What is your philosophical obsession?
I think we all tend to have one idea, a la Bergson, that we consistently keep on coming back to. The problem that we keep on thinking about when we're in bed and staring at the ceiling, or what keeps us entertained in the long transits between work and home.
My philosophical obsession is what Jeff McMahan coined "the Asymmetry". In a nutshell, the Asymmetry is a population ethics intuition that we must make people happy, but not make happy people (i.e. giving birth to happy people), i.e. the world is made worse by the addition of a miserable person but is not made better by the addition of a happy person (as if the happy person is entirely irrelevant). It's an extremely compelling and intuitive principle that nevertheless is rather controversial because of the various consequences associated with accepting/rejecting it (such as Parfit's mere addition paradox). In my opinion, it is a superior dilemma than, say, the trolley problem, since it's actually real and happening right now, and it also seems to grab you by the collar and force you to make a decision, thus forcing you to evaluate and refine your own ethical views, which end up being quite complicated and more nuanced than you originally had thought.
I personally am leaning towards symmetry views but still find the Asymmetry to be compelling in its own right (symmetry is logical in this case) - but why this is the case is what needs to be deconstructed. Are ethical intuitions subject to logic? Can ethical intuitions escape charges of ad hoc?
In addition to the aforementioned problem, I also focus heavily on meta-philosophical problems pertaining to the nature, scope, and legitimacy of philosophy as a source of information. I also tend to pass time thinking about ontological problems associated with universals, objects, and persistence, although I don't take them as seriously as I do the other issues.
So that's my general list of philosophical obsessions. What are yours?
My philosophical obsession is what Jeff McMahan coined "the Asymmetry". In a nutshell, the Asymmetry is a population ethics intuition that we must make people happy, but not make happy people (i.e. giving birth to happy people), i.e. the world is made worse by the addition of a miserable person but is not made better by the addition of a happy person (as if the happy person is entirely irrelevant). It's an extremely compelling and intuitive principle that nevertheless is rather controversial because of the various consequences associated with accepting/rejecting it (such as Parfit's mere addition paradox). In my opinion, it is a superior dilemma than, say, the trolley problem, since it's actually real and happening right now, and it also seems to grab you by the collar and force you to make a decision, thus forcing you to evaluate and refine your own ethical views, which end up being quite complicated and more nuanced than you originally had thought.
I personally am leaning towards symmetry views but still find the Asymmetry to be compelling in its own right (symmetry is logical in this case) - but why this is the case is what needs to be deconstructed. Are ethical intuitions subject to logic? Can ethical intuitions escape charges of ad hoc?
In addition to the aforementioned problem, I also focus heavily on meta-philosophical problems pertaining to the nature, scope, and legitimacy of philosophy as a source of information. I also tend to pass time thinking about ontological problems associated with universals, objects, and persistence, although I don't take them as seriously as I do the other issues.
So that's my general list of philosophical obsessions. What are yours?
Comments (74)
Not to derail your thread, but why - given this equation - is it not justified to go around killing off all miserable people? (Or equivalently, tanking them up on heroin, giving them lobotomies, or whatever.)
As an asymmetry, it still harbours the symmetry with would be subtraction instead of addition. And subtraction would seem to have the advantage of fixing things right away rather than waiting to make the desired change over time.
Anyway, in terms of your thread, I think "why anything?" is as good an obsession as any.
Probably the first truly philosophical question.
What dilemma? Asymmetry, at least as you've summed it up, is not at all compelling or intuitive for me. But symmetry is. Who is it that finds it so? Has there been a survey or something?
Quoting darthbarracuda
On the forum, I go from here to there, engaging with whatever catches my interest. But the basic, key questions have not yet been resolved to my satisfaction. One of the most fundamental for me, if not [I]the[/I] most fundamental, is: what do I really know, and how do I know it? Whatever else I ponder or opine about, it comes back to that.
For me, it's going back to basics. Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology. Also politics, and, to some extent, I share your focus on meta-philosophical problems pertaining to the nature, scope, and legitimacy of philosophy as a source of information.
The good life. Virtue and morality. Order. Love. How to help bring order in one's own soul, as well as in those who are surrounding me? How to become more virtuous and how to teach virtue? How to get more people interested in living a good life? These are the matters/questions I always come back to.
