Inescapable universals

Reply to darthbarracuda

The empirical is a symbolic representation of the spiritual. The aporias arise when questions about the existence of universals are asked. Questions about the existence of anything are coherent only in the context of the empirical.

So the universal (the spirit) is prior to the particular (empirical nature), but it does not follow that the universal exists prior to the particular.

Quoting John

The empirical is a symbolic representation of the spiritual.

I don't know what this means.

Quoting John

So the universal (the spirit) is prior to the particular (empirical nature), but it does not follow that the universal exists prior to the particular.

If the universal is prior to the particular, then the universal is prior to the particular.

Reply to darthbarracuda

It means that talk about the existence of universals is incoherent. Universals do not exist, they inhere in existents. The existence of an existent, in other words, is a symbolic expression of universals.

Quoting John

Universals do not exist, they inhere in existents.

What is the difference between existing and sort-of existing?

Quoting John

The existence of an existent, in other words, is a symbolic expression of universals.

Does this mean that whatever exists depends upon an expression of universals?

Quoting darthbarracuda

Thus universality is ultimately prior and foundational to particularity. Particularity emerges from universality as various combinations and configurations of universals.

But universality or generality is the product of induction or generalisation from particulars. So really it is a two-way relation - a symmetry-breaking or dichotomy - that is being described.

It is true that the particular derives from the general (via downward constraint - a limitation). And it is true that generality derives from the accumulation of the particular (thus via upward construction). So in being mutually derived in this fashion, both the general and the particular, the universal and the instance, must arise from something further - a third thing - beyond themselves.

That is where vagueness, apeiron or firstness enters the metaphysical picture. The general and the particular are themselves the complementary limits on being which result from breaking the symmetry of a vaguer "everythingness" that is neither the one, nor the other, just the potential for the logical division that develops.

So as usual, the instinct is to reduce two choices to just one - either it is the case that the general or the particular is the primary.

But metaphysical two-ness has to be a dichotomy to be logically possible. To definitely have one thing, that can only be the case if it brings along the concrete possibility of the exact thing which it is not.

And from there, the only way out is to see the whole thing as a triadic development - a transition out of vagueness where it is possibility itself which is being metaphysically divided towards its logical limits.

The general and the particular can only exist in relation to each other. And then that definite relation can only exist in relation to yet a third thing which is the same relation at its other limit - a state of maximal vagueness, a state where it can't meaningfully be said whether there is the general or the particular.

Quoting apokrisis

The general and the particular can only exist in relation to each other. And then that definite relation can only exist in relation to yet a third thing which is the same relation at its other limit - a state of maximal vagueness, a state where it can't meaningfully be said whether there is the general or the particular.

Yet if I remember correctly Peirce included second-ness and third-ness. So first-ness would be vagueness (which is a vague term itself - a placeholder for what is impossible to predicate?), second-ness would be universality and third-ness would be the "crisp" particularity. A crude image would be gas-liquid-solid.

Universality comes before particularity simply because we particulars cannot exist without universals, i.e. constraints and repetition. The very class of particulars is a universal. So indeed you are correct that we never come across universals "by themselves", but this is well-accepted as the instantiation relation objects have with their properties.

My view of universals is that this term encompasses a number of things including grammatical laws, aspects of mathematics, and many concepts that are basic to scientific reasoning, among other things. But I think to get a perspective on why the debate is important, takes a lot of reading.

There's an online essay called What's Wrong with Ockham: Reassessing the Role of Nominalism in the Dissolution of the West. This essay analyses the issue in terms of Aquinas' view of universals, and of William of Ockham's criticism of that.

One of the definitions:

What does Aquinas say is a universal, then? While a nature does not exist as a universal, the nature can be considered as a universal insofar as the individual act of a mind relates that mind to many things. As Aquinas puts it, universality is an accident of an intelligible nature which accrues to it insofar as it exists in the intellect and thus relates the intellect to many things existing in reality.

Aquinas’s view is perhaps best framed in terms of what historians of philosophy call the “inherence theory of predication.” A proposition is true, on this account, if the predicate term signifies a nature or form which inheres in what is named by the subject term. “Socrates is white” is true if and only if the form of whiteness inheres in Socrates. “Socrates is a man” is true if and only if Socrates is characterized by the nature humanity. Obviously this view is linked to a metaphysical account of things as caused to be what they are by virtue of their forms; and it is linked, as well, to an account of cognition according to which I understand things insofar as they are characterized by these intelligible forms. Indeed, this is why it leads to the semantic account, as my words are only meaningful insofar as they signify the concepts in my mind, which concepts are caused by, and so represent by means of their formal similarity to, the forms of things.

Words signify forms—this is the heart of Aquinas’s “realism.” It is not that these signified forms are universals or have any universal existence; they exist only as the individual acts of being characterizing individual things. (And, as we will see, even the sense in which they “exist” in individuals can admit of great qualification.) But as the individual forms of individual things, they have a potential intelligibility which can be abstracted by the mind; abstracting this potential intelligibility—making it actually understood by the mind—is the formation of the concept.

The 'concept' is central, although the essay distinguishes the classical idea of concept from 'conceptualism' which tends to 'psychologize' concepts, i.e. try and explain them as merely or only 'mental constructions'.

In any case, the essay depicts Ockham's rejection of this notion of universals as follows:

Notice, however, that even if it does not entail that universals exist, the inherence theory of predication does seem to entail a rather highly populated universe of discourse, if not perhaps a highly populated ontology. For this view requires, in addition to all the beings about which I can form true propositions, a whole new set of beings, namely, the natures or forms, which verify any true proposition about those beings. For Ockham, this proliferation of objects was the ground for grave objection. In Ockham’s judgment, it is at best a meaningless play of language, and at worst an irresponsible complication of our theorizing, to insist that “the column is to the right by to-the-rightness, God is creating by creation, is good by goodness, just by justice, mighty by might, an accident inheres by inherence, a subject is subjected by subjection, the apt is apt by aptitude, a chimaera is nothing by nothingness, a blind person is blind by blindness, a body is mobile by mobility, and so on for other, innumerable cases.” Why should we “multiply beings according to the multiplicity of terms”? This is, for Ockham, “the root of many errors in philosophy: to want it to be such that, to a distinct word there always correspond a distinct significate, so that there is as much distinction between the things signified as between the nouns or words that signify.”

If Ockham’s primary motivation was to articulate an alternative to this proliferation of beings, he saw that he could do this very efficiently with some incisive logical or semantic innovation. Instead of having common terms signifying forms or natures of things, Ockham insisted that they signify the things themselves. “Man” does not signify the humanity of individual human beings; it signifies the individual human beings themselves. In other words, “man” is not predicated of men on account of their having humanity; rather, it is predicated of men just because “man” is a name for men. Ockham thus replaced the inherence theory of predication with an alternative version, sometimes called the two-name theory, or the identity theory. “Socrates is a man” is true if “Socrates” and “man” can name the same thing, if Socrates is among the things—individual human beings—that “man” can signify.

In effecting this revision of the semantics of terms, Ockham eliminated the need for even talking about natures or forms. This is the crux of Ockham’s nominalism, which while it cannot be adequately described as a denial of the existence of universals, can be described as a denial of the existence of forms or natures.

Later on, the author notes that

Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.

Notice it is precisly this question which is at stake in the interminable debates about the meanings of physics.

I think that essay is important. It also mentions another important source, which is Richard Weaver's 1948 Ideas Have Consequences. This has, perhaps unfortunately, become strongly associated with the American conservative movement, but it also attributes nominalism with 'the fall of the West', i.e. the abandonment of a meaningful metaphysic. Similar themes are also explored in M A Gillespie's The Theological Origins of Modernity and E A Burtt's Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.

Reply to Wayfarer It certainly is interesting how metaphysics affects things outside of its own domain. I remember reading a while back on SEP how ancient Buddhist philosophers tried to distance themselves from the Hindu caste system by developing a thoroughly nominalist ontology of radical particularity. According to some Hindu philosophers, people belonged to their caste by having certain universals - they metaphysically belonged to that caste. And of course Buddhism rejected the caste system and some adherents ended up sacrificing what I see to be a reasonable position in order to try to distance themselves from an otherwise unreasonable view of nature (castes).

Reply to darthbarracuda See this thread on Dharmawheel for a recent discussion of Buddhism and nominalism.

I came to this conclusion about it:

I think the nub of the issue is this: Buddhists are always saying, don't try and conceive of 'the ultimate'. As soon as you try and conceive of it, say what it is or isn't, then you're entangling yourself in the domain of relative/verbal/conventional descriptions, 'mistaking the finger for the moon'. The point of Buddhist praxis is always practical: you have to realise the nature of the ultimate, which is indeed ineffable from the viewpoint of conventional philosophy. (cf Wittgenstein 'that of which we cannot speak...'.) So I think that this resistance to the consideration of metaphysical propositions such as universals is consistent with that. Dharmakirti's attidude is: 'so you say there are "universals"? Where is one? Show it to me! What difference does it make!' That is the characteristic pragmatist attitude of Buddhism to not reifying abstracta.

So I think I understand why Buddhism doesn't deal with universals and the like - they're all part of what amounts to speculative metaphysics.

But my interest in universals actually came out of my debates on Philosophy forums, about Western philosophy in particular. In that context the question has a different meaning. There, the eclipse of Platonism and the rise of nominalism is one of the principle factors underlying the origins of scientific materialism. So there's no grasp of an ineffable light at the end of the tunnel - neither any moon nor finger pointing to it - but simply the endless accumulation of empirical facts against the background of an intrinsically meaningless physicalism. In this context, the question has a different import.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Yet if I remember correctly Peirce included second-ness and third-ness. So first-ness would be vagueness (which is a vague term itself - a placeholder for what is impossible to predicate?), second-ness would be universality and third-ness would be the "crisp" particularity. A crude image would be gas-liquid-solid.

Firstness is logical vagueness. But secondness is particularity - the particularity of some fleeting relation or event. And thirdness is then generality - the regularity of some habit in which the said relation or event is reliably produced (due to the development of some system of constraints).

But phase transitions certainly illustrate the point.

A gas is vague possibility. Particles are not in interaction. A liquid is a collection of events. Some kind of organisation arises as every particle has some individual interaction with other passing particles. Then a solid is the emergence of a global rigid order that puts every particle into a final entropy-minimising state of organisation.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Universality comes before particularity simply because we particulars cannot exist without universals, i.e. constraints and repetition. The very class of particulars is a universal. So indeed you are correct that we never come across universals "by themselves", but this is well-accepted as the instantiation relation objects have with their properties.

Talking about before and after runs into big difficulties if your notion of "time passing" is already based on a notion of time as a dimension, or a constructable string of particular instants.

So in the systems view, time is both global and local, general and particular. Universality is identified with final cause, while particularity is about efficient cause.

Thus one can say that universals are structural attractors. They exist in the future of a pattern of development. They are the goals towards which events tend (with retrospective necessity).

So you can say the universal exists even before it exists. It is there already waiting when things first start as the future outcome. But by this point it should be clear that the whole conventional notion of temporality is becoming more confusing than useful.

Again, trying to say one thing is definitely in existence, or definitely more primary, than its other, is where the monadic or reductionist approach to metaphysics quickly goes wrong.

Holism depends on getting past those 101 stage paradoxes.

Quoting darthbarracuda

What is the difference between existing and sort-of existing?

What do you mean by "sort of existing"? I am saying that it makes no sense to say that universals exist independently of the particulars that instantiate them. Can you give an account of some other kind of existence you think they might have?

