an ur-stuff. And as you say, something so unchanging must be ungraspable, unintelligible, as it stands beyond the descriptiveness of formed somethingness. It is like a taste so bland it can't be tasted, or a hue so pastel it can't be seen.
Anaximander gave it a name - the apeiron, or the without-limitation. But Anaximander also realised that while form (or limitation, ie constraints) was plastic, it was also based on a dialectical logic. It had to arise dichotomously as a succession of symmetry breakings.
For limits to arise in the limitless, it could only do this by the apeiron "moving apart from itself in complementary directions". And Anaximander - looking around, being empirical - not so unnaturally struck on the prime thermodynamic idea that the first parting of the apeiron would have to be into the warmer and the cooler. And then as this division proceeded to develop, it paved the way in turn for a division into the dryer and the wetter. Again, empirically, heat dries and cold dampens.
And so we have the start of a natural hierarchy of formed substances. We have the Greek elements of fire, air, water and earth as the four resulting mixtures (the hot dry and the cool dry, the hot wet and the cool wet).
Now later Greek philosophy rather messed up the simple natural purity of Anaximander's vision even as it sought to expand upon it. Obviously, the Athenians tried to work a strong notion of the divine back into it - or at least, some account of the mind seemed necessary. There was also the atomistic alternative - which did have some explanatory advantages, like stressing the notions of composition and the void. And atomism did try to argue for a rational naturalness in giving atoms the perfect shapes of the Platonic solids, or else providing them with hooks and other property-creating features.
So the notion of an ur-stuff did get confused. It became a divine spirit stuff - different from material stuff in a dualistic fashion. And it became a fundamentally particulate stuff - concrete particles rocking through an immaterial(!) void. So again a dualistic conception in that now existence was separated into the concretely material and causal contents, and an a-causal, non-material, non-involved nothingness as its cosmic container.
Thus you can see a parting of the ways from the orginally organic and holistic vision of Anaximander. Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism.
But modern science has returned to a holism where existence is the transformation of simple potential via a succession of symmetry breakings, and the duality of atomism has been repaired because particles are excitations in fields and spacetime has material properties.
So we return to the question of what is the ur-stuff, the hypostatic ground, the apeiron, from which our structured existence could arise.
And as you seem to be saying, we can only characterise it in terms of it being everything our well-formed world of substantial objects is not.
So that is indeed how I would define vagueness, or the quantum roil, or the One, or whatever technical metaphysical term we might wish to give to this critical and logically necessary idea.
The things we can say about it are that it must at least be the kind of thing out of which our existence could arise. And so if our existence is about a succession of symmetry breakings, then it is some kind of perfect symmetry. And that's great, because we have some maths to get a handle on it right there.
So what is the ultimate symmetry state? I've argued the standard understanding that symmetry is about changes that can't make a change (just as symmetry breakings are semiotically the differences that do make a difference).
Absolute nothingness seems one candidate for such an ideal initial state of symmetry. But that's logically out as nothing can come from nothing.
The alternative is instead an initial state of everythingness - a complete lack of limitation on action. So some kind of dimensionless, or infinitely dimensional, chaos. Unbound fluctuation. In a state of wildness, nothing is really happening because everything is happening. And logically it is quite easy to understand how the taming of such a roil by the emergence of symmetry-breaking constraints could produce our kind of hierarchically organised world.
The classic example of such a dissipative structure is a Benard cell where global hexagonally shaped convection currents form to organise the previously chaotic thermal motions of oil molecules being heated in a pan. The many directions that the molecules are going in are reduced to the particular directions of the convection flows. The universality of a global form is imposed on the material chaos and the convection cells become a real feature of the oily world.
So we can revisit the notion of the apeiron armed with all the maths and empiricism we have gathered over the past 2300 years. If we have a clear metaphysical model of what has come out of the apeiron, we can in negative descriptive fashion now also say something scientific about the "indescribable" nature of the apeiron.
So that is why I talk about it in terms of things like unbounded fluctuation. We now understand the concrete world of substantial objects in terms of bounded fluctuations. So it is simply logical that the apeiron would be the "other" of that.
Whatever is our current best theory of fundamental being, we can reverse that out dialectically to speak about what must then be the best possible theory of the cosmic fundamental potential - the possibility that must have grounded the actuality of our Universe.
Physics will no doubt understand different forms in 400 years, just as it has changed throughout human history, with the discovery or loss of knowledge about how parts of the world work--understandings of empirical states not metaphysics.
Apo's problem, and the problem of "universals" in any context, is in trying to define the presence of states of the world in terms of metaphysics.
Supposely, logic imposes "constraints" on existence, such that one state is present over another. The "universal" is literally the idea that the meaning of thought creates states of existence. In knowing it, we supposedly have the rule which tells what states the world must be.