I'd like to show and experience the quality of psychagogy.
I'd like to experience progress towards Eudaimonia.
So you want to have one foot in heaven and the other in hell? :-*
If not that, I suppose I'd say combating folks' tendencies to posit nonphysical existents, real abstracts, the reification of concepts and so on.
The third candidate would be a general relativism, perspectivalism, etc.
So, I'm obsessed with our obsession with the inconsequential--that which has no consequence.
Sounds like a rehash of Pragmatism :D
I'm not sure. The Pragmatists as far as I know didn't inquire much into why, for example, we ponder or debate why we exist, or do so regarding whether we're brains in a vat, or why we do the same regarding the existence of God. It's true, though, that Dewey felt that many philosophical problems and prejudices resulted from a misguided "quest for certainty" and that certain philosophers' proclivity to believe what is true or good has its basis in something transcendent was caused at least in part by a sort of aristocratic disdain towards or contempt for the world which encompasses such things as trade, manual labor, unwashed bodies and ugly, ignorant, inferior people, change and death.
I think something different is involved, though. Maybe it's a kind of self-serving "quest for profound significance."
More importantly: if abstracta do exist (and I think they do), what does this mean for us? What does it mean that they exist?
Seems like an airy fairy question, but I find that it lies beneath nearly every philosophical position I have.
I think they're real, too, or that it's a bit silly to deny them this description. We live so much in the realm of ideas.
Good, you're not a nominalist, phew.
Transcendental or immanent, though?
Peirce did criticise Descartes's method of doubt involving the evil demon though. If that criticism applies to Descartes, it certainly applies to the brain in a vat hypothesis too.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Yes true. Peirce also had this concern about criticising the possibility/usefulness of Cartesian certainty.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I think that the transcendent has its basis in the experience of the transcendent, which isn't altogether uncommon. A beautiful piece of art, falling and being in love, prayer/meditation, values, meaning, etc. - there's lots of possibilities out there for encountering the transcendent. As for why we are attracted to the transcendent - I think Plato was right, and we are a sort of a metaxy - an in-between the world and the transcendent - we have one foot in this world, and another in the world of spirit. So you are right - we can never know the transcendent. But we are still attracted to it, we want to experience it, and be around it. It's part of our nature. Hence we desire to know it, even though we can't ever know it - we are always attached to the Earth. "Significance" that you are talking about, that is merely a feeling, I don't think it's such a thing as a fact. So I'm not sure about the quest for profound significance underlying an intellectual movement - maybe it is the opposite in fact - in front of the transcendent, man is indeed like nothing.
Must 'real' be coterminous with 'concrete'?
That's an odd way to spell 'beyond'...
:s
I'd say look to context. You've maybe heard my spiel about "meaning by fiat." The unit of meaning is at least as big as a conversation. But maybe the unit of meaning is a personality, etc. We have to get a sense a person's basic self-image. In this context, abstracta are real because we live for them and die for them. They are a thick layer on the merely sensual, itself disclosed by concept.
I think I can see where you're going with this, but I can't see how it relates to my silly comment and in any case, I cannot wholeheartedly agree. Firstly I'm not sure that a person's self image, whatever that might be taken, as a generality, to consist in, could determine, let alone exhaustively determine, what the things a person says mean. Are you thinking along the lines of "meaning as intention" (as distinct form the more impersonal intension) here. If you so, is conscious intention (self image?) fully determinative or are you proposing the wider operation of unconscious intention ( and thus unconscious self image) as well? But, even then, what about the even wider, more general sematic context of intersubjectivity (intension)?
Also, I would put it differently than you have and say that concepts (although in their concrete, and not in their abstract, guise) are not a layer over the sensual, but are constitutive of it. I don't think we live and die for abstracta at all, but for concreta. The abstract is too thin and unfelt to motivate much interest.
I find that if I can feel my way into a thinker's worldview --itself largely shaped by the heroic role that requires this worldview as a stage -- then I can interpret individual statements more confidently.