Quoting darthbarracuda

Does this mean that whatever exists depends upon an expression of universals?

No, it means that whatever exists is an expression, or instantiation, of universals.

Peirce confined existence to Secondness/particularity/Brute Actuality. Therefore, strictly speaking, Firstness/possibility/Ideas and Thirdness/generality/Mind indeed only exist in their instantiations. However, they nevertheless have Being--they are real--apart from those instantiations. Within our existing universe, all three Categories are involved in anything and everything to varying degrees; but in the cosmological sense, Thirdness is primordial because actualities are determinate individuals in a continuum of indeterminate potentiality.

I would agree that they are real apart from their instantiations, but I would not agree that they "have Being", because I think 'to be' is coterminous with 'to exist'. Any alternative to this seems incoherent to me. Consider this; a thought, an imagining, or a feeling is real but it does not exist and is not a be-ing.

Reply to John but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. Some are abstract but have real consequences, others are 'real possibilities'. But that domain includes many more things than things that exist. Which actually conforms with Pierce's usage above.

Reply to darthbarracuda

The first task is to understand just what it is that nominalists are claiming.

Very few if any nominalists deny that we think about things in terms of universals. That's the whole gist of what concepts are, after all, and who is going to deny, especially in a philosophical context, that we formulate concepts?

What nominalists are denying is the reality of universals, where "real" in this usage amounts to "extramental." (And hence why this debate was framed simply as realism vs. nominalism in scholastic philosophy. It's realism vs. nomalism with respect to universals. Universals were an important enough topic in scholastic philosophy that there was no need to specify realism vs. nominalism about what--it was understood that it was about universals.)

At any rate, we're denying that there's somehow literally one (real) thing that is identically, multiply instantiated in two different entites.

Nominalism also often amounts to a denial of real abstracts in general (even though that's broader than the issue you brought up).

I'm a nominalist in both senses.

Quoting Wayfarer

here are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series.

In my view, insofar as those things are real (again, read "extramental"), you can have an encounter with them.

We could give examples of real things that one can't have an encounter with, though--or at least where it's virtually impossible to discern that one is having an encounter with them; we have to rely on theoretical models and indirect evidence from others gained via difficult-to-set-up experiments. For example, neutrinos.

Quoting Terrapin Station

In my view, insofar as those things are real (again, read "extramental"), you can have an encounter with them.

Yes, in practice our talk about the reality of things is talk about them being causal entities. They are "things" if they can make things happen. So the weather can be a type of causal thing. Even a reductionist still talks of things with emergent properties.

Quoting Wayfarer

but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. Some are abstract but have real consequences, others are 'real possibilities'.

This is also sort of right in that all these things are real in a sign or symbolic causal sense, more than a material causal sense. They are things that are meaningful at a semiotic level and so cause us to react in appropriate ways.

Ultimately symbolic entities and material entities are causally connected. Entropy ends up being created as we jump up and down in joy, cheering when our team wins. Forests get mown down if someone is concerned over GDP.

So claims about things being real seem best understood as claims about entities with causal potency. And the world is complicated enough that there are both material and symbolic entities to take seriously.

Although we can then also tighten the definition of real when it comes to the symbolic or semiotic as it is not just about something as detached or dualistic as "an idea". A sign must be related to the material world for it to be actually a causal entity. Symbols must be grounded. Entropy must be expended, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the mother of all causality.

So people conventionally want to draw a strict line between physics and information, matter and mind, when it come to talking about reality. And clearly they are quite different classes of thing.

But if reality is defined in terms of being causal, and symbols are understood as being causal in this parasitic or pragmatic fashion, then - invoking the overall reality of the second law, the most universal of constraints - we can see how minds or ideas are also fully real as part of the world's complex causal being.

The error here is to suppose that uniqueness is an inherent property of every particular. It's not. There's nothing in 'grass-green' that says anything about uniqueness. The uniqueness-as-a-universal that you are thinking of is simply a consequent, and the uniqueness of this consequent is a further different consequent from the original consequent.

Quoting apokrisis

Although we can then also tighten the definition of real when it comes to the symbolic or semiotic as it is not just about something as detached or dualistic as "an idea". A sign must be related to the material world for it to be actually a causal entity. Symbols must be grounded. Entropy must be expended, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the mother of all causality.

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always.

The relations between forms, ideas, laws, and particulars are analogous to the relationships between formal and material causes. The material cause of a statue is the marble and the hammer-blows of the sculptor, but the formal cause is the idea that the artists is attempting to realise*. Likewise laws and principles are causal in the sense that the provide the matrices of possibility along which things tend to unfold, but they are not causal in the sense that efficient or material causes are. So your description of what is real being 'entities with causal potency' is still physicalist.

The point about scholastic realism (i.e. acceptance of universals) is that it provides a connective principle, a telos, which has on the whole been lost to modern thought:

Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble.

It is precisely the absence of that which has given rise to the notion of life being the fortuitous combination of elements which just happens to take the forms it does, in service of the only measurable outcome, which is proliferation (and ultimately 'heat death', right?) But the idea that this happens for any reason is scornfully dismissed on the grounds of it being 'antiquated thinking', in the same category as the Aristotelean physics which Galileo so successfully demolished. Reason in the sense of telos is itself treated as a kind of superstitious relic - the only real reasons are 'antecedent factors', the chain of material causation grounded in physical laws.

----------------------------------

*That's not to say that I believe Aristotelean metaphysics are the final word but the categories of thought and of causes are indispensable, and the loss of them disastrous.

Quoting Wayfarer

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always.

And better yet, it is not theistic mumbo-jumbo but testable hypothesis!

Divine will is capricious. God can forgive you or smite you. And either will be claimed as good evidence of His causal reality.

But thermodynamics is counterfactual. You can prove it wrong by filing your patent for a perpetual motion machine.

Quoting Wayfarer

Likewise laws and principles are causal in the sense that the provide the matrices of possibility along which things tend to unfold, but they are not causal in the sense that efficient or material causes are. So your description of what is real being 'entities with causal potency' is still physicalist.

I've already said often enough I take a "constraints and freedoms" approach to causality. So that combines top-down and bottom-up causes in the one whole - the formal and material causes of being.

Quoting Wayfarer

The point about scholastic realism (i.e. acceptance of universals) is that it provides a connective principle, a telos, which has on the whole been lost to modern thought:

Yep.

So I take it that you are just agreeing with me then? But for some reason, you don't want to accept the telos that science has discovered - entropification?

If your divine will could show itself more clearly, more consistently, then we might believe in it with more confidence. Until then, let's stick to what we are finding written into the fabric of nature everywhere.

Quoting apokrisis

But thermodynamics is counterfactual. You can prove it wrong by filing your patent for a perpetual motion machine.

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine.

Reply to Wayfarer

I agree with what you say; I would not claim such things are not real. I just want to say that they do not "have being" or exist, in line with what I said in the post your were responding to.

Such fine distinctions are always going to be, at least to some degree, terminological issues. You may have a different conception of what 'being' means than I do. :)

Quoting apokrisis

A gas is vague possibility. Particles are not in interaction. A liquid is a collection of events. Some kind of organisation arises as every particle has some individual interaction with other passing particles. Then a solid is the emergence of a global rigid order that puts every particle into a final entropy-minimising state of organisation.

I would then put universals prior to particulars. Universals are more vague than particulars. They are what particulars are made up through the instantiation relation or what have you.

Quoting John

No, it means that whatever exists is an expression, or instantiation, of universals.

Yet is this not what universalists believe? That particulars instantiate universals? Properties are just ways things are, and these ways are universals. Repetitive patterns.

Quoting John

I would agree that they are real apart from their instantiations, but I would not agree that they "have Being", because I think 'to be' is coterminous with 'to exist'. Any alternative to this seems incoherent to me. Consider this; a thought, an imagining, or a feeling is real but it does not exist and is not a be-ing.

I would have said that thoughts exist but are not real, as realism typically is about an external reality beyond the mind.

Quoting Terrapin Station

At any rate, we're denying that there's somehow literally one (real) thing that is identically, multiply instantiated in two different entites.

Right, so all the processing power of similarity gets re-located to the mind. The external world is just some amorphous deserted blob and it's cut up and structured by the power of the mind.

The problem with this that I see is that it is difficult to understand how and why the mind "separated" itself from the rest of reality.

It is also impossible for me to understand why we have different concepts to begin with, if universals do not exist. The mind presumably originated from the rest of the world in some sense. It is causally connected to the world. What makes us recognize round from triangular is not the going-ons in our heads but the actual structure of the two objects in the world that we interact with.

So instead of the mind molding reality, it is the rest of reality that molds the mind. In fact this is basically the Aristotelian conception of the soul.

Quoting apokrisis

And better yet, it is not theistic mumbo-jumbo but testable hypothesis!

Theology doesn't try to be a science, because it's subject matter isn't scientific.

Quoting apokrisis

If your divine will could show itself more clearly, more consistently, then we might believe in it with more confidence. Until then, let's stick to what we are finding written into the fabric of nature everywhere.

Natural theology is all about attempting to show the necessity or probability of theism by general observations of the world at large.

Quoting Wayfarer

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine

Exactly. There is the counterfactual hypothesis. And where does the evidence currently stand?

"Dark energy" is telling us that there is only a one way ticket to the heat death, no eternal recurrence. And even most cyclic models require the second law to be obeyed somehow. There are theorems that even a spawning multiverse can't be past eternal.

So science must conceive of other possibilities. Then reality tells us its answer.

Quoting John

Such fine distinctions are always going to be, at least to some degree, terminological issues.

Would you agree that talk of existence, being, or reality, is talk about causal potency? It is "stuff" that has an effect?

So the problem is that most want to confine the notion of causal being to material being. But it also seems reasonable to allow for formal being, or ideational being, or symbolic being - the other kinds of causal being that really do appear to act in the world?

Quoting John

... I would not claim such things are not real. I just want to say that they do not "have being" or exist ...

Late in his life (1908), Peirce wrote about "three Universes of Experience." The first "comprises all mere Ideas," everything "whose Being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person's faculty or impotence to represent it," such that "their Being consists in mere capability of getting thought, not in anybody's Actually thinking them." The second "is that of the Brute Actuality of things and facts," whose "Being consists in reactions against Brute forces." The third "comprises everything whose being consists in active power to establish connections between different objects ... its power of serving as intermediary between its Object and a Mind." Elsewhere he also characterized them as (1) ideal possibilities, (2) Matter and physical facts, and (3) Mind and minds, along with habits, laws, and (especially) continua.

For Peirce, the constituents of all three Universes are Real--"having Properties, i.e. characters sufficing to identify their subject, and possessing these whether they be anywise attributed to it by any single man or group of men, or not"--but only those in the second Universe exist. This is why the particular article that I am quoting here described an argument for the Reality of God--Ens necessarium, creator of all three Universes--rather than the existence of God. I continue to find this terminological distinction helpful in these kinds of discussions.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Universals are more vague than particulars.

Says who exactly?

If you are thinking that universals are ghostly forms or epiphenomenal ideas, then your claim is that they definitely don't exist. So they are not vaguely existent. They are sharply inexistent.

But if you are taking my approach, then universals and particulars are as real (or ideational) as each other.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Theology doesn't try to be a science, because it's subject matter isn't scientific.

So they don't both talk about the world and our place in it? What are you on about?

Quoting apokrisis

Says who exactly?

If you are thinking that universals are ghostly forms or epiphenomenal ideas, then your claim is that they definitely don't exist. So they are not vaguely existent. They are sharply inexistent.