Eager to say we know how the world works, we have reversed the role of logic and the state of existence. We forget it's the empirical state which defines what is present in the world. Our "physics" becomes prescriptive. They start say the meaning of the world must always conform to them, rather than doing what physics should, identifying the meaning of present states of existence. The meaning of physics is subordinate to what the world does. It's never "universal," only specific to the states of the world which work that way.
The "rules" of physics are not a constraint on the world. They are an expression of what it happens to be doing at a moment.
For me the point is that nature contributes to our categorial perceptions and judgements; more than contributes: categorial perception and judgement is itself an expression of nature, just as we are. The further point is that we are, by no means, all there is to nature.
Methodological naturalism is just the tendency to discount supernatural interventions that contravene natural law. But then I think it's also necessary, when trying to understanding the more indeterministic spiritual side of things, in relation to both the animal and the human, not to abandon naturalism, and devolve to supernaturalism, but rather to greatly expand our conceptions of what is both natural and possible.
See Heisenberg's essay The Debate between Plato and Democritus.
If logic wasn't universal, then you would never be able to prove an inference, or to say 'because of this, then that must be the case'. You can only say that, because thought itself, and language itself, relies on abstract universals in order to predict and declare. (Loyd Gerson paraphrasing Aristotle: 'if materialism were true, you literally couldn't think'; because each 'brain state' would only correspond to a specific moment of experience, there would be no general truths.) Thinking itself is an abstracting process; it is by virtue of this that the rational intelligence can see equivalences and make the inferences that makes discourse, and science, possible.
The problem for methodological naturalism, is that the basis of the order which makes logic possible, must always be prior to, or assumed by, naturalism, in order to create any explanation whatever. Which is why, again, logic and metaphysics have to be more general, and more 'vague', than any specific science - because they belong to a different order of experience than whatever we observe in the empirical domain.
Aristotle is the one who doesn’t believe in the universal here. He is the one who says, in response to me telling him that it’s necessarily true that a tree means tree, that I’m talking nonsense unless I suppose some specific force of the world which makes logic true, as if the tree began without the meaning of tree. Logic supposedly isn’t enough on it’s own. Logic is thought be defined by states of the world or else fall into incoherence.
This is why Aristotle understands the world to be defined by general categories. To fill the supposed “gap” he relies on observed states of the world. On observing an human, he sets out a standard which supposedly tells us when human are present. We can supposedly tell when a human is present by these “general, universal properties” which define the existence of a human.
But this creates a problem. Now there is a restrictive standard. At what point does a thing qualify as human? What if it’s missing an arm? A leg? Certain states of consciousness? Or what if someone has an extra finger, limb or hair? If these “general universal properties” were to define the meaning they would have perfectly account for the meaning of any possible human. Clearly, this is untrue. Many possible humans do not fit these meanings.
Aristotle is a reductionist who eliminates the meaning expressed by many states just to get the (supposedly) “universal truth” which describes everything in one moment. Like the person saying “consciousness” is just a brain, Aristotle equivocates a vast array or states and the meaning they expressed with something else entirely.
Thinking is not an abstracting process. It is a specifying one. Each thought picks out one specific meaning, one which is no other, a universal. For metaphysics to be more general or vague destroys this. What are unique expressions of meaning get reduced to the presence of some other thought— “Humans are necessarily X,Y,Z ”, “Experiences are brains.”
The sort of inference you are talking about is reductionism. Supposedly, by having one thought (humans, experiences) we must mean another (X,Y,Z, brains) and there's is no room for these meanings to occur on their own terms.
In terms of metaphysics, one could not get more wrong. It’s the equivocation of the order of the empirical with the logical, which goes both ways. We end up in the absurd situation where the logical is read as empirical (a caused truth, the meaning of properties X,Y,Z=existing humans, the meaning of experiences=existing brains, etc.,etc.) and empirical is read as logical (supposedly, empirical states are necessarily by logic: first cause, PSR, God, "constrained by the universal,"etc.,etc.). For these metaphysics, "vagueness" is a requirement because the universal nature of every logical truth is rejected. For them any truth is "vague" because is it has to have its logical meaning given by a different meaning.
'Universal' is not a reference to "universal truths'.
The "universals" are suggested to meet the standard of that which is true regardless of the empirical world. The sort of truth which obtains regardless of the flux of empirical states (which is how they are a different order than empirical states). Something that is true regardless of space/time.
Only universal truths are this. A "universal" which might or might not be true, which is defined by a force drawn against states of the world, lacks this necessity. Your "universals" are a contradiction.
I don't think you did say that. But if that's what you meant, then fair enough, that's what you meant. But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see why I would need or wish to make either of these arguments. My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated.