I do think men die for abstractions. Men sometimes volunteer for war when they don't have to --when they're own families and property are not in immediate danger. Off to the heroic adventure, in the name of justice and freedom and courage, etc.! They once fought duels over honor. Men still get into stupid fights in bars over the their identification with some particular heroic notion of being a Man. Our self-esteem looks to me to be largely about a sensed proximity to valorized concepts.
Yes, concepts structure the sensuous, but it is still there is an "primordial" way as a non-it. Intense pain, intense pleasure, the howl of an ambulance siren. Whatever concept structures them, they exceed this concept. Reading about heartbreak or remembering and old heartbreak is different from experiencing heartbreak. I'm pretty sure men have slaved away and passed up material advantage for the glamor of pursuing universal truth.
I think what you are really talking about is intensity of feeling. For sure people may die for their convictions, that is they may be feel ready to die on account of their feelings of belief in what you might, but they surely would not, think of as 'abstractions'.
The same in the case of the different examples of heartbreak. We can read about it and may be able to associate what we read with a feeling we have experienced, but now maybe only dimly remember. How much more intense and poignant will be our feelings on reading about heartbreak when we are presently heartbroken. But the reading, on account of its likeness to our own experience, may sweeten the feeling of being heartbroken; and instead of feeling alone in our bitterness we may feel what it is to join in living the human experience.
Regarding the sensuous, I don't believe anything is non-conceptually "there"; primordially or otherwise. As far as I can see it can be 'there' only in that good old empty formal way of the noumenal.
You and I apparently see things very differently when it comes to the pursuit of truth. I think it is a deadly serious matter; whereas you seem to understand it only in terms of the self-images of heroism and the mirage of glamour. A kind of celebrity view of the spiritual quest; it seems to me to be.
Anywho, disagreement is generally more interesting and fruitful than agreement....
:)
Ah, but surely you believe that feeling and sensation are more than the concept we need to speak about them?Quoting John
Continuing the above, how could truth be a serious matter if you didn't feel something about truth. We're aren't (only) word computers.
I used to pursue truth with deadly seriousness. But I was hit by The Irony as I pursued the truth about truth. To question the will to the truth --that's the big move for me. Why truth? If we are in the everyday realm of cats on mats, then truth and utility are almost the same. I depend on this physical truth like anyone. I revere it as a fragile animal who doesn't want to get hit by a truck.
But beyond this realm of physical truth, which science seems to get right-enough, we have the realm of the controversial ideas that are usually tied up with ideals. Politicians live here. Philosophers live here. I don't think it's all that wild to read their lives as an indication of their notion of virtue. Don't we tend to want to be virtuous? So all this "hero myth" jazz is just another way to look at how varying images of virtue deeply inform the disagreements that we don't expect science to settle. Are non-empirical claims usefully investigated in terms of their "ethical" kernel? I think there is some fuzzy vision of virtue at the enter of any "vortext." And rhetoric/sophistry works at the level of these images of virtue. A revolution in this image of virtue is going to unsettle the wooden concept system built around it. But I could just be an A-hole of the first water, framing the spiritual quest as "essentially" narcissistic because I got too much breast milk as a first-born son. At this point, I'm in too deep, though. It's comfortable in this prejudice.
I agree, disagreement is good. We'll keep one another dancing.
I really shouldn't still be here responding but I'm sucked in!
I do, but I don't think the concepts we need to speak about them are the same as the concepts that constitute them. I mean, in a certain sense they are, but one kind of concept is implicit and the other kind is explicit. The implicit concept is not even necessarily dependent on linguistic capacities; I think animals also have such concepts of things.
Language makes many more things possible, but it also makes things much more ambiguous. :s
I feel you. I told myself I was going to math tonight. Philosophy is my vice, my sin.
On sensation-emotion, it's probably just differing idiosyncratic terminology then. I was thinking of concepts in a very human sense, intelligible unities that fit into a system of relationships. And that a man born blind fails to "know" something "nonconceptual" about the rose. Then there's this:
[quote=cummings]
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
[/quote]
And I have to though this one in:
[quote=cummings]
Me up at does
out of the floor
quietly Stare
a poisoned mouse
still who alive
is asking What
have i done that
You wouldn’t have
[/quote]
Nice! The second poem made me shiver as I saw the little mousie's eyes, and my blood run cold.