But if you are taking my approach, then universals and particulars are as real (or ideational) as each other.

I am saying that without universals, particulars wouldn't exist. Particulars are made of universals. In the same way you might boot up MS Paint and use a few geometric templates to make a design.

Quoting apokrisis

So they don't both talk about the world and our place in it? What are you on about?

Science talks about the world. Theology talks about the divine and how it relates to the world and its residents.

Reply to apokrisis

I certainly acknowledge the causal efficacy of thoughts, feelings, institutions and so on, and their reality on account of that. But I do tend to think of being or existence in terms of tangible beings or existents that can exert tangible forces that work as efficient or material causes..

Quoting aletheist

I continue to find this terminological distinction helpful in these kinds of discussions.

I agree and I probably only diverge in that I equate being with existence and that I do not think being exhausts reality. I would say there is also spirit, and that it is on account of spirit that there can be final and formal causation, and beauty, goodness and truth as well.

Reply to John So substance dualism then. And yet Aristotle did such a good job of deconstructing the very notion of substantial being. :)

Quoting darthbarracuda

I would have said that thoughts exist but are not real, as realism typically is about an external reality beyond the mind.

The way I conceive reality is not in contradistinction to the imaginary. For me the imaginary is simply real in a different way than material existence. The imaginary is thus real, but it does not exist. So, it seems that my conception is diametrically opposed to yours.

Reply to apokrisis

No, I don't believe in substances of any kind and nor am I a monist, dualist or pluralist of any kind. You may find it inconvenient to be unable to fit me into a box, but I can't help that. >:)

Reply to John If you tell me that: "I do tend to think of being or existence in terms of tangible beings or existents that can exert tangible forces that work as efficient or material causes", then the box fits you mighty well.

If you find the label of substance dualism inconvenient, you will have to explain why in light of what you wrote.

Reply to apokrisis

"Tangible" or "material" simply means tangible to human percipients. The spiritual is real insofar as it is experienced. The material exists insofar as it is experienced as such.

I have made no claim of a substantive existence beyond that.

Reply to John it is still an implicit duality.

Quoting John

I agree and I probably only diverge in that I equate being with existence and that I do not think being exhausts reality. I would say there is also spirit ...

Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist.

Quoting John

... and that it is on account of spirit that there can be final and formal causation, and beauty, goodness and truth as well.

Peirce held that final and formal causation are also manifestations of Thirdness, while beauty, goodness, and truth are the proper ends of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness), respectively; i.e., the subject matter of the normative sciences, which are esthetics, ethics, and logic (semeiotic).

Reply to Wayfarer

Sure, but it's a duality of kinds of experience. That there are these kinds of experience I think is simply irrefutable. But we don't need to, and I believe are not justified in, drawing any metaphysical kinds of conclusions from the fact of the different kinds of experience.

Quoting aletheist

Are you suggesting that spirit is somehow not being? Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist.

That's right, I don't think spirit is rightly thought of as any kind of being.

Quoting aletheist

Peirce held that final and formal causation are also manifestations of Thirdness, while beauty, goodness, and truth are the proper ends of feeling (Firstness), action (Secondness), and thought (Thirdness), respectively; i.e., the subject matter of the normative sciences, which are esthetics, ethics, and logic (semeiotic).

I don't think that beauty, goodness and truth are rightly thought of as the "subject matters" of aesthetics, ethics and logic, but as the foundations of those disciplines, whose real subject matters are our judgements of beauty, goodness and truth. Beauty, goodness and truth are unanalyzable and so cannot be the subject matters of discursive inquiry, rather they respectively make the different kinds of discursive inquiry associated with them possible and so must simply be presupposed, in my view.

Quoting John

Sure, but it's a duality of kinds of experience. That there are these kinds of experience I think is simply irrefutable. But we don't need to, and I believe are not justified in, drawing any metaphysical kinds of conclusions from the fact of the different kinds of experience.

The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it?

Quoting aletheist

Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist.

I'm interested in any philosophies that make this kind of distinction.

Quoting Wayfarer

The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it?

But, I have drawn the important distinction between the two kinds of experience. It is further metaphysical conclusions I am refusing to draw. I think "the point of any philosophy" is the inquiry as to how to best live, philosophy is primarily ethical; and I don't believe metaphysics is required for that inquiry at all. Also, many modern philosophers have eschewed the kind of traditional metaphysics you seem to be saying is the point of any philosophy, among whom are arguably four of the most important: Kant, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Heidegger.

I have no sympathy with the positivists at all, so I don't what you had in mind with that comment.

Reply to John If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that they're significant, but if there's an entire domain of such experiences which seems not to be known to science, then what is its basis?

I think the answer has to be some form of dualism. And it doesn't have to be traditional or traditionalist for its own sake. I think Critique of Pure Reason is the most important metaphysical text of our day and I would hope not to be in conflict with it.

Quoting John

"Tangible" or "material" simply means tangible to human percipients. The spiritual is real insofar as it is experienced. The material exists insofar as it is experienced as such.

However, the 'experience of the material' can be made subject to quantitative analysis. But where is that kind of objectivity in respect of spiritual experience? There seems a noticeable lack of unanimity about such matters in the history of religion and philosophy,

Quoting Wayfarer

If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that they're significant, but if there's an entire domain of such experiences which seems not to be known to science, then what is its basis?

There is no "object of knowledge" of spiritual experience. The knowing is direct ; the experience is the knowing. Think about love; what is the object of the experience of love? You might say "the beloved", but I would say that the experience, not the object of the experience, of love is the beloved; the two are not separate.

Science can only deal with objectified experience. This is where the experience is broken up, such that part of it is externalized and then treated as something to be analyzed and modeled mathematically or in terms of mechanical causality. This is not possible with spiritual experience of any kind, whether it be of the most everyday, or of the most esoteric, kind. Really all experience is spiritual; it is only on reflection that it is fractured into external and internal, subjective and objective. Every moment of your life is spiritual experience.

Quoting Wayfarer

However, the 'experience of the material' can be made subject to quantitative analysis. But where is that kind of objectivity in respect of spiritual experience? There seems a noticeable lack of unanimity about such matters in the history of religion and philosophy,

Yes, I think it is done as I explained above. There is no such "objectivity" when it comes to spiritual experience. Our experience is both finite and infinite. It is finite insofar as it is reflected upon, and broken down into components to be modeled and operated upon. It is infinite insofar as it is also completely beyond any such fracturing, modeling and operating. The finite is nature, as conceived by science, and the infinite is spirit. The finite is unlimited possibility, where no possibility is ever really actualized, because others always come immediately to take their place, and thus no certainty is ever possible. The infinite is eternal mystery, where no possibility could ever be great enough, and wherein certainty can be found in unknowing. The infinite mystery is discovered in faith, and the finite world of endless possibility is discovered in belief. At least that is my tentative understanding at the moment.

Reply to John I'm quite in agreement with the intuition, but I think in the context of philosophy, something something else needs to be said, which is what I have been labouring to say in this thread.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think Critique of Pure Reason is the most important metaphysical text of our day and I would hope not to be in conflict with it.

I think Kant rejects the idea that traditional metaphysics is possible. It was traditionally understood that metaphysical truths could be arrived at by pure reason. Kant showed just why that is not possible. He established the limits of pure reason to make way for practical reason, or faith. According to Kant, we are entitled to believe in God, immortality and freedom only on account of the fact that we experience ourselves to be morally responsible. Morally responsibility is of the very highest practical importance, and it is on account of that that we are entitled to believe.

But where I diverge from Kant is that he did not allow for moral intuition or spiritual experience. But it's not that I think we believe on account of spiritual experience; I think of it the other way around; we have spiritual experience because we believe. But believing in this sense is not believing in the sense of believing some proposition or other. It is more like a disposition than it is like believing anything. It is faith, and faith is the disposition of being open to the relationship between Man and God; it is the necessary disposition of the relationship between your Self and your God.

This aspect of faith as openness rather than as propositional belief is also implicit in a Buddhist text I read some years ago called The Awakening of Faith by Asvaghosa

Reply to Wayfarer

I can't imagine in the context of philosophy for whose benefit something else needs to be said, to be honest. I think spiritual intuition and the persuasiveness of its rhetoric is all too little regarded in philosophy these days.

The metaphysics Kant criticized were those of his predecessors and indeed the sholastic etc. But i think Kant was still recognisably part of a tradition going back to Plato. He adopted the Aristotelean categories and didn't reject them wholesale. Not that Plato was infallible, and I don't think the basic idea of 'anamnesis' holds up at all, with respect to empirical knowledge - that a subject could recall specific information about actual tasks by remembering them. Although I sometimes think that the goal of anamnesis is the recall of liberative knowledge, not knowledge of particulars, and the 'integral vision' that goes with it.

I respect the Ashvagosha text, that is a fundamental textbook of Mahayana. But what interests me in this topic is precisely the neglected wisdom of Western philosophy in particular. But I also agree that Kant didn't sufficiently recognise spiritual intuition. Interesting comment on that from Eric Reitan:

Kant calls the world of appearances “empirical reality”—it is real in the sense that it’s a given, something we have to come to grips with. But even though space and time are therefore “empirically real,” they are not for Kant a feature of things as they are in themselves apart from our experience. They are, rather, the necessary form in which our faculties of perception present objects to us in experience. Kant captures this idea by saying that space and time, while empirically real, are transcendentally ideal. That is, they are a real part of the empirical world (the world of phenomena) but not of the noumena that lie behind or beyond the empirical world.

If all of this is correct, then “ultimate” reality is unknowable. And, as I pointed out in the last post, this implication of Kant’s thought was not one that others were prepared simply to accept. In the intellectual generation immediately following Kant, there were two towering figures in philosophy and theology who, each in his own way, sought a pathway beyond the wall of unknowability that Kant had erected around the noumenal.

I’m speaking, of course, of Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both thought that Kant had missed something important—namely, that the self which experiences the world is also a part of the world it is experiencing. Rather than there being this sharp divide between the experiencing subject and things-in-themselves, with phenomena emerging at the point of interface, the experiencing subject is a thing-in-itself. It is one of the noumena—or, put another way, the self that experiences the world is part of the ultimate reality that lies behind experience. ...

...consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.

Pretty much my belief exactly - interesting that Schleiermacher is a major figure in what is called 'liberal theology'.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Right, so all the processing power of similarity gets re-located to the mind. The external world is just some amorphous deserted blob and it's cut up and structured by the power of the mind.

It's in no way saying anything like that. Be serious if you want to understand this stuff rather than responding like you're in a political forum and you want to polemically exaggerate your opponent with the aim of gaining votes/followers. It's not saying that anything is amorphous, "deserted," etc. ALL that it's denying is that there are universals that exist extramentally as abstract existents that particulars then somehow partake of so that the universals are identically instantiated in at least two different particulars.

Re how universals wind up created by our minds, that happens simply because it's necessary for our survival as creatures (with our particular characteristics/requirements) in a world where a lot of stuff can wind up killing us. We need to be able to act and react quickly to(wards) various things we encounter. Creating conceptual abstractions, where we ignore details of difference and instead lump things together as common kinds, allows us to act and react quickly so that we can survive to procreate. Those conceptual abstractions into common kinds are what universals are.

Reply to Terrapin Station So, instead of a deserted blob, it's a bunch of particulars.

But what is the relationship between particulars such that some particulars are more similar than others. We conceptualize because the world can be conceptualized, because of similarity.

The challenge for nominalism is accounting for similarity without falling back into universals.