I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote in your post, although I would say 'what it appears to be doing to thinkers of a certain place and era'.
You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethics and the social sciences? 'Naturalism' is an irrelevant category in the arts, for instance, or refers to something quite different in artistic creation and judgment than it does when the scientific method is involved.
In ethics, how shall we make judgments? By finding something appealing in evolutionary biology? Not for me.
In short: I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism. But if we circumscribe science to the realm of methodological naturalism, then we can do science together and apply it all over the shop and have a whale of a time.
When we do, we find categories there, and sub-categories of categories, and so on. Is that categorical forking resident in what we find, or in how we undertake and understand the finding, or a mixture of both? I'm arguing for a mixture of both.
And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?
If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.
Quoting mcdoodle
Why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.
And yes, human thinking in "any given place and era" is indeed historically situated - that is, you just gave a definition of being historically situated, not an argument.
So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy.
I would say they are more or less part of the more indeterministic, spiritual side of things. Even animal behavior would be to some degree. Science deals with strict causation and mathematical modeling; these are not adequate methods outside of a fairly narrow range of enquiry.
I would say that in both the arts and ethics we make judgements using our natural moral and aesthethic intuitions. Of course these can be cultured, but there is nothing that could rightly be called supernatural or even artificial in such processes of enculturation. To say there is would be to artificially separate us from the rest of nature, which I think is a bad idea. But then even such artificial ideas are part and parcel of human nature, which in turn is part and parcel of nature.
In my view the category 'naturalism' is a perfectly natural, but undesirable, category which grows out of and contributes to misleading views of humans as being radically separated from the rest of nature.
Can you tell me exactly what "metaphysical naturalism" consists in. Landru was always going on about it, and yet when challenged he could never come up with a coherent definition. It turns out, as far as I could see, that he was talking about scientism, the idea that everything can be adequately, even exhaustively, explained in terms of causal and mathematical models, which I agree is a very narrow-minded idea. But Landru, because of his apparent inability to think beyond polemic, could never countenance the idea that science might have anything at all of interest to tell us about ourselves. I think it can, but this is very different than claiming that we could ever understand ourselves exhaustively in 'hard' science terms.
I agree with you that our categories are a "mixture of both", and that is what I have said from the start. But I think it also "resident in what we find", because what we find is obviously determined in part by "how we undertake and understand the finding". I really cannot see how this could be considered controversial or that there is any conflict between these three ideas.
I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. I come late to all this philosophical stuff, but I try to be scrupulous in my judgment, and rely on a little more than Google searches. I've worked outwards from Aristotle and Plato to the Stoics and Epicureans then backwards to the pre-Socratics in the last year, but I don't claim to be well-read in this stuff, just trying to understand it.
I certainly don't accept laziness as one of my faults, nor that I'm a social constructionist. I can't say I exactly know what my 'position' is, I'm on something of a journey, and rather a Wittgensteinian in temper. Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument.
Well I think of it as applying the category 'naturalism' to all, I mean all sorts of philosophical discussions, including those where it either is inapposite, or reductionist. One example: I remember sociobiology getting going in the 1970's, and feeling my blood boil at the attempt to explain things like gender differences or ethical arguments by supposed derivation from 'evolution' when feminism or ethics needs, to me, to be approached on different terms altogether. Landru talks about these things as different forms of 'discourse' and that's what the sociological and Continental approaches call them: the disciplines have their own histories and conventions. To try and derive ideas about them from a 'naturalism' that in turn derives from scientific realism is to try and play Go with chess pieces: it can be done but it's foolish because they are different games.
I'm doing a grad course in mostly analytic philosophy at the moment, and another area where this 'metaphysical naturalism' has struck me forcibly is something I'm interested in: what music is about. There is a strand of thinking, for instance, in talking about 'the ontology of music' that a score or a recorded musical performance is the basis of 'ontology', and that seems to me a dreary and belittling way of approaching one of the arts (and indeed the arts in other cultures where 'music' has a different importance and relevance) as if they were a branch of the natural world, as if the same sorts of issues apply in the same sorts of ways as they do with science - whereas to me they are a whole different sphere – 'discourse' when we talk about it – to which quite different concepts apply.
Sorry this is a distance from universals but you asked so I answered!
Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'.
Would you go as far as to say, though, that science has nothing interesting to tell us about ourselves?
(Y) I cannot and will not stand arguments. I enjoy discussion, not flame wars.
And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.
Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy.
Be honest here. Did you know that there was only one recorded fragment of Anaximander's writings before you read the Wiki page a couple of days ago? Have you read Kahn or any other of the careful critiques?