That poem is deep. That little mouse is something like the truth of us, we who evolved from the nocturnal thieves of reptile eggs (or that's something I picked up long ago.) We're always warm. We don't need the sun to move. But we are hungrier than reptiles!
I wish I was a nocturnal thief of reptile eggs; it sounds exciting! I should have said (to make the meaning clearer) "and my blood ran cold with recognition", not to mention compassion, but I think you got it anyway.
For me that's where philosophy gets exciting. Reason finally looks into itself. Demystification takes a long, hard look in the bathroom mirror.
The hard problem of consciousness- how it is that experience can come out of non-experience.
I mean, you aren't really a nominalist, are you? ;)
The examples you use all describe what takes place in the world (the universe) so I'm not sure we're using "transcendent" in the same way. There's no reason to believe that such experiences suggest or establish the existence of something outside the universe. They may enable us to transcend ourselves or indicate we can do so, but no more.
I don't doubt the existence of such experiences, and think, personally, that there's much about the universe we don't know and that such experiences may be a way to learn more about it and ourselves. But I don't think such experiences can be described by words, though they may be evoked by them. That's done well by certain artists and their works, but not by philosophers or their work, or so I think. Philosophers aren't good artists as a rule. I wonder if this accounts for Plato's dislike of artists.
Unfortunately, it seems the belief in a transcendent God is often associated with the belief we humans are his favored creatures and particular concern, so it isn't clear to me that it's been productive of a feeling of insignificance.
The experience doesn't seem to be situated in the physical world as I understand it. Some things in the physical world do give rise to, or lead to the experience, that is true, but the experience isn't of something situated anywhere in the world. I look at a beautiful painting, and behold, for a moment I am transfigured, experience the slowing down of time, the forgetfulness of a strong sense of self and the nearby world - and instead I become focused not on the painting itself, but on that which the painting expresses. You can search for the source of that experience anywhere you want in the atomic configuration of the painting and you will not find it.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
I think Plato himself though was quite an artist - I find his dialogues sublime. Plato disliked artists because he understood how art can be misused to encourage base desires, instead of pursuit of the good. And there were some philosophers who found art to be very significant - such as Schopenhauer.
I'm afraid I don't find Plato's works as enchanting as it seems you do. But I don't like dialogues in general, though it seems the ancients were fond of them. Plato's dialogues are kind of a lawyer's dream--this lawyer's dream, anyway. Your witness says exactly what you want and expect them to say. Ah, that would indeed be sublime.
Perhaps we mean different things by "transcendent." For me, what is in and takes place in the universe is not transcendent. That would necessarily include meaning, as meaning like thinking is something we do (find, assign), right here and now as a result of being living organisms of the human kind existing as part of the universe. We can have no idea of the truly transcendent because we can have no idea which doesn't arise from living in the world, as part of the world.
For this reason, I find the idea of an immanent God (like that of the Stoics) more appealing than a transcendent God. I don't think the experiences you refer to are transcendent because if we weren't alive and part of the world we couldn't have them. This view doesn't mean that there's no such thing as that which has been called mystical or spiritual experience, it means rather that they are a part of our life in the world.
Probably.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
My only problem with that is that the Universe generally has the connotation of being the sum of everything that physics can account for - and I don't think this includes the whole of existence.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
If you define "world" as the whole of existence sure.
How do you account for similarity and difference if not by universals. i.e. what if your flavor of nominalism?
Examples:
***
***
Should I make my choices only aiming to do "my part", and ignore even predictable choices of other moral agents? Or should I forego the idea of treating others as moral agents altogether and aim for what I predict would likely result in the best outcome regardless of whether I'd have to take some blame myself? Both approaches seem to have their own problems, which I don't feel necessary to go into right here and now.
So, that's one of my few philosophical obsessions.
Similarity simply obtains by something being "closer to" x than y in at least some respects, from a particular reference point.
For example, say we're dealing with a universe of "@s"
Well
@@
is more similar to/is closer to
@ @
than it is to
@ @
in terms of the extensional relations between the @s.