Quoting Wayfarer

..consider how Schleiermacher dealt with the...conundrum--that is, with fact that even if I am a noumenal self, the self as I appear to myself may not be all that similar to what I am in myself. Schleiermacher dealt with this conundrum by privileging a distinct mode of self-consciousness, one in which all attempts to make the self into an object of consciousness—that is, all attempts to come to know the self—are set aside. When the self is made an object of study it becomes a phenomenon, and as such is divorced from the noumenal self. But it is possible to simply be—to become quiescent, if you will, and simply be what one is rather than attempt to know what one is.

And in this place of cognitive stillness, one discovers in a direct experiential way an ultimate reality that cannot be conceptualized or made into an object of study. This is the domain of mystical experience—and even though it is ineffable (that is, even if it cannot be made into an object of knowledge) it brings with it a kind of insight or enlightenment.


Pretty much my belief exactly - interesting that Schleiermacher is a major figure in what is called 'liberal theology'.

Yes, this seems close to what I mean by spiritual intuition. For the one who has it the truth is without question. There are no rational arguments to be marshalled from that experience, so to persuade others rhetoric is the tool of choice.

I don't know anything much about Schleiermacher and liberal theology.

Reply to John But the discussion is about universals so we ought not to divert it into mystical theology. I'm interested in what Terrapin Station has to say about it.

Quoting Wayfarer

Peirce characterized spirit as "disembodied mind," and hence Thirdness; it is real and has being, but (strictly speaking) does not exist. — aletheist


I'm interested in any philosophies that make this kind of distinction.

Perhaps another way of thinking about the distinction between the real and being and existence is to say that spirit does not have being or existence it is being or existence. But there are always going to be anomalies that emerge within any use of terminology; language is not perfectly consistent it seems.

Reply to Wayfarer

Fair enough. I don't think appeals to evolution explain anything beyond the metamorphoses of biological forms.

Apo and Streetlight in a similar thread to this months ago said that everything starts off the same, and then because of symmetry breaking and what not early on, things differentiate.

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining.

Is that convincing? How would a proponent of universals respond?

I don't see how you can deny universals, and still have physical principles. The point about a physical principle is that it is universally applicable to all kinds of particulars. That is at the very basis of science itself - you have to be able to make predictions, on the basis of principles, that certain outcomes will or won't be observed. So what are those principles, if not universals?

Now, if you think about the way principles 'exist', it might help cast light. Such thing as 'the principle of flammability' (i.e. the ability of a material to catch fire) doesn't exist by itself. You can't go out and observe such a principle as a disembodied or free-floating thing. Yet it is obviously applicable to all kinds of materials, and if you want to create a basic science of fire-lighting, then you classify materials as to whether they're flammable or not; there are substances that catch fire, and those that don't.

Examples of that kind could be multiplied indefinitel. On a more general level again, the very rules that are used to even discuss or explain anything, make use of the basic observations of 'like', 'unlike', 'similar to', and so on. In some ways, then, they are 'the rules of thought'; but if those rules didn't correspond to anything in reality, then no science would be possible, so you can't say they are purely internal to the mind. (Think of the 'synthetic a priori' proposition.)

The defense I gave for universals above in this thread still stands, i.e. that by understanding the relationship of universals and particulars, one is able to arrive at an holistic understanding which unites formal, final and material causes.

Reply to Marchesk
Peirce called himself an "extreme scholastic realist" and eventually developed a cosmology that, at least from where I sit, explains both similarity and difference. The hierarchy of Being involves an infinite continuum (Thirdness) of indefinite possibilities (Firstness), only some of which are actualized as determinate individuals (Secondness). The sequence of events in each case consists of spontaneity (Firstness) followed by reaction (Secondness) and then habit-taking (Thirdness). The evolution of states is from complete chaos (Firstness) in the infinite past, through this very process (Thirdness) at any assignable time, to complete regularity (Secondness) in the infinite future.

Quoting John

Beauty, goodness and truth are unanalyzable and so cannot be the subject matters of discursive inquiry, rather they respectively make the different kinds of discursive inquiry associated with them possible and so must simply be presupposed, in my view.

I think that Platonic dialectics demonstrate that these things are analyzable. What he did was to analyze the different ways in which each of the different words is used, in an effort to determine the thing referred to by the word.

Quoting Marchesk

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining.

Yep. But I would really call universals "habits of individuation". So the stress is on being as a process. Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint. And viewed that way, differentiation becomes much less of an issue. Producing individuated being is simply what a universal process does. Symmetry breaking is the deal itself.

This is why the true "metaphysical-strength" universals would be dynamical principles - a highly general "truth" of any physical action like the least action principle or, indeed, universality (the onset of chaos).

I just happen to have started reading Adrian Bejan's latest popularisation of his constructal theory - The Physics of Life ... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/physics-evolution-life-constructal-law-bejan-ngbooktalk/

So when people talk about universals or ideals, they are normally thinking that every thing has some perfect form - there exists the Platonic cat or coffee mug. Which is of course rather silly. Or they think about the number three or the equilateral triangle.

But these tend to be static conceptions of ideal substances. Catness exists as a eternal essence.

Instead, a modern scientific take on universals (which goes all the way back to Anaximander) would see that we are really talking about the regularities that "must" emerge to regulate any material flow. So we are talking about those deep physical principles like the least action principle - if every path is free to be taken, then even so, a flow will wind up taking the path that is in some measurable sense the most efficient possible way of connecting A to B.

This truly universal way of looking at universals can then be applied to cats and cups as rather more contingent regularities of nature. Cats and cups are still processes - material flows. But they reflect a more specific history of such flows - that is, genetically or culturally constrained flows.

Then mathematical ideals, like numbers and shapes, can be seen as expressions of things like the least action principle.

A perfect triangle is both a broken symmetry in being some particular kind of shape (three cornered polygon), but also "special" in being the most symmetric example of a three cornered polygon. It both reduces triangle-ness to its least effort state - three equal sides producing maximum compactness. And also then stands as the essence, the ideal, against which all other triangles have higher entropy/greater imperfection.

So universals only really start to make physical sense when they are seen as basic dynamical principles - the fundamental rules for organising flows (ie: material symmetry breakings).

And then you can build up from those fundamentals to also explain cats and cups as informationally-constrained material flows. They are genetically or culturally encoded habits of individuation that thus both produce something universal - cats and cups - while also producing those cats and cups in their permissable variety.

Quoting apokrisis

Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint.

But, you can't say that any of the above really explains universals, can you? Were there not such constants as Planck's constant and so on, then there would be no 'symmetry-breaking' in the first place, would there?

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

I think that Platonic dialectics demonstrate that these things are analyzable. What he did was to analyze the different ways in which each of the different words is used, in an effort to determine the thing referred to by the word.

In the part of the passage you quoted from but left out I said pretty much what you said here: that it is not beauty, goodness and truth, but our judgments of them (the ways we use the words) that are analyzable:


Quoting John

I don't think that beauty, goodness and truth are rightly thought of as the "subject matters" of aesthetics, ethics and logic, but as the foundations of those disciplines, whose real subject matters are our judgements of beauty, goodness and truth.

Quoting Wayfarer

Were there not such constants as Planck's constant and so on, then there would be no 'symmetry-breaking' in the first place, would there?

Constants emerge as the rate limit on self-optimising flows. So they describe the regularities that a process of symmetry breaking creates. They don't cause the action. They are a measure of it.

Reply to John But I am saying the opposite of that, that we can analyze these things for what they are, independent of our judgements. You put beauty in the eye of the beholder, but do you really believe that it is simply by judging something as true, that it actually is true?

Quoting Terrapin Station

It's in no way saying anything like that. Be serious if you want to understand this stuff rather than responding like you're in a political forum and you want to polemically exaggerate your opponent with the aim of gaining votes/followers. It's not saying that anything is amorphous, "deserted," etc.

I'm not being polemical, Quine was a hardcore nominalist and called his own system an amorphous desert.

Quoting Terrapin Station

ALL that it's denying is that there are universals that exist extramentally as abstract existents that particulars then somehow partake of so that the universals are identically instantiated in at least two different particulars.

Right, so like I said, without universals the extramental world is a mish-mash of wholly unique particulars with no actual "sharing" relation at all. The world is overflowing with unique particulars everywhere you look.

Quoting Terrapin Station

Creating conceptual abstractions, where we ignore details of difference and instead lump things together as common kinds, allows us to act and react quickly so that we can survive to procreate. Those conceptual abstractions into common kinds are what universals are.

That is plausible, but what I do not find to be plausible is that, in a world utterly void of universals, the mind pops up with universals. It would require a sort of dualism in which the mind is actually not part of the rest of the world at all but separated from it.

And I still don't understand how nominalism gets around the problem of why we even clump things together in the first place. If universals do not exist extra-mentally, then how do we even begin to clump things together? Why see Blue1 similar to Blue2 but not similar to Red3? What differentiates the Blues from the Reds?

Quoting Marchesk

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining.

Is that convincing? How would a proponent of universals respond?

Yes, well I had brought this point up a long while back, how nominalism not only struggles to explain why things are similar but why they are different as well. i.e. why can we discriminate between things if they are not "actually" similar to each other in virtue of sharing a property.

However I think similarity is a more pressing issue anyway. The nominalist could simply say that two things are different because they have different particular properties. Fine, the universalist would say the same thing except they would be universals not particulars.

Quoting apokrisis

Constants emerge as the rate limit on self-optimising flows. So they describe the regularities that a process of symmetry breaking creates. They don't cause the action. They are a measure of it.

Yet talk of rates, limits, self-optimization, flows, regularities, symmetries, all that stuff is still referring to something. A graph without numbers is not a graph. Language cannot exist without syntax. You reject abstract Platonic ideals but also seem to want "things" that are not concrete objects like tables and rhinos and whatnot. Are they virtual? Are they "semi-real"? Are they "vague"? In the beginning, there was nothing - but there technically was something, it just wasn't SOMETHING but a different sort of something entirely. Which, to the uninitiated, comes across either as bogus or esotericism.

I keep running into this problem when I read what you write: it seems to me that you attempt to explain things like universals in an ontic and intra-worldly, scientific manner, when it's that these very observations and theories hold the same regardless of what metaphysical position you hold. Nominalism won't change the Big Bang theory at all. Presentism is compatible with special relativity despite endurantism being a common trope. Idealism accounts for everything we know, just without an unknowable external world. Metaphysical theories of these types are empirically transparent.

Figuring out whether or not universals exist is not like finding a particle or uncovering the history of the cosmos. Science already uses properties all the time in its theorizing. What we want to know is that properties themselves are without a regress into vagueness. We want to know how we ought to see properties as. We already know that stability occurs and habits emerge, but nominalism doesn't deny this. It simply denies that these habits are actually repeatable entities that are multiply instantiated.

As it stands I do believe that there really shouldn't be a problem of universals, or at least a problem of similarity/difference. Universals are inevitable and I think should be fairly obvious especially when one sees just how clunky nominalist positions tend to be. The universalist is much more flexible as it recognizes the existence of both universals and particulars, while the nominalist strictly forbids the existence of universals. The problem shouldn't be on the existence of universals but the nature of universals themselves, i.e. abstract transcendentals vs immanents or something else.

Quoting Terrapin Station

Re how universals wind up created by our minds, that happens simply because it's necessary for our survival as creatures (with our particular characteristics/requirements) in a world where a lot of stuff can wind up killing us. We need to be able to act and react quickly to(wards) various things we encounter. Creating conceptual abstractions, where we ignore details of difference and instead lump things together as common kinds, allows us to act and react quickly so that we can survive to procreate. Those conceptual abstractions into common kinds are what universals are.