Quoting mcdoodle
You are welcome to speak for yourself. But you insult me in saying that my position is not grounded in rational scholarship.
And to remind again, the question was: why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.
There are strong mathematical arguments that hierarchical organisation is inevitable in nature - even when contingency appears to rule that nature.
If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale, then that very uncontrolled freedom throws up the big slow global processes that become the context, the potential constraints, on the small fast local processes.
So scale randomness produces hierarchical order as a simple mathematical fact. But to know about this, I guess you have to have studied modern hierarchy theory.
The point is hierarchical organisation is a misapplication of logic to casualty. One which mistakenly views logical expressions (e.g. gravity, "laws of physics," etc.,etc.) as the source of existing states. Supposedly, things on one level order the presence of things on another, such that various outcomes are inevitable in the world-- there is this "universal" idea that constrains the world.
What is at stake is not whether we know how the world works (we do, to a large extent), but the means by which it works in this way. Rather than springing from logic (a "universal" constraint), states of the world are existing things in themselves-- they have to be. So instead of states of the world being defined out of the universal or the semiotic, they are logically their own things. There is no hierarchy. Just a whole lot of things swirling around each other. We can't reduce the meaning of the world to a nice set of "universals" which give an account of everything.
The semiotic is driven into an expression of states themselves. The gravity relationship between the Earth and the sun, for example, no longer needs defining by the "universal" or the semiotics of human language. It a feature of those two states themselves, until such time (if any) they work differently. The same is true for any meaning of anything in the world.
Thus, there is no "vagueness" to any state of the world. All the way up, all the way down, and all the way around, there are infinite specific states and relations. "Vagueness" is just the realisation of the connection of the world without knowledge of any specific state.
This is incoherent becasue no process is capable of unfolding over any spatiotemporal scale. Processes are states of the world in relation or working together. They are tied to their own spatiotemporal moment. We can't have our Big Bang, for example, which unfolds outside its time. My body can't replace its cells outside its space and time. And so on. And so on.
Yep. LGU promotes a confusion here. While anyone can coin their own definitions of naturalism, there is a real history of something called natural philosophy that tries to stick to Aristotle's holistic naturalism, and so usually stands against reductionism, mechanics, and scientism.
So naturalism in this tradition is about four causes, immanence, hierarchies, organicism - all those good (pre-scholastic) Aristotelean things. And you can find it popping up all through history in various guises, but, in modern times, particularly in holism, hierarchy theory, systems science, complexity theory, second order cybernetics, semiotics, neural networks, ecology, dissipative structure theory and condensed matter physics.
A confusion is that this organic naturalism doesn't actually reject mechanical reductionism. Instead, it seeks to incorporate it as its natural "other" - organicism being true to it own dialectical reasoning in this way.
So the mechanical view is not wrong. Nature does come to regulate itself in a very simple and mechanical looking fashion. Newton's laws show how the habits of the Universe can become so strongly developed that the Universe looks to run like clockwork - until quantum mechanics comes along to show that such a mechanical determinacy, such a suppression of spontaneity, is only emergent and not fundamental.
Anyway, the reductionist view really works because it is so simple. In a nutshell, it is the view that drops formal and final cause - the universals - out of the picture, and just tells the story of things in terms of material and efficient cause. This really works from a human technological point of view, because of course we are planning to impose our own formal and final causes on nature. We are going to come up with our own desires and designs. Thus we don't need to care about what nature itself might have in mind. Scientism can rule.
But then natural philosophy is meant to be stepping back to take the full holistic view where nature itself is granted as having formal and final cause in a full physicalist sense. They are real causes and not some nominalist fiction.
Now this immanent holism then treads on the toes of theistic and transcendental metaphysics - the same dualism and romanticism that informs the (muddled) Continental conception of the world.
So natural philosophy often attracts the mystic fellow travellers. Its organicism and holism can sound rather woo, so it attracts woo lovers. It has overtones of eastern philosophy especially. And in many ways, it is very much related to eastern "hard" philosophy, especially the doctrine of dependent co-arising, scholars like Nagarjuna, schools like Kyoto. So systems thinking has mushy edges. But within modern theoretical biology (naturally), you have a rigorous and mathematical tradition.
And there, scientists like Stan Salthe (a great friend) call themselves now natural philosophers to openly distance themselves from the scientistic mainstream. Aristotelean naturalism is a banner to rally around.
So I divide the camps into three.
There is material reductionism - the mechanical philosophy of material and efficient causes.
There is romantic dualism - the claim that material reductionism can't touch formal and final cause, these being aspects of the transcendent mind/spirit/value.
And then there is the holism of naturalism - a full four causes approach where the world immanently self-organises into being in organismic fashion.