That's all that similarity is. There's no need to posit universals for that. We're not saying that any two numerically distinct things,including the "closer to" or "similar" relation, including the extensional relation, etc. are identical in what we said above.
Just from wikipedia: "In logic, extensionality, or extensional equality, refers to principles that judge objects to be equal if they have the same external properties."
Are these properties not universals? How else should be interpret this as?
If it's a brute fact that things are similar in certain ways, then fine. But I think universals provide a much more useful and appealing theory, especially when it comes to causation.
In the example you give, for example, % one has a circle to the left of a slanted line as does %, while that's not the case for @ and @. They're not numerically identical circles--obviously, which makes them not identical. It's simply (degree of) resemblance.
Why would you think that o and o are circles by instantiating a numerically identical property of circularity that exists who knows where and that obtains in those circles by who knows what means so that it's just ONE circularity property even though we're talking about two different things? That's just incoherent. It's reifying the fact that we make mental type abstractions.
Re "how do you account for identity," I'm not sure what you're asking. If you're asking about "identity" in the "essence" sense, essences are what someone requires to name some unique existent an F, a type term. I'm guessing that's what you're asking. Otherwise you'd be asking how does one account for the fact that something is itself, in which case it's simply a matter of coherence. It's incoherent to say that something is not itself.
That would simply be a matter of whether someone is applying the same type categorization to the items in question.
I don't think that positing real abstracts is useful. It seems rather incoherent to me. The mere idea of nonphysical existents seems incoherent to me.
Because without universals similarity or resemblance becomes arbitrary. There is no reason for the way things are - they just are. Brute fact. Language does not constrain reality, reality constrains our language.
There are indeed multiple different things - they are numerically different but not qualitatively different. When you say something is round, why is it round? Why is it a certain way? Without universals, there cannot be any explanation as to why two properties happen to be identical in nature. Two things are round - without universals there doesn't seem to be any way to explain why these two things are both identified as being round. There's no explanation as to why the one round trope is identical to another round trope. What makes them round tropes and not something else?
Without universals, the world becomes totally disorganized and messy. There's no structure to it all, no reason why anything can be reliably predicted or predicated on.
Re there being a "reason for the ways things are," that's the case with universals, too. No matter how many reasons you give behind something, no matter what it is, you get to a point where "it's just the way things are." You can't keep giving an infinity of reasons one step back and then another step back and then another step back, etc., right?
What's incoherent is saying that they're not numerically different in terms of the quality or properties. And you have to be saying that the properties in question are numerically identical or you're not talking about universals. You'd be a nominalist then instead.
Because that's a property that existents can exhibit. They're not somehow "participating" in one thing that exists who-knows-where. The roundness is a property of that unique existent.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You don't need an explanation for that because no two properties are literally identical. Again, you'd simply be reifying type abstractions that we make. Reifying conceptual categories we create as individuals in our minds.
It couldn't be more simple. They both meet your criteria, you mental, conceptual abstraction, for calling them "round" things.
Quoting darthbarracuda
No it isn't. Again, "either there are universals or everything is random" is a false dichotomy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right. The primitives do the work. But in this case you lack sufficient primitives. Relations are ad hoc, brute facts without any real reason. Whereas a unitary, single thing, a universal, explains this far better without being so ad hoc, since it's grounded in one single thing instead of trying to ground it in multiple totally different, yet somehow the same, tropes or classes or something.
Quoting Terrapin Station
No, properties are numerically identical because they're universals, transcendental or immanent, take your pick.
Objects are numerically different but qualitatively similar/different in virtue of the numerically-identical universals they share.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Well of course we don't have to say that every book instantiates the universal "book". But they are sufficiently similar to each other as to warrant us to call them books, i.e. their constitution is similar enough, i.e. their basic properties. There's scarce and abundant properties.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Are our own mental abstractions universals across humanity? Are we not all utilizing similar abstraction constructs? Are our mental ideas not in some sense universal, allowing language to flourish?
You've removed universals from the world, but only have relocated them in the mind as conceptual constructs.
Quoting darthbarracuda
The existents "do the work." I don't know if existents are "primitives" in your view. I don't call them that. Existents have properties, or rather, they ARE properties. It's what materials/structures/processes are like. Those properties, which are identical to the materials/structures/processes are not numerically identical in two different things.