So, a Darwinist account of order. I guess that would be passed without comment by a lot of people, but I am dubious in the extreme. This is because it undermines the sovereign nature of reason - i.e. reason ought to be respected, not because it's ancillary to the process of procreation, but because what it reveals is necessarily true. Whereas here, reason is simply an adaption - like a peacock's tail, it improves the odds of passing on your little bundle of protoplasm - and if, as a byproduct, you happen to be able to figure out the age of the universe, then so much the better, eh?

Of course, this is a large argument in its own right, but it is discussed in such essays as Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, from his book The Last Word. It is also at issue in Alvin Plantinga's 'evolutionary argument against naturalism'. And, last but not least, it is the subject of a pretty radical theory by Donald Hoffman (see The Case Against Reality), which argues, apparently without much sense of irony, very much along the lines that you're suggesting, to come to the radical conclusion that our notion of reality is basically an illusory byproduct of the struggle for survival.

Quoting apokrisis

Constants emerge as the rate limit on self-optimising flows

But there has to be order for anything to emerge whatever. That is the basic lesson of the 'six fundamental constants' types of books. Given order, then something can emerge - triangles will do as an example - but I don't think you're presenting why order should emerge. Nor would I expect an explanation of that, I don't think it is something that can be explained. Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind.

Quoting darthbarracuda

The problem shouldn't be on the existence of universals but the nature of universals themselves, i.e. abstract transcendentals vs immanents or something else.

You might find Kelly Ross' essay on Ontological Undecidability relevant.

Quoting Wayfarer

Whereas here, reason is simply an adaption - like a peacock's tail, it improves the odds of passing on your little bundle of protoplasm - and if, as a byproduct, you happen to be able to figure out the age of the universe, then so much the better, eh?

At the same time, however, we aren't perfect reasoners and we aren't objective evaluators of the world. We're filled with biases and fallacious thinking.

So I think the more "reasonable" thing to believe, in which I mean "most likely", is that the universe has a structure of repetition, and that this structure can be gradually re-modelled within our own minds. Genuine perfect correspondence is bullshit expect for some of the most basic and commonly-encountered things. Yet through a process of counterfactual reasoning and tentative speculation we can come to know things outside of our basic experience. And we can know we're on the right track because it will work, just as we would expect from an evolutionary perspective. There's no inherent need for correspondence truth in the wild, you only need what works. And what works may or may not be correspondence. However now that we have evolved further, we can reflect and realize all this.

But then there's also theories of knowledge which see Knowledge as a natural kind in-itself. Thus when we have knowledge, we actually HAVE knowledge.

Quoting darthbarracuda

At the same time, however, we aren't perfect reasoners and we aren't objective evaluators of the world. We're filled with biases and fallacious thinking.

But I think the kinds of explanations that can be expected of a biological theory of speciation - that is what evolution is - are different in kind to the sorts of questions that are subject of this discussion.

Just to even converse, to agree or to disagree, requires the ability to abstract, to say that 'this is like that' or 'this means that'. Many seem to assume that naturallly this is something that can be understood in terms of evolutionary theory - as if such abilities are foreshadowed by the primitive forms of communication in other animals. And that these abilities are then honed by evolution to the point we now see in h. sapiens, as if it's a continuum.

I think it's really lazy thinking and that there is a fundamental discontinuity that is reached at the point where humans are capable of abstract reasoning and language. It is at precisely that point, where the biological accounts loose their cogency and start to be missapplied to create an illusion of understanding something that really isn't at all well understood. These ideas - the nature of universals, logic, reason, and the like - aren't a highly refined version of bee-signalling or bird-calling. It is at this point where the 'rational animal' is able to see into a different ontological level than animals per se.

Quoting Wayfarer

Given order, then something can emerge - triangles will do as an example - but I don't think you're presenting why order should emerge. Nor would I expect an explanation of that, I don't think it is something that can be explained. Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind.

But this is just wrong - both at the level of facts and definitions. The whole point of naturalism is to abjure transcendent explanations such that the universe can be explained immanently, on it's own grounds, without appeal to the super-natural. The entire idea is not to 'take anything for granted', including and especially 'order'. And this is cashed out in the actual science of things, which, since the discovery of far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics in the mid to late twentieth century, has done pretty much done nothing but demonstrate time and time again, in different fields across different domains, exactly how 'order arises from chaos'.

You attempt to invoke a 'difference in kind' is simply a projection aimed at securing a little piece of the divine for yourself by means of sheer fiat; it exists only as an imaginary line to stave off the real encroachment of naturalism upon a sphere you simply don't want it to cross. But there's no logical reason to draw any such line, except as a theological desideratum motivated more by fear than by facts.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think it's really lazy thinking and that there is a fundamental discontinuity that is reached at the point where humans are capable of abstract reasoning and language. It is at precisely that point, where the biological accounts loose their cogency and start to be missapplied to create an illusion of understanding something that really isn't at all well understood. These ideas - the nature of universals, logic, reason, and the like - aren't a highly refined version of bee-signalling or bird-calling. It is at this point where the 'rational animal' is able to see into a different ontological level than animals per se.

Although I sort of agree with the sentiment I can't help but point out the irony of you claiming reason is not equivalent to bird-calling, yet also claim that this skewed view of reason is the product of something not-too-dissimilar to bird-calling. >:O

Materialism is a foolish position.

Quoting StreetlightX

he whole point of naturalism is to abjure transcendent explanations such that the universe can be explained immanently, on it's own grounds, without appeal to the super-natural.

Well, I don't think it succeeds in so doing, I think it looks a lot less likely to be able to do that now, than it did at the beginning of the 20th Century. I mean, have a look into all the interminable debates on the 'many worlds interpretation' - there you have version of 'naturalism' that has to invoke the extravaganza of infinite parallel worlds, just in order to preserve the purported reality of the objects of observation.

StreetlightX:But there's no logical reason to draw any such line, except as a theological desideratum motivated more by fear than by facts.

That argument cuts both ways.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Although I sort of agree with the sentiment I can't help but point out the irony of you claiming reason is not equivalent to bird-calling, yet also claim that this skewed view of reason is the product of something not-too-dissimilar to bird-calling. >:O

Don't understand what you mean. To be clear, I certainly believe h. sapiens is the product of evolution, when the question is viewed through the perspective of biology; but that this doesn't entail that reason itself has an obvious biological explanation. I'm not referring to detailed evolutionary accounts of langauge, reason, and the like, which I'm sure have considerable weight, but the reductionist account of reason which does portray it simply in the terms of the 'peacock tail'.

Quoting Wayfarer

Well, I don't think it succeeds in so doing, I think it looks a lot less likely to be able to do that now, than it did at the beginning of the 20th Century. I mean, have a look into all the interminable debates on the 'many worlds interpretation' - there you have version of 'naturalism' that has to invoke infinite parallel dimensions, in order to preserve the purported reality of the objects of observation.

Frankly, the 'interminable debates' on quantum theory - itself a tiny sliver of the unquantifiable success of naturalist approaches to nature - has got nothing on the millennia of theological wrangling over the nature of God. If the less-than-century year old debate over this disqualifies naturalism as a viable position, then theology ought to be once and for all confined not simply to the trashcan of history but it's landfill.

Quoting StreetlightX

If the less-than-century year old debate over this disqualifies naturalism as a viable position, then theology ought to be once and for all confined not simply to the trashcan of history but it's landfill.

I'm not so sure. Theology and metaphysics generally don't try to be "sciences" although their practitioners sometimes like to play dress-up and pretend they're scientists of the divine or ontological scientists or what have you.

We expect results from science. When we don't get them, it's probably because we screwed up somewhere and need to re-assess the situation.

We don't necessarily expect results from theology or metaphysics. These two disciplines, in my opinion, are not deserving of the title "discipline" but are nevertheless important (at least the latter is, not sure about theology as I'm leaning towards atheism) as speculative attempts at understanding.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said? The way we use the words reflects what we think about them, that is how we judge them to be in our lives. Can you think of any other way to analyze them?

Quoting darthbarracuda

Yet talk of rates, limits, self-optimization, flows, regularities, symmetries, all that stuff is still referring to something.

That's right. That's why I am arguing against nominalism.

Quoting darthbarracuda

What we want to know is that properties themselves are without a regress into vagueness.

But how do properties emerge into crisp being if vague being isn't what they are leaving behind?

The problem with your kind of ontology is that it can't explain existence as a causal development. Existence is just some dumb brute fact. Or maybe God invented it.

My approach takes the evidence that existence evolves seriously.

Quoting darthbarracuda

We already know that stability occurs and habits emerge, but nominalism doesn't deny this. It simply denies that these habits are actually repeatable entities that are multiply instantiated.

Shame that hypothesis doesn't fit the facts then. The evidence that the cosmos keeps spitting out the same entities, the same patterns, can be seen everywhere we look. (Have you heard of fractals or powerlaws?)

Quoting darthbarracuda

The problem shouldn't be on the existence of universals but the nature of universals themselves, i.e. abstract transcendentals vs immanents or something else.

So why the problem when I take something like universals to be real, and then offer a modern infodynamic account?

Quoting Wayfarer

But there has to be order for anything to emerge whatever.

Order is explained within thermodynamics as the negentropic investment that is made to increase the production of entropy. So it is order that emerges and that allows there to actually be something - a dissipative flow.

Q: Why does expanding spacetime exist? A: To give the Big Bang something to spill all its heat into.

Quoting Wayfarer

Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind.

Where are you getting this definition of naturalism from? Clearly I'm talking about process philosophers like Peirce and Anaximander who cottoned on to the fact that in nature, order can emerge from disorder so long as it serves the global purpose of disordering.

Quoting John

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said?

The search for symmetry, equilibrium and the minimisation of uncertainty - the usual physical principles?

Quoting apokrisis

Clearly I'm talking about process philosophers like Peirce and Anaximander who cottoned on to the fact that in nature, order can emerge from disorder so long as it serves the global purpose of disordering.

From the various musings on the 'naturalness problem in physics' which is closely related to, or might be simply a perspective on, the 'fine-tuning problem'. That is, the universe has just those attributes that are required for stars, matter and living things to form. Those constants can't themselves be explained - hence the 'naturalness problem'.

And there has to be 'order' for there to be 'disorder'. If there were no order, then there could be no disorder.

Quoting Wayfarer

From the various musings on the 'naturalness problem in physics' which is closely related to, or might be simply a perspective on, the 'fine-tuning problem'. That is, the universe has just those attributes that are required for stars, matter and living things to form. Those constants can't themselves be explained - hence the 'naturalness problem'.

So you offer the kind of problems that bug a reductionist in answer to my holist position?

The reductionist issue here is that because they are only imagining a constructive or additive picture of causality, it seems "natural" that either every quantum contribution adds to infinity (as there is nothing to stop it), or else all quantum contributions should symmetrically cancel to nothing (as everything time you add anything, you have to add a plus and a minus value).

But my holist position is all about the production of definite reality through the suppression or constraint of vague possibility. And so it is now "natural" that you get left with some minimal residue. Variety is suppressed to the point of indifference - but still, that leaves some irreducible variety or quantum spontaneity.

It is like trying to reduce noise in analog electronics. You can minimise it but never eliminate it.

Sure, explaining constants is a big problem for reductionists. Explaining everything about boundary conditions is a big problem when you are determined to view existence solely in terms of bottom-up material and efficient cause - acts of construction.

But for the billionth time, my model of causality is Aristotelean - all four causes in play. And Aristoteleanism is the kind of metaphysical naturalism I'm talking about, not the very recent adoption of the term within particle physics.