The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes. That problem was solved by semiotics. Peircean semiotics shows how the world can be divided into matter and symbol, and then interact and develop as a result of its causality being divided in this very fashion.
So three ontologies. And philosophical naturalism is the hardest to understand because it is intrinsically the most complex. It is not monistic like reductionism, nor dualistic like romanticism, but triadically self-intertwined.
This is why people always complain about the opacity of Hegel and Peirce. And yet they are the metaphysicians that really thought things through in systems fashion.
C.S. Pierce
The latter is clearly descended from the (neo)platonic conception of 'the One' in my view (albeit considerably elaborated and re-interpreted by Hegel.)
Aristotle was a naturalist - many would say the first! - but he also argued for a first cause or unmoved mover, etc, which was an essential premise of his philosophy.
Semiosis certainly does offer a non-reductionist account of the processes of life, but at the same time, I don't think it recognizes that behind the idea of the sig an implicit idealism.
I'm afraid you are too caught up in Peircean worship to pay attention to what I'm saying, but that's the usual practice for you.
Peircean semiotics is too meek. The world not only can be divided into matter and symbol, but it always is-- existence and the meaning of existence (and the wider meanings of logic). The symbolic is not an addition of causality, but a necessary truth. It does not have to be added in. That's why there is no hierarchy. All meaning is already there. Anything is always possible.
More importantly, casualty is turned over entirely to existence. The interactions and developments of causality are entirely question of states which exist, not any symbolic meaning.
Now, it is true that which ever states exist express a symbolic meaning, so for a given state to be present (e.g. tree) the "presence" of a symbol ("tree") is always given, but that symbol is not how the tree exists. Existence does that.
[quote=apokrisis]The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes.[/quote]
With causality turned over to existence, this is resolved. There are no distinction of formal and efficient cause. All causes are of the same realm, material-- a state which brings about another, whether the given cause is an atom or someone's experience.
Yep. They both had their mushy edges being people of their times. But if we pay attention to the general logic of nature they were talking about, then we are on solid ground.
So if you go quote-mining their huge outputs, you can always pick out some plum that sounds like it speaks to romantic dualism...
You say that is Peirce espousing panpsychism. I say that Peirce sought to naturalise a four cause approach in talking about a reality that could develop robust habits. And what we call physical law are the four causes in their most attentuated possible form. They are the least mind-like condition - and yet mind-like in that the causality of constraints, the globally shaping causality of formal and final cause, is what the laws represent.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. I see natural philosophy as detouring through German naturphilosophie and idealism. That is why German science has produced so many of the systems thinkers.
But in the end - as a pragmatist - one takes idealism as the epistemic condition, not the ontological model. So you accept all the constraints of being in a modelling relation with the world, but then you get on with actually modelling the world in the best way possible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Aristotle didn't get everything right. Parts of what he said are in contradiction with others. And most of what he did say is still understood via the heavy filtering of scholasticism, which had its own agenda to meet.
So first causes and unmoved movers are where it really breaks down. He should have stuck closer to Anaximander, the first real recorded naturalist, here.
Quoting Wayfarer
How so? Isn't the whole point of Peircean semiotics that it deliberately starts at the "mind's end" of things so as not to leave the mind out?
So we are very used to the materialist approach of starting metaphysics way over where there is just brute matter tumbling about in a dumb void. The modelling begins in a realm without any trace of purpose, or design, or meaning, or logic. And by doing that, the modelling never gives itself the means to recover what it has deliberately abandoned.
But Peirce did the opposite. He started with the intellect that was doing all the intellectualising. He began with a model of logic and of the human mental processes that underlie that. Then he did the revolutionary thing (well, Hegel tried to the same with the Science of Logic) of seeing how this account of mentality could be also the account of metaphysical being.
Peirce was also of course a top scientist of his day. He could see how evolutionary theory and thermodynamics had put formal and final cause back into the game for science in a big way.
And so he did draw the natural conclusion that intelligibility was itself the driving principle of developed existence. If you have a model of the mind, it is also going to be a model of the world, as the same generic semiotic principles describe self-organisation of any possible kind.
If Plato had been a systems thinker, his Platonia would have been populated by fractals rather than triangles, the laws of thermodynamics rather than the beauty, truth and the good. :)
This is the problem with Peirce. He puts all possible self-orgainsation into the principle of our minds, as if we new everything about the world by knowing a few general principles. Rather than putting models and meaning in the world, giving each state of the world its specific meaning which we might or might not know, he insists what we know must be the extent of the world. Instead of the world being intelligible of itself, its considered something the world needs to have added to it, something which the the world has to act towards. Peirce does not give enough respect to logical meaning and reduces the world to our present knowledge.