And this, I contend, it impossible to maintain if you also maintain that they are similar in some respects, for numerical identity between properties is necessary for a similarity to be. I don't understand how you go about explaining why and how things are able to be identified as being a certain universal concept, such as red, square, 1.346 g, etc, without believing that the reason we have these concepts in the first place is that the objects they correspond to have a certain ontological structure. How do we identify some two things as being red if they aren't both red, i.e. being a certain way, a duplicative way?
What do you take to be an argument for that? (And I mean an argument in the sense of premises leading to a conclusion, where the conclusion is logically valid and you believe the argument to be sound.)
Or, if not that, at least give a more fleshed-out, heuristic argument for it, or what you take to be empirical evidence for it or whatever you think is a good support of that claim.
When we identify two things as being of a certain quality, they are of a certain quality, that is, a numerically-distinct and unitary quality. One quality. The basis of adjectives.
Without universals, we're left with two white objects with no way to explain why they are white, or how we come to know that they are both white. It contradicts even our own language: the two things are white. They are under the category of "white". Members of the category are such because they instantiate a universal. Without universals there's no reason to be in a category. There's no reason why x is a square and y is a circle, or why they appear to be different. Difference requires a difference in composition which can only be done by property differences. Without universals, there is no way to differentiate between a white object and a black object, a square object or a circle object.
It kind of seems like you must not be understanding my arguments, so you're instead just repeating with slightly different wording the party line, broad supports for universals, figuring that surely they must address what I'm saying without having to understand my comments and directly respond to them (whether you agree or disagree, specifically why you disagree if you do, etc.).
Quoting Terrapin Station
SInce both %s have a circle to the left of a slanted line, they both have circles, they both have slanted lines, and they both have a relationship between the circle and slanted lines. You just described universals.
This is another illustration of the paradoxes that arise within traditional reductionist notions of existence. We know that both universals and individuals must be "real", and yet there is no way to show that using a reductionist ontology. The two halves of the deal always seem to wind up dualistically divided.
And so we have nominalism wanting to say that universals are just ideas, and not real. Then we have the Platonic response to that of idealism, which says well OK, but that just means the real reality is the realm where the perfect ideas have their eternal existence.
A systems approach to ontology looks at it differently in talking instead about reality as a process. Now universals become constraints - emergent limitations that are real enough to go out and physically measure. Likewise, individuals become instead acts of individuation. They are what the prevailing constraints actually produce in terms of local events. And so, in being now merely events, individuals are rather less substantially "real" than the entities or objects imagined by conventional reductionism.
Thus the reductionist sense of paradox is eased from both sides. Universals become more obviously real - we can physically measure their presence in terms of historically developed constraints. While individuals now become matchingly less real - they exist only by virtue of some constraining context which forms them.
So if we are talking about a white thing - a thing that partakes in the property of "whiteness" - a systems view is that the real question here is "Is the thing white enough?". Whiteness is not some perfect absolute but instead an act of individuation where possibility has been constrained to a degree where any vagueness, any further variation, doesn't, on the whole, matter.
And this individuation is physically measurable in terms of a dichotomy. To be white can be reciprocally defined as to be not not-white, or not-black. So we can claim whiteness by measuring the lack of its "other" - a state of constraint sufficient to exclude any meaningful degree of blackness.
So conventional ontology is usefully simple - it treats the world as a collection of existents, a state of affairs, a collection of formed objects that thus only partake in predicate type logic arrangements.
But a holistic ontology talks instead about such existence as a state of self-regulating persistence. The whole is forming its parts - the very parts needed to compose that formative whole. Logically, it is a closed reciprocal deal where universals cause individuation and individuation contributes to there being the steady flow of particular events that results in the emergence of the regularities we call universals.
It is a feedback, cybernetic, or dynamical way of looking at things - normal in science, but apparently still alien in philosophy.