Quoting Wayfarer

I don't see how you can deny universals, and still have physical principles. The point about a physical principle is that it is universally applicable to all kinds of particulars. That is at the very basis of science itself - you have to be able to make predictions, on the basis of principles, that certain outcomes will or won't be observed. So what are those principles, if not universals?

For one, you can see them simply as a brute fact about how particulars "behave." That might seem like a cop-out, but as it is, if we were to posit physical "principles" or laws as universals, and then continue on to say that somehow, particulars "engage" with those universals so that they're literally, identically instantiated by different particulars, the best anyone has at this point for filling out that "somehow" is that it's a brute fact. So it's the same thing except that the realist on universals is adding a couple incoherent (on my view) notions to their brute fact. (Those incoherent ideas being the notion of abstract existents with no particular location and the idea of anything being literally, identically instantiated in two different, discernible existents.)

Alternatively to that, some nominalists rather take the approach that physical laws are simply a way of thinking about the phenomena that we observe. That's not to posit the phenomena that we observe as having no similarities, but similarities are not identities of discernibles, and if you don't have identities (that is, literally, numerically the same thing) instantiated in discernibles, you don't have universals.

Reply to Marchesk

I don't think that's much of a challenge though, unless one simply doesn't understand what similarities are, and one wants to pretend to not be able to understand any explanations/"in other words" descriptions (such as "(family) resemblances") etc. of what similarities are.

What similarities are not are abstract existents with no location that are somehow literally, identically instantiated in discernible particulars. And as long as they're not that, they're not universals.

Quoting darthbarracuda

I'm not being polemical, Quine was a hardcore nominalist and called his own system an amorphous desert.

Okay, but "an amorphous dessert" isn't actually implied by nominalism.

Quoting darthbarracuda

That is plausible, but what I do not find to be plausible is that, in a world utterly void of universals, the mind pops up with universals

I don't really understand this comment because what you're saying is plausible is a description if universals being exclusively conceptual abstractions. So if that's plausible, it shouldn't be implausible that the mind pops up with universals in a world extramentally devoid of universals.

Minds do quite lot of things that only occur in minds by the way.

Quoting apokrisis

And Aristoteleanism is the kind of metaphysical naturalism I'm talking about, not the very recent adoption of the term within particle physics.

The question is, how much of Aristoteleanism remains without a 'first cause'? If you retain some notion of telos then indeed many of the issues around reductionism are ameliorated, but I can't see how to square that with the idea that life is really just a heat sink (or a way of maximising entropy), or for that matter with a lot of current thinking in evolutionary biology.

Aristotle's naturalism was not naturalist in today's sense, because it didn't seek to methodically exclude what we would now categorise as the supernatural (even if his conception of first cause was remote from what Christian theology would later make of it.)

Quoting Terrapin Station

For one, you can see [physical principles] simply as a brute fact about how particulars "behave."

They're not 'brute fact' insofar as they are only perceptible to reason. Only by reason could you arrive at the conception of the laws of motion. Sure, they may not be something that can be further explained, but I think the term 'brute fact' does no justice to the idea.

But in any case, these were not the subject of the medieval debates about universals - that all came later. It was more that the idea of universals was embedded in a particular 'domain of discourse' which provided a connection between reason and the 'four types of causation', via Aristotelean metaphysics. I am extending the idea of 'universals' to encompass a wider range than was understood by the scholastics - to generalise it to cover such things as natural numbers, laws, conventions, and the like. However I believe that is a valid interpretation of the basic idea.

However thanks to Dr Google I have found this felicitous paragraph which nicely congeals many of the subjects in this thread.

Peirce understood nominalism in the broad anti-realist sense usually attributed to William of Ockham, as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle's conception), and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency.

Review of Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism.

I appreciate that first, he sees materialism as a 'daughter of nominalism' (certainly true) and that second he recognises the distinction between reality and existence (which I have often laboured to make on the Forum). Further motivation to 'read more Pierce'.

Quoting Terrapin Station

don't think that's much of a challenge though, unless one simply doesn't understand what similarities are, and one wants to pretend to not be able to understand any explanations/"in other words" descriptions (such as "(family) resemblances") etc. of what similarities are.

So what are similarities? Every single electron in the universe is similar because it has the same mass and amount of charge. Mass is similar because it attracts by the same relationship, for all bodies of mass, across the entire cosmos. How does one account for such universalities in science?

An electron is an electron because it has certain properties that all electrons "share", or however you want to put that.

Quoting Wayfarer

The question is, how much of Aristoteleanism remains without a 'first cause'? If you retain some notion of telos then indeed many of the issues around reductionism are ameliorated, but I can't see how to square that with the idea that life is really just a heat sink (or a way of maximising entropy), or for that matter with a lot of current thinking in evolutionary biology.

It's the scholastics who need that first cause. And also some high flown purpose for human existence. So we can park those prejudices one side,

The supernatural is also excluded in the sense of an appeal to the external or transcendent. Naturalism is an ontic commitment to immanence or bootstrapping existence.

Quoting Wayfarer

Review of Pierce and the Threat of Nominalism Notre Dame Reviews.

Have you got some spellchecker that keeps insist on misspelling Peirce's name? (It rhymes with purse.)

Quoting apokrisis

And also some high flown purpose for human existence. So we can park those prejudices one side,

What you consider prejudice, I consider philosophy, and vice versa.

//ps// don't you like that quote about Peirce? I am trying to see if I can borrow that book.

Quoting darthbarracuda

We expect results from science. When we don't get them, it's probably because we screwed up somewhere and need to re-assess the situation.

We don't necessarily expect results from theology or metaphysics. These two disciplines, in my opinion, are not deserving of the title "discipline" but are nevertheless important (at least the latter is, not sure about theology as I'm leaning towards atheism) as speculative attempts at understanding.

I think it's important not to confuse or conflate science with naturalism. If the former refers to a series of methodologically constrained practises of explanatory construction, the latter simply says that our approach to the world ought to take place on grounds that don't appeal to extra-worldly sources or forces. It's possible, in the Quinian mode, to say that these are one and the same thing, but I think it is both possible and desirable to disentangle the two. One can be a speculative naturalist without, for all that, simply falling into the black hole of scientism.

So I don't have a problem with theology just because it is 'metaphysics and not science'. I do have a problem with sloppy distinctions that are illegitimately posed on some a priori, unargued for basis, as when science is somehow disqualified - by sheer power of fiat - from having anything of value to say about the coming-into-being of order. Not only is there no basis for it at the level of principles, it is also simply wrong at the level of fact as well. It has nothing going for it.

It doesn't help either that the constant and brazenly fallacious appeal-to-ignorance that is the invocation of quantum theory is basically the last refuge of the theological scoundrel, having been driven from literally every single other explanatory level of existence other than where - surprise, surprise - the dark and fuzzy frontier of scientific knowledge lies. There's a reason you don't get religious kooks barking shrill over the divine properties of say, silicon chip engineering. At some point, apparently, the perpetual embarrassment tips over into shame.

Quoting Wayfarer

They're not 'brute fact' insofar as they are only perceptible to reason. Only by reason could you arrive at the conception of the laws of motion. Sure, they may not be something that can be further explained, but I think the term 'brute fact' does no justice to the idea.

This paragraph makes no sense to me. It seems like you're reading "brute fact" as some sort of epistemic move that's only allowed by certain epistemic conditions that you do not believe obtain here. But that's not the usage of "brute fact" here. It's rather an ontological claim. The claim would be that ontologically, there's nothing else to "physical laws" aside from the fact that that's how particulars happen to "behave." It's not any sort of comment about how people arrive at a belief about laws of motion. And that concern would only be pertinent insofar as one believes that laws of motion have something to do with what we believe about them (and in that scenario, nominalism isn't any sort of issue, since what's at dispute under nominalism is what the extramental world is like).

Quoting Wayfarer

But in any case, these were not the subject of the medieval debates about universals - that all came later. It was more that the idea of universals was embedded in a particular 'domain of discourse' which provided a connection between reason and the 'four types of causation', via Aristotelean metaphysics. I am extending the idea of 'universals' to encompass a wider range than was understood by the scholastics - to generalise it to cover such things as natural numbers, laws, conventions, and the like. However I believe that is a valid interpretation of the basic idea.

I'm just not sure what this would have to do with what "nominalism" contemporarily refers to per current conventions. Re Aristotle and the four causes, that might be worthwhile to make another thread about, and there I can get into an analysis of why I think those ideas are nonsense. ;-)

Quoting Marchesk

So what are similarities?

Right. So I already gave one answer to this--that they are (family) resemblances, and already anticipated that you can very well go "well, what are (family) resemblances" etc., ad infinitum, or claim that that's ultimately circular (as if any definitions are not) in response to further explanations/"in other words" descriptions etc. for as long as you want to pretend that you have no idea what similarities are contra logical identities. And maybe you'd really not be able to comprehend what similarities are no matter what, so that it's not pretending. I'd not be able to tell that--whether you're just pretending or not.

Similarities are not things being the same as each other. Family resemblance should clue you into that. Alec and Daniel Baldwin, for example, have a family resemblance--that is they have similarities, but that's not to say that they're just the same in any regard. What can be confusing here is that "the same" can be a loose manner of speaking, but taken literally, as it should be in discussions where we're trying to sort these distinctions out, "the same" is literally, numerically identical.

Re accounting for universalities in science, that is a matter of how we think and talk about things like electrons, and it's necessary to think and talk about them that way in order to do science in the first place. Science needs to make assumptions such as phenomena having universality (that's a different sense of "universal" than we're discussing in the "realism (on universals) vs nominalism" discussion, by the way), such as replicability, etc.

Quoting John

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said? The way we use the words reflects what we think about them, that is how we judge them to be in our lives. Can you think of any other way to analyze them?

Analyzing the way that we use the words is only the beginning in Platonic dialectics. From this analysis we can come to the conclusion that there must be a real object referred to by these words, to validate their use. This object is the idea. Have you read Plato's Symposium? Once we come to understand the ideas as objects, we can analyze the objects themselves, attempting to understand what type of existence they have.

Here's a brief explanation of the difficulty involved with the way you are describing things. You say "the way we use the words", and "what we think". By using "we", you have already made an unjustified generalization. In reality, I use words, and I think , and so do you. There is no such thing as "the way we use words", because we each use them in our own ways. In order to make this generalization which you propose, we must assume some conventions, rules, agreements, or some such thing, to justify the claim that there is such a thing as "the way we use words". But if this is the case, then "the way we use words" refers to these agreements, and that is something outside of our minds, in between us, and therefore not "what we think about them" which is something within our minds.

Quoting Wayfarer

Further motivation to 'read more Pierce'.

When I first started getting acquainted with Peirce's thought, several people warned me that it would take a while--and I have found that to be very much the case. If you would like to read his own words, I think that the best place to start is with the two volumes of The Essential Peirce. If you prefer a fairly comprehensive introduction written by someone else, I suggest The Continuity of Peirce's Thought by Kelly Parker. If you are looking for something shorter that focuses primarily on metaphysics, I recommend Charles Peirce's Guess at the Riddle by John K. Sheriff.

Quoting StreetlightX

One can be a speculative naturalist without, for all that, simply falling into the black hole of scientism.

True, one simply has to make sure that what one is inquiring about is not part of the scientific enterprise.