Before, when I have called out Pierce's leanings towards idealism, or Hegel's idea of the 'world spirit', or Aristotle's acceptance of the 'uncaused cause', you will always say they were people of their times, they had their quirks, that is not what is important about them (or words to that effect).
That is exactly what I mean when I say you're redacting out some aspects of their thinking, so as to incorporate the aspects of it are useful for your approach. That is not an accusation of some wrong-doing, it is a natural consequence of where your interests lie, which are more oriented towards science and engineering than are mine. You want solid ground into which you can sink foundations. There's nothing that matter with that, but note that not everyone has the same motivations.
There's a PDF of a paper called The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism, Nicholas Guardiano, (it's easy to google but I can't find a way to link to it.) It talks about Emerson's influence on Pierce. It's interesting, because in some respects Emerson, and then Pierce, did absorb something like non-dualism, from Emerson's reading of Eastern texts. This lead to his monistic view - the magazine they both published in was The Monist - which is that 'mind and matter' both form part of a continuum. However, I think they both have considerable difficulty conceptualising the substance of which mind and matter are both aspects. Granted, Emerson calls it 'Nature', which is 'all one' - this essay shows how Pierce's ideas were influenced by that. But what is nature, then? if it is something (caveat on using the word 'something' but there are few alternatives) that is both, yet neither, mind and matter - then what is it?
Now, I don't think *any* naturalism will have an answer to that. And indeed, it is when the question of what that essence is comes up that Emerson, Pierce, Hegel, (and whoever else) hazards an answer, that the talk veers towards the 'mushy edges'. The mystic, on the other hand, has the distinct advantage of not trying to articulate whatever 'it' might be, but approaching the whole subject through the method of un-knowing. (I know that that is going to sound thoroughly mushy, but to paraphrase the Tao, 'within this way there is something that can be tested'.)
How does existence do this? By power ontology, teleology, tychism, etc?
Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind?
It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist.
By nothing. To exist is to be oneself, not some other means. A logical distinction which is given not by anything else, not by any idea about what is in the world, not even by a form. The difficulty in coming up with a set of principles or forms which defines the extent of a person, object or object is because self is an infinite expression, a nothingness in empirical terms, which always defines distinction in form.
No matter what we say about me part of the world, some object or even some part of an object, there is always its logical expression of self which extends beyond what we've identified. Anything always means more than what we can capture in any one idea or description.
The thing in-itself, the noumenon, we might say, is the logical expression of self-- the meaning of a thing which always defies categorisation and description as a finite form of the world. Nothing is the infinite expression of our existence. Logically, nothing "made" us or enables us exist-- that's a question for causality, for the interactions of particular states.
To be realist is to understand that the noumenon is knowable: the infinite logical expression of self that we may understand.
The subjective idealist does not realise this. They still treat noumenon, "nothingness," as if it is a state of the world, with finite forms, that we might identify. Supposedly, in understanding the "thing in-itself," we fail to grasp what is. There is meant to this "unknown" state with forms that exists beyond our empirical world, which we can just never know. They are treating logic as a state of world. What they don't realise is understanding the noumenon is "nothing" is to know it.
You mean effete mind. Or extinct mind, in Schelling's term.
But what Peirce meant by mind is another question. ;)
Quoting darthbarracuda
You realise Peirce wanted to fix Kant's dualism using Schelling's objective idealism?
Well, I will give up coming back to this thread now, I don't engage in this kind of exchange.
I'm reading a little book of essays by Nicholas Bachtin, lesser-known brother of Mikhail. Nicholas was a keen classicist and a friend of Wittgenstein, who read portions of the Philosophical Investigations to him during the writing. In his essay on 'Realism in the drama' he has this to say:
Perhaps we will talk of this in another thread. I do think science has a lot of interesting things to tell us about ourselves. I don't know why anyone would say anything different. But some things called 'science' are decidedly dodgy, from psychology to economics to very theoretical physics :)
But it's not me who is trying to pin a single reading on what Peirce, Hegel or Aristotle "really meant" as if they were my spokesmen or my authorities.
I'm quite happy with the fact they were all complex thinkers whose own views evolved considerably over their lifetimes and so involve views that were in contradiction, or even - in my view - quite off the mark. at times.
Furthermore, Peirce was different as a philosopher in having a scientific attitude to his speculative cosmology. So the changes in his approaches can be viewed as a series of goes at striking upon the right formulation - one that would actually result in testable outcomes. In rejecting Newton's mechanical paradigm, he actually started proposing ways of checking to see if the geometry of the Universe was flat rather curved.
TL Short in What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism? 2010, makes the argument that his use of the term objective idealism marks only a phase in his thinking - one of his goes at making a developmental cosmology work. He tried it for a few years and moved on.