Quoting apokrisis
This only means that there has to be a sufficient amount of qualities to be called "white" - Wittgenstein's family resemblance all over again. Things overlap. A is similar to B, but not similar to C. B is similar to both A and C. They aren't identical but neither are they totally different. They share qualities, i.e. universals
Quoting apokrisis
You deny conventional ontology yet retain predication by talking about a state of self-regulating persistence, wholes and parts\, etc. You're still referring to these as something that fills the subject in a predicative statement. These subjects have properties in themselves because they are of a certain state: a state is vague when it has no "crisp" as you like to say properties - yet vagueness would be a property itself. Any sort of adjective is going to either refer to a specific property or a collection of properties abstracted into a unified concept.
Huh? Isn't the number line continuous ... as an infinity of infinitesimals?
If you are talking about set theory, then you are talking about a conception of things that builds in the very atomism I have disputed. So to wheel it out is not proof of anything except, yes, that is what a reductionist model of reality looks like. And we all know that mathematically that way of thinking winds up in paradox.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Or what they share is a state of individuation sufficient to achieve the general purpose of some actual boundary condition. They are X enough (in being sufficiently, self-groundingly, not not-X).
Quoting darthbarracuda
As usual, I use language I hope might be familiar to you. But the relation of wholes and parts is then different - reciprocal - as I go on to explain. And then as I also say, we can still use a logic of predication as our rough and ready way of thinking about things.
We exist in a highly individuated state of being as a result of our rather particular thermal scale. We sit on a planet that orbits a star in the middle of a void which is nothing but a radiation bath 2.7 degrees above absolute zero. So a classical, reductionist, object-orientated approach to reality modelling can take a lot for granted.
However we also know that it is only a very particular and unrepresentative view of the cosmic reality.
Quoting darthbarracuda
You just keep pointing out properties of our habits of language, not things we have to believe of reality itself.
Sure, we can give names to even the unspeakable. We can talk about "everything", "nothing", "vagueness", "God", "matter", or anything we like.
But if we pay close enough attention, we will see the same organic logic at play behind the names we feel most metaphysically confident about. Something like vagueness can be considered a measurably real property of the whole of existence - a viable predicate or act of individuation - because it is understood as being counterfactual to some "other", namely the crisp or definite.
So vagueness is not-not vagueness. Or in other words, it is at the other end of the spectrum, as distant as it is physically possible to get, from the crisp.
Your confusion may stem from the fact that we are also - through language - quite free to predicate the contingent or accidental. A heap might "actually" have 101 grains of wheat and not 102. But who cares about that level of individuation? (And in the systems view, you have to have an answer to that - you have to show there is some reason to care.)
In bowl 1 you have 3 oranges. In bowl 2 you have 4 oranges. It is an objective fact that there are 2 bowls and 7 oranges, and an objective fact that the two bowl's contents are different in virtue of the discrete amount of oranges in them.
Properties don't just disappear just because they come from a more general source. The number 3 is still the number 3.
Quoting apokrisis
Wittgenstein all over again, man. You're talking about classes of things. But classes are identified by their essential properties. The properties that you must have to be an x, or, in the case of Wittgenstein, the properties you must have to be similar to a sufficiently large amount of objects that are already seen as a set.
Quoting apokrisis
But you're assuming that properties are like those you see on your office desk. When really there shouldn't be any kind of limit like that. 2.7 degrees above absolute zero is a property. We can identify it. Being a billion miles away is a property. We can predicate it. Being general is a property. We can understand what it means to be general.
Furthermore objects need not be limited to the boring office desk pens, papers, coffee mugs and staplers.
Quoting apokrisis
At what point do properties no longer classify as properties? Properties (universals) are just the way things are. If something is general, say, the universe, the the universe is general. It is in a state. The state of affairs is always crisp. The objects and their parasitic properties within need not be.
Quoting apokrisis
Our disinterest in something doesn't make it not-true. You're more focused on pragmatics, I'm more focused on what's actually true in the correspondence sense. Not-caring about something doesn't make it go away.
This concreteness of thought is now beyond a joke. You know all this about the oranges because you have ... counted them again right now?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Or classes of things are produced by acts of constraint. That's why a better term for them is family resemblances. They only have to be judged alike enough to the degree there is person (or a system) that cares.
Look! One of your oranges is a tangelo! Crikey, what now? Does the number three no longer exist?
Quoting darthbarracuda
Yep, talk is cheap. We can say what we like.