Quoting StreetlightX

It doesn't help either that the constant and brazenly fallacious appeal-to-ignorance that is the invocation of quantum theory is basically the last refuge of the theological scoundrel, having been driven from literally every single other explanatory level of existence other than where - surprise, surprise - the dark and fuzzy frontier of scientific knowledge lies. There's a reason you don't get religious kooks barking shrill over the divine properties of say, silicon chip engineering. At some point, apparently, the perpetual embarrassment tips over into shame.

I'm not so sure if this is accurate, at least for all theologians. I'm only beginning my study of theology and philosophy of religion, but it seems to me that it is the atheist that commonly begs the question. The point of natural theology is to use empirical observations about the world to make an argument for something that cannot possibly be empirically tested but nevertheless is seen as necessary or important in some way. I don't think the cosmological argument has really been "refuted" by science. Teleology has been shoved aside as reductionist accounts of causality have emerged but it is precisely the latter that depends solely on the material and formal causes and continues to run into difficulties.

So I'm confused as to why you used quantum theory as an example of the "last refuge" of the theologian. Because it's not really the case that (serious) theologians (and not your neighborhood evangelical) are shoe-horning God into the picture. It's rather that atheistic (pop-) scientists are shoe-horning atheism into things like the Big Bang, evolution, and quantum mechanics in order to "prove" God does not exist and it's the theologians that have to fight back and explain why it's actually not so black and white. Theologians often get stuck in a kafkatrap.

Quoting apokrisis

That's right. That's why I am arguing against nominalism.

Right, okay, because before I thought you were conflating universalism with the thesis that particulars don't exist, which would indeed create an extreme binary.

Quoting apokrisis

But how do properties emerge into crisp being if vague being isn't what they are leaving behind?

So A changes to B, are you saying the time between the change is the vagueness?

Quoting apokrisis

The problem with your kind of ontology is that it can't explain existence as a causal development. Existence is just some dumb brute fact. Or maybe God invented it.

Well, I mean, I'm not trying to explain the existence of causal development. I'm trying to explain how universals have to exist in some way.

Quoting apokrisis

Shame that hypothesis doesn't fit the facts then. The evidence that the cosmos keeps spitting out the same entities, the same patterns, can be seen everywhere we look. (Have you heard of fractals or powerlaws?)

Yes, I know all about those, please stop antagonizing me. Once again, I'm out to show how nominalism is false and that it defends an indefensible monism.

Quoting apokrisis

So why the problem when I take something like universals to be real, and then offer a modern infodynamic account?

Because some of us have no formal training in whatever fields you are referring to and thus your words come across as esoteric gish gallops.

But also because you use a framework to explain the same framework. Universals exist, because symmetry is a universal. That's begging the question. Nominalists don't deny that symmetry exists, they deny that symmetry is a universal. You need to explain why universals have to exist without just ignoring the actual question; i.e. using "scientific" terminology to explain something that is usually empirically transparent.

Quoting darthbarracuda

You need to explain why universals have to exist ...

The terminological point that I have been trying to make is that universals do not have to exist in order to be real. It is nominalism that insists on limiting reality to existence.

Reply to aletheist Right, since nominalism rejects any and all abstracta.

Quoting Metaphysician Undercover

Analyzing the way that we use the words is only the beginning in Platonic dialectics. From this analysis we can come to the conclusion that there must be a real object referred to by these words, to validate their use. This object is the idea. Have you read Plato's Symposium? Once we come to understand the ideas as objects, we can analyze the objects themselves, attempting to understand what type of existence they have.

Here's a brief explanation of the difficulty involved with the way you are describing things. You say "the way we use the words", and "what we think". By using "we", you have already made an unjustified generalization. In reality, I use words, and I think , and so do you. There is no such thing as "the way we use words", because we each use them in our own ways. In order to make this generalization which you propose, we must assume some conventions, rules, agreements, or some such thing, to justify the claim that there is such a thing as "the way we use words". But if this is the case, then "the way we use words" refers to these agreements, and that is something outside of our minds, in between us, and therefore not "what we think about them" which is something within our minds.

OK, there are a few misunderstandings and seeming contradictions here. First, you say that when we take the beginning dialectical step of analyzing the way we use these words, 'beauty, 'goodness' and 'truth', it can lead to the conclusion that there must be a real object referred to by them, and that this real object is the idea. Without getting into metaphysical issues about what exactly ideas, such as ideas of beauty, the good and truth, are, I will just say that I don't entirely disagree with that. I have read the Symposium and other works of Plato's' and secondary works about some of them and about his philosophy in general, and I think I have a good enough grasp of Plato's notion of 'idea'.

What I will say though is that the idea is not rightly thought of as an object, the ideas cannot be objectified, because then this leads to the familiar silly questions about 'where they exist', 'is the idea of green itself green', 'is there a perfect form of ugliness' and so on. The point is we can talk about beauty, goodness and truth in terms of how they are in our lives, how we think about them, how we feel them, what kinds of experiences they are associated with, an so on, without having to explain what they are in themselves, or worrying about the question as to whether they are in themselves; without, that is without objectifying them.

In the next paragraph you go on about a "difficulty" with the very idea of "the way we use words", which I presume would be extended to 'how we experience things', and refer to this idea as an "unjustified generalizations". All this seems to completely contradict what you were saying in the first paragraph.

Now I do agree that we are each unique and that there are differences in how we use words and experience things. But there are also commonalities, and when we refer to conventional usage we are certainly referring to "something outside our individual minds"; I haven't anywhere denied this. The point is that the phrase "the way we use words" as I intended to use it refers to just theses conventional usages, so it seems you have completely misunderstood what i have been saying. You say the conventional ways we use words, being external to our minds, do not reflect the "way we think about them" because the latter is "something within our minds". I think this is greatly mistaken. We learn languages consisting of conventional usages; we introject these languages, and so, of course, they come to mediate, if not completely determine, what and how we think. There is no clear and coherent delineation between what is 'outside' and what is 'inside' our minds.

Quoting John

What I will say though is that the idea is not rightly thought of as an object, the ideas cannot be objectified, because then this leads to the familiar silly questions about 'where they exist', 'is the idea of green itself green', 'is there a perfect form of ugliness' and so on. The point is we can talk about beauty, goodness and truth in terms of how they are in our lives, how we think about them, how we feel them, what kinds of experiences they are associated with, an so on, without having to explain what they are in themselves, or worrying about the question as to whether they are in themselves; without, that is without objectifying them.

The problem is that these ideas do become objectified in epistemology. Most epistemologies hold that some knowledge is objective, and therefore certain ideas such as mathematical and geometrical principles are objective. Whether one justifies this objectivity by referring to some Platonic Forms, or by referring to some conventions, rules, or agreements, these both are assumed to have some sort of existence external to the human mind, and that's what justifies knowledge as objective.

Quoting John

In the next paragraph you go on about a "difficulty" with the very idea of "the way we use words", which I presume would be extended to 'how we experience things', and refer to this idea as an "unjustified generalizations". All this seems to completely contradict what you were saying in the first paragraph.

The difficulty is that you made these generalizations, "the way we use words", yet you didn't seem to allow for any objectivity to such generalizations. So the point was to show the difficulty in your position. I have been allowing for real objective existence of these universals, so the difficulty does not apply to my position. This generalization, "the way we use words", may be a real objective idea, if you allow that ideas exist as objects.

Quoting John

Now I do agree that we are each unique and that there are differences in how we use words and experience things. But there are also commonalities, and when we refer to conventional usage we are certainly referring to "something outside our individual minds"; I haven't anywhere denied this. The point is that the phrase "the way we use words" as I intended to use it refers to just theses conventional usages, so it seems you have completely misunderstood what i have been saying. You say the conventional ways we use words, being external to our minds, do not reflect the "way we think about them" because the latter is "something within our minds". I think this is greatly mistaken. We learn languages consisting of conventional usages; we introject these languages, and so, of course, they come to mediate, if not completely determine, what and how we think. There is no clear and coherent delineation between what is 'outside' and what is 'inside' our minds.

By conflating what is inside and what is outside of our minds, you deny the possibility of establishing good epistemic principles for separating subjective and objective. So, back to my original point. Once we establish that these things, ideas, have real objective existence, and this is demonstrated by the existence of objective knowledge, then we can analyze them as real objective things, objects, and that means more than just experience which is purely subjective. You however seem insistent on the notion that they are nothing other than how individuals think. Until you release this notion, and see them as real objects, which form the basis of objective knowledge, you will not be able to see knowledge as anything more than the experience of subjects. You have no grounds for an epistemology of objective knowledge.

Reply to aletheist Thanks for the recommendations. I will try and borrow the book I mentioned first (Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism, although I like the look of that 'Riddle' book.)

Quoting Terrapin Station

It seems like you're reading "brute fact" as some sort of epistemic move that's only allowed by certain epistemic conditions that you do not believe obtain here. But that's not the usage of "brute fact" here. It's rather an ontological claim. The claim would be that ontologically, there's nothing else to "physical laws" aside from the fact that that's how particulars happen to "behave." It's not any sort of comment about how people arrive at a belief about laws of motion

We're discussing physical principles, such as those described by the laws of motion. They're not matter of 'belief', they describe the trajectory of artillery shells. And the sense in which such ideas are similar to universals is due to their being 'laws'. The question of whether there are 'laws of nature' is actually quite analogous to whether there are real universals. You can't dismiss them by saying they are how 'objects just happen to behave' because they're also predictive, and lead to new discoveries - things previously unknown about nature. They're basic to any kind of science. But I don't believe that naturalism explains natural law, it simply assumes them - as it must. Couldn't get out of bed in the morning without them. It's when it believes that it can explain them that it starts to morph into scientism.

Furthermore, according to 'structural realism' it's only how 'objects happen to behave' that is real.

Quoting darthbarracuda

It's rather that atheistic (pop-) scientists are shoe-horning atheism into things like the Big Bang, evolution, and quantum mechanics in order to "prove" God does not exist and it's the theologians that have to fight back and explain why it's actually not so black and white.

Well said. I went to a book launch recently, A Fortunate Universe. Neither God nor theology were explicitly mentioned, but seemed implicit in the presentation. I've also noticed the books by Jesuit philosophers Stephen M Barr and Robert J Spitzer, which appear theologically literate and scientifically informed (although there's also a fundamentalist by the name of Stephen M Barr, don't mix them up.)

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

There is no point continuing this, I think. You insist that something must be either internal or external; subjective or objective. I don't think in those terms; for me objectivity consists only in inter-subjectivity; which is neither external nor internal. I don't see knowledge as merely the "experience of subjects" that is your prejudicial reading of what I have said; I see knowledge as the shared experience of subjects.

Also I don't believe in the possibility of, and therefore am not even to the slightest degree interested in any purported "epistemology of objectivity". If I am interested in objectivity at all it would only be in terms of a phenomenology. Since our beginning premises are so different, I don't believe we can have any conversation at all, and I would hazard a guess that neither of wish to waste our time.

Quoting darthbarracuda

But also because you use a framework to explain the same framework. Universals exist, because symmetry is a universal.

Where did I make that circular argument?

Quoting darthbarracuda

You need to explain why universals have to exist without just ignoring the actual question

I tried instead to show you why your "actual question" doesn't even make sense in my holist and pansemiotic paradigm. And I mention infodynamics as the particular current scientific project that takes a broadly Peircean metaphysics seriously.

So it would be circular for a metaphysics to try to account for dynamical particulars in terms of "just more dynamics". A semiotic approach to metaphysics is different precisely because it accounts for universals in terms of sign relations. The realm of symbols - or informational constraints - gives the "universals" a real place to exist, much like Plato's realm of ideas. The difference is that this informational aspect of existence is thoroughly physicalist and doesn't need the mind or ideas to be a second kind of substantial being.