Now that is probably too strong. But I think we have to really examine the technicalities of Peirce's conjectures rather than simply flourish the comments where Peirce sounds enthusiastic about Emerson (a family friend) and Schelling.
Key here is Gaudiano's summary of the contrast between a materialistic and idealistic ontology...
So as I say, Peirce tried to account for the cosmos in terms of "psychical law". And by that, he doesn't mean the application of some theistic or dualistic notion of mind, spirit or soul. He actually means the current psychology of his day. Remember that he was close to James. And he himself did foundational work in the application of the scientific method to psychological research.
(On Small Differences in Sensation. By Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow (1885) http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm)
If you google for the link to Short's paper, What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?, you can see the rather science-informed description of "the mind" that Peirce was applying to his cosmology. And it is basically the usual constraints-based system thinking I'm always talking about. So it is my claim here that "mind" boils down to "psychical law", which boils down to what I mean by organicism or systems casuality.
So as Short notes, Peirce was talking about habit-formation as being the critical dynamical process. And this led him to taking a rather odd, probably frankly self-contradicting, approach to consciousness or attentional level mental proocessing.
So for most people - especially when they think of idealism - they think it is all about the ineffable phenomenological aspect of "being conscious". That is the basis of Cartesian dualism - the apparently inescapable fact that there is something which it is like to be me, or you, or a bat. And then when Peirce starts talking about matter being effete mind, the natural assumption is that he means - panpsychically - that material substance is some kind of very dilute or deadened version of a mental substance.
Yet Peirce talks about consciousness quite differently as Firstness (where habit is Thirdness). So consciousness is associated with the brief fluctuations that are breaks in the smooth (unconscious!) running of habits. And this leads to a reversal of what you might expect.
Peirce's idea is that the cosmos started in a chaos of fluctuations and developed then the regularity of habit. And so the character of this beginning was of the kind of vivid, but undigested, consciousness of the newborn where all is a Jamesian blooming, buzzing confusion. Conscious feeling was at its most intense because absolutely everything is a disorganised surprise. But then also it was at its most chaotic or vague because it was nothing but a flood of disorganised surprises.
So what Peirce means by mind is the steady organisation which imposes order on raw feelings, or wild fluctuation. Law is the emergence of habit. A gradual suppression or constraint on surprise because the mind comes to read events in terms of signs that it interprets. We know that the beep of a car horn or the hand on the shoulder is an understood part of a world with an order. It is another example of that category of thing.
And Peirce was also careful to say he was not talking about individual minds, but the world as if it were a mind ruled by the psychical laws that psychology was establishing. Human minds are the product of neural complexity - Peirce knew that. So his argument was that they retain a lively capacity for surprise - for the flashes of attention that is the first experience of something novel - that then allows for the continual formation of new habits.
And if you follow his analysis of protoplasm, you can see how he hopes to argue a continuity from the extreme liveliness of human material organisation, through to the self-organisation of protoplasm, and eventually towards the now minimal - effete, extinct, dead - liveliness of the cosmos itself. The cosmos that is so past lively flashes of spontaneous thought that it lives as a collection of dry mechanical habits.
Importantly, Peirce point about protoplasm was the thermodynamic one. Thermodynamics had explained existence in terms of an entropy principle. And that made negentropy - the emergence of cosmic organisation a real problem. Even worse for Peirce's developmental cosmology, this new mechanical notion of entropy said the cosmos must begin in a state of high order, and his chaos is what comes at the end in a heat death.
So Peirce was wanting to say no. The ancient's had it right with their organicism. First there was an endlessly lively chaos, then this developed constraints to produce the well organised, very habitual, cosmos we see around us today. And so Peirce foresaw what was eventually proven by Prigogine. Boltzmann's mechanical version of thermodynamics is simply the reduced and deadened version of the livelier thermodynamics of modern dissipative structure theory. And cosmologists like Layzer have been championing a developmental cosmology as a consequence.
Anyway, the point is that when Peirce speaks about a cosmic mind, he means one actually ruled by psychical law and so one in which the key fact is not the emergence of consciousness - a surplus of feeling - but instead about the constraint or suppression of that in order to produce the regularity of habits.
As Short stresses, his objective idealism focuses on the principle of generalisation. Peirce is saying that lawfulness or habits develop via the "spreading" of a confusion of sharply felt instances. Over time, the differences fall away and some commonality emerges - a conception, a schema, a category, a universal. And this comes to encode a constraint on variety. It comes to encode the top-down formal and final purpose that constitutes the being of a habit, with its regulative effect on lively spontaneity.