But for "object" to be a meaningful term in a metaphysical discussion, it needs the reciprocal context of that which is its "other".
So in talking about objects, what are you thinking are their exact opposite? And having spoken that name, do you now still feel you have mentioned everything that is the case ontologically?
Quoting darthbarracuda
You are stuck in your realism which is a dualist subjectivism - naive realism in other words. There just isn't a problem for you in dividing mind and world, observer and observables, in brute and unaccounted-for fashion.
The habit is so engrained that you can't even realise it is your way of thought.
Pragmatism (of the Peircean kind) is all about bridging that gap by granting the ability to care to the whole of nature - even if we then wind up with "the Universe" which in fact seems to care about very little beyond arriving at its Heat Death. Bastard!
:-}
Quoting apokrisis
Not necessarily. Being-identical-to, existence, etc are no reciprocating properties. You can't have the property of non-existence...otherwise you'd exist. You can't be not-identical to yourself...otherwise you wouldn't even be.
Quoting apokrisis
How? You always tell other people they're dualists and that there's a problem with this but then never explain why it's problematic, only affirm that your position is right. Something something semiotics.
Quoting apokrisis
I might accuse you for being dualistic by separating the rest of the world from the agents that are part of the world. "The Universe doesn't care"...it does care in certain contexts when we're talking about sentients that are manifested by the Universe. Unless you want to claim that the manifest image is actually the scientific image.
You kind of wandered away from the point.
What is the formal antithesis of "object"? What is its opposite in the mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive fashion the LEM demands?
Quoting darthbarracuda
If you are happy to defend dualism as ontology, be my guest. If you don't believe it problematic to have two entirely separate kinds of reality, with no way to account for their connection, then probably pretty much nothing is ever going to trouble you when it comes to metaphysics.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Couldn't really follow that.
For the last several years I've been trying to piece together a full blown "morality" by describing morality first as an emergent strategy or code of conduct (usually) designed for the mutual benefit of human beings, with an emphasis on how environment and circumstances affect changing pragmatic moral prescriptions. Right now my main objective is to try and better understand the scope and shape that moral landscapes take (think "your next best move in chess") given variations in environment and circumstance. A notable insight I've gleaned so far is that cooperative morality (perhaps the only relevant kind) can be evaporated via circumstance, especially when mutual survival or ability to thrive between human beings is inherently at odds. Resource scarcity, for instance, can reduce or eliminate the possibility of a mutually beneficial strategy between humans being held. If the odds of surviving or avoiding some harm are far better, or only possible, through acting in one's own interest even while it is against the interests of some or all others, then in this sense no mutually beneficial strategy can be held.
The prison environment in America (and many other countries) is a fascinating example of how environment can shape morality and what humans consider to be necessary, justified, or even praiseworthy behavior. As a new inmate enters some jail and prison environments, they are already over-crowded and overwhelmed by an internally violent pecking order like social structure. In some of these environments, you will be expected to fight your new cellmates, one by one, in order to establish your place in the pecking order and (hopefully) demonstrate that you are not an easy target. If you opt out, you will be viewed as a target for other people to use to demonstrate their own position and reputation. People will extort your commissary through violence and even your family by extension (for example, "have your family smuggle in narcotics or suffer daily attacks"). When an otherwise "moral" person is placed into this environment, short of being able to change the entire system, they can be forced to themselves become violent and aggressive, for their own protection. As gangs form, similar events play out on larger scales, where initially a gang may form for mutual protection, but like any individual in that environment must maintain it's reputation as powerful or else it will become an open target to the rest of the prison population.
Some would say that "morality" does not exist in such a place, that it cannot exist. And I would agree with them in the sense that the contemporary western morality we may share cannot exist there, but I think rather a different kind of morality exists due to the circumstances and environment that strain the feasibility of our higher moral virtues and standards in favor of virtues and standards we might consider barbaric. Rather than holding to one's own per-conceived moral notions about violence and transgression, this environment will force you to adapt to it's own. Trying to coherently conceptualize the differences in these inherent emergent norms as a mechanism of practice and production seems to provide me with unending complexity, which is a wonderful recipe for putting one's self to sleep!