So you do have a very difficult bit of philosophy here. But what is clear - in my opinion - is that while it sounds like Peirce is simply doing the easy thing of making panpsychic proclamations - the Universe is made of mind stuff - you really have to pay attention to the technical detail of how he really intends to cash out his objective idealism. And there he starts to talk about mechanical/material laws vs organic/psychical laws.
So - as is the case with modern biosemiotics - he really is focused on trying to fix the shortcomings of reductionism by bringing in four causes Aristoteleanism. He is saying life and mind do show there must be more to nature than a mechanist's conception of reality as a clutter of blindly bumping lumps, a rain of atoms in a void. And psychical laws - the story of habit formation in living beings right from humans down to protoplasm - capture the essence of that.
So it is not that nature has phenomenological experience everywhere in some degree - the panpsychic position. It is that nature everywhere is organised by this common "psychical" principle of habit-formation or the universal growth in reasonableness.
You could say in this light that matter is effete mind in having gone right to the extreme of being so habitual as to be deterministic. And humans - because of their complex organisation - are instead a lively balance of feeling and habits. Humans have huge capacity for development in their own lifetimes.
After his objective idealism phase, Peirce did continue to develop his semiotics more fully, which is why I personally would describe his ultimate goal as pansemiotics. If you can drop the apparent appeals to phenomenological experience - Peirce was quite plain he was against this dualistic reading - then you are left with his emphasis on a commonality of a semiotic mechanism. It is the way that minds work - by generalising away a chaos of fluctuating feeling to arrive at the intelligible regularity of habit - which is the insight he wanted to apply to a developmental metaphysics of existence itself.
I agree with most everything you write in this post and certainly about dualism. But I think romanticism is an absolutely pivotal disposition, indispensable for the health of the human spirit, so we may diverge when it comes to that.
It is its Romantic essence that in my view makes German Idealism one of just a very few key moments in the history of thought. It is insofar as pragmatism, which has its roots in German Idealism, departs from this romantic spirit (which had been so well expressed by the Transcendentalists and still by Royce, and at times by James and Peirce, but sadly, not much by Dewey) that I cease to value it as a suitable philosophy. Process philosophy though, is an important movement to redress the baby that was thrown out with the bathwater.
Yes, I hope we do find an opportunity to do that.
Quoting mcdoodle
Well Landru, I believe, would say just that; and I had thought you were agreeing with him about it.
So my argument is the dichotomising one. There are two parts to living - the rationalising and the experiencing, or however we choose to term it. And both matter to us. And it is recognising their essential difference that would let us do both well.
My beef with romanticism is when it is treated as a model of rational things - in particular, a model of human psychology or society.
And so for instance, psychology focused on the development of mental habits, sociology on the development of cultural ones. But romanticism then focuses on the individual's reactions in the instant - especially those that are the highest in novelty and sensation and reaction. So it puts the non-habitual in first place and rails against the constraint on freedom that is either intellectual or cultural habit.
So we have quite dichotomous ultimate targets of explanation when romanticism enters the arena of metaphysics. It seems obvious to the romantic that the real thing of intense emotion and free evaluation are what the dry old sticks are missing. The romantic then tries to establish a metaphysics of unconstrained feelings. The talk becomes all about poetry and intuition and other "freely creative ways of intellectualising".
Well I guess you can have that other brand of philosophy if it does you good. But I just prefer to experience life and art and girls, or whatever. And I certainly don't see any reason to think that romanticism offers the correct analytical framework for when it comes to doing the job of rationalising about things.
The Peircean point is that it is pointing back to the generative chaos rather than forward to the emergence of regulative habit. It is regressive rather than progressive as metaphysics. It is only progressive in the context of battling Scientism - reminding the reductionists there is more to life. But a holist already knows that.
I can sympathize with this. Romanticism is not a very good basis for human psychology or society; since these things, insofar as they are logistic and systematic, are amenable to statistical analysis, and that is antithetical to romanticism. Actually I'm not valorizing romanticism as a basis for any discursive enquiry, but I am valorizing the romantic as a healthy disposition underlying attitudes to the world, to nature and the creative and spiritual dimensions of the human. The sense of the enchantment of life, and the sense of reverence for it and the openness to a spiritual dimension that is not beyond the everyday but inherent in it.
[i]To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour*[/i]
This is the essence of the Romantic spirit.
I certainly don't think that experiencing "life and art and girls, or whatever" is precluded by the romantic disposition, or by any healthy spirituality. I do agree with you that romanticism has no place in the hard sciences or pure mathematics, as a methodology; I mean , that much seems obvious. But even in these fields we often find the romantic disposition, no? I mean, you don't want to suggest that we must be stuffy, pedantic, hard-nosed old farts when it comes to what possibilities we might choose to entertain, do you?
*William Blake Auguries of Innocence; here is the link to the full poem:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43650