And I hardly need point out again that actual physics is undergoing just this entropic or information theoretic revolution. Event horizons - as informational limits - are so "real" that they structure the cosmos and may even account for forces like gravity. It is bit, etc.

So for a start, I have a positive thesis about the physical basis for "the existence of universals". Modern physics is cashing out Peirce's notion that the cosmos is the self-organised product of a triadic sign relation.

Whoosh. I hear the noise of words flying right over your head again. But you can hardly claim to be saying anything interesting about metaphysics these days if you throw up your hands in horror when someone mentions holographic bounds and least action principles.

And then another important point is that Peircean realism would not regard the particular as particularly "existent" either. Like the quasi-particles of condensed matter physics, or the actual particles of the standard model, the uncuttable atoms of material existence turn out to be merely the excitations or localised frustrations of a field.

So as it says on the bottle, this is process philosophy. And both the particular and the universal are things that only "exist" in the sense of being features of processes.

The best way to ontologise that view is then - as Peirce did - to divide reality into constraints and freedoms. Universals are the contextual reality. They are the general habits, the global tendencies. And particulars are the events that are regularly produced, the outcomes that may share family similarities but also express an irreducible spontaneity or indeterminism.

So in a church, there is a fairly fixed propensity to burst into prayer. The context shapes the behaviour. And if for some reason the prayers begin to cease, the church is no longer really a church. The mutual relation between the universal and the particular is what gives birth to the physical whole. If that reciprocal interaction falters, then the whole dynamical structure fades away again.

Reality is the process of becoming real. And reality is characterised by its general stablity - its long-run, self-sustaining, dynamical equilibrium. To exist is really just to persist in a way where continuing change does not result in significant change.

And that kind of reality, that kind of existence, is now something we have exact scientific models for. Dissipative structure theory (as the next step along from "far from equilibrium" thermodynamics) has given us metaphysics we can go out and measure.

To call that huge advance in human understanding "esoteric" is simply to be ignorant of modern progress.

Quoting Wayfarer

We're discussing physical principles, such as those described by the laws of motion. They're not matter of 'belief', they describe the trajectory of artillery shells. And the sense in which such ideas are similar to universals is due to their being 'laws'. The question of whether there are 'laws of nature' is actually quite analogous to whether there are real universals. You can't dismiss them by saying they are how 'objects just happen to behave' because they're also predictive, and lead to new discoveries - things previously unknown about nature. They're basic to any kind of science. But I don't believe that naturalism explains natural law, it simply assumes them - as it must. Couldn't get out of bed in the morning without them. It's when it believes that it can explain them that it starts to morph into scientism.

The comment you're responding to here was about you reading my earlier comment as an epistemic rather than an ontological claim. Yet your response here has nothing to do with that issue.

Quoting apokrisis

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said? — John


The search for symmetry, equilibrium and the minimisation of uncertainty - the usual physical principles?

Symmetry is one idea often associated with beauty, and equilibrium is one idea sometimes associated with goodness. As to "minimization of uncertainty", I would say that is associated with belief, not with truth.

Quoting John

There is no point continuing this, I think. You insist that something must be either internal or external; subjective or objective. I don't think in those terms; for me objectivity consists only in inter-subjectivity; which is neither external nor internal. I don't see knowledge as merely the "experience of subjects" that is your prejudicial reading of what I have said; I see knowledge as the shared experience of subjects.

You're just refusing to justify you terms, inter-subjectivity, and shared experience of subjects. I do not think that it is possible that my experience is shared by you. You bring up these notions in order to avoid a true analysis, and then make the unwarranted claim that a true analysis of things like ideas is impossible. These things are just a "shared experience". But shared experience is incoherent nonsense.

Reply to Metaphysician Undercover

Of course directly shared experience might be nonsense, but experience is obviously shared via language or we would be unable to communicate effectively about anything.

Personally I think your analyses are anything but true, but if you are happy with them, that's up to you. I am not interested in participating with you in what seems to me to be endless sophistic pedantry that just goes nowhere; which I have seen all to much of over the last few years.

Quoting Terrapin Station

The comment you're responding to here was about you reading my earlier comment as an epistemic rather than an ontological claim. Yet your response here has nothing to do with that issue.

'Physical principles' are matters for ontology, our knowledge of them matters for epistemology. It's precisely the ability to represent physical principles in symbolic terms which is at issue. Yet according to nominalism there are no such principles - only specific instances are real. Strictly speaking if nominalism were correct, there could be no discourse, as each instance of an utterance would have a different meaning - which, come to think of it, is something you might say, isn't it?

Reply to John So physical principles ARE used to analyse the Platonic triad. Cool.

Quoting apokrisis

So it would be circular for a metaphysics to try to account for dynamical particulars in terms of "just more dynamics". A semiotic approach to metaphysics is different precisely because it accounts for universals in terms of sign relations. The realm of symbols - or informational constraints - gives the "universals" a real place to exist, much like Plato's realm of ideas. The difference is that this informational aspect of existence is thoroughly physicalist and doesn't need the mind or ideas to be a second kind of substantial being.

The part I get tripped up on is when you explain the existence of universals like redness or hardness of whatever by appealing to things like sign relations, symbols, constraints, information, etc. Are these things not universals in themselves? You said they were similar to Plato's realm of ideas - are they "less real" than the concrete stuff we experience everyday?

Quoting apokrisis

Whoosh. I hear the noise of words flying right over your head again.

:-}

Why must you be so arrogantly patronizing all the time?

Quoting apokrisis

But you can hardly claim to be saying anything interesting about metaphysics these days if you throw up your hands in horror when someone mentions holographic bounds and least action principles.

Well because holographic bounds and least action principles are incoherent, at least to me, without a proper context, and especially because they aren't anything at all unless they have certain qualities, or properties, which is exactly what we're talking about here.

So you can say that the properties of bread: its doughiness, flexibility, warmth, etc come from external constraints like the heat of the oven, the yeast, etc. But these things also have properties themselves.

Quoting apokrisis

So as it says on the bottle, this is process philosophy. And both the particular and the universal are things that only "exist" in the sense of being features of processes.

I thought you didn't like the binary between substance and process.

Quoting apokrisis

The best way to ontologise that view is then - as Peirce did - to divide reality into constraints and freedoms. Universals are the contextual reality. They are the general habits, the global tendencies. And particulars are the events that are regularly produced, the outcomes that may share family similarities but also express an irreducible spontaneity or indeterminism.

Right, okay. This is basically what I already said. Universals are general patterns and particulars are specifics.

Quoting apokrisis

Reality is the process of becoming real. And reality is characterised by its general stablity - its long-run, self-sustaining, dynamical equilibrium. To exist is really just to persist in a way where continuing change does not result in significant change.

Right, I agree. There are no such things as enduring objects.

Quoting darthbarracuda

So I'm confused as to why you used quantum theory as an example of the "last refuge" of the theologian. Because it's not really the case that (serious) theologians (and not your neighborhood evangelical) are shoe-horning God into the picture. It's rather that atheistic (pop-) scientists are shoe-horning atheism into things like the Big Bang, evolution, and quantum mechanics in order to "prove" God does not exist and it's the theologians that have to fight back and explain why it's actually not so black and white. Theologians often get stuck in a kafkatrap.

Mmm, I should have qualified - the last refuge within the sciences themselves. Although to be fair, this too overstates the case somewhat. Abiogenesis is another favourite stomping ground of shitty theology, and once again, it's unsurprisingly another site where the scientific work is still underway (although it's made some damn fine strides in the last ten years). The larger point is that religious thinking about science has a tendency to latch on to the uncertainties necessarily latent at the bleeding edge of science, rather than at any point where the scientific work is well established. In every case it's just low hanging, God-of-the-gaps bullshit, a kind of desperation to slot God in to any (rapidly diminishing) space available. A theology with a bit of dignity ought to probably find the divine at work in everything, but then again, the theological engagement with the sciences gave up it's dignity long ago.

Quoting darthbarracuda

I'm not so sure if this is accurate, at least for all theologians. I'm only beginning my study of theology and philosophy of religion, but it seems to me that it is the atheist that commonly begs the question. The point of natural theology is to use empirical observations about the world to make an argument for something that cannot possibly be empirically tested but nevertheless is seen as necessary or important in some way. I don't think the cosmological argument has really been "refuted" by science. Teleology has been shoved aside as reductionist accounts of causality have emerged but it is precisely the latter that depends solely on the material and formal causes and continues to run into difficulties.

Frankly, I literally do not care about theology for the most part. In truth, I think the only proper atheistic response to theology ought to be sheer indifference, right up to the point where it starts making claims about naturalism or the sciences. The philosopher Francois Chatelet once spoke of the need for a 'tranquil atheism', one for which "God is not a problem. The non-exis­tence or even the death of God are not problems but rather the conditions one must have already acquired in order to make the true problems surge forth." God is a false problem. I think this is more or less right. Anyone who tries to 'prove God doesn't exist' has already conceded too much to theology - has taken God to be in any way a legitimate problem at all. So I don't much care for those scientists who attempt to shoehorn their atheism into the science either. But once claims are made about naturalism, or about the sciences - or philosophy more generally - which are plainly wrong, misleading, or ignorant, I think that's where one ought to affirm one's atheism by arguing back, at every point.

Not God's 'existence' but his relevance ought to be perpetually put into question - which is why I much prefer 'naturalism' to 'atheism', insofar as the latter is still too oppositionally defined by a relation to the divine. I would prefer simply not to care about the very idea of God, let alone to argue 'against' it.

Reply to apokrisis

Sure, why should the physical nature not express or reflect the spiritual?

Reply to John Given physical principles derive from phenomenological observables, it is pretty obvious which way round things in fact arose epistemically.

Quoting StreetlightX

In truth, I think the only proper atheistic response to theology ought to be sheer indifference, right up to the point where it starts making claims about naturalism or the sciences.

I agree. And I'm even quite sympathetic of theism to the degree it puts forward a coherent opposition to Scientism and hardline reductionism.

Religious philosophers were the early leaders in the revival of Peircean scholarship for example. It is quite possible for theists to be reasonable people.

Quoting darthbarracuda

You said they were similar to Plato's realm of ideas - are they "less real" than the concrete stuff we experience everyday?

One can only face palm at a comment like this. Does this everyday concrete stuff exist, or is it simply how we construct our experience of it?

Quoting darthbarracuda

I thought you didn't like the binary between substance and process.

What do you mean? I'm saying substantial being is a process. And that is opposed to the view that substance has fundamental existence rather than pragmatic persistence.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Right, I agree. There are no such things as enduring objects

Great.

Quoting Wayfarer

Strictly speaking if nominalism were correct, there could be no discourse, as each instance of an utterance would have a different meaning - which, come to think of it, is something you might say, isn't it?

Yes, I'd agree with "there are no two logically identical instances of meaning."

Obviously, on my view, logically identical, multiple instances of meaning are not what's going on with communication.

Quoting apokrisis

One can only face palm at a comment like this. Does this everyday concrete stuff exist, or is it simply how we construct our experience of it?

Umm, okay? I'm asking what the difference in "real-ness" you see to be between something like an asteroid and "symmetry" of "something" like vagueness of whatever.

If something exists, and if this something can be known to us, then it must be able to be predicated upon. The predicates latch on to properties, or at least describe a collection of simpler properties.

Quoting apokrisis

What do you mean? I'm saying substantial being is a process. And that is opposed to the view that substance has fundamental existence rather than pragmatic persistence.

Well cause I remember sometime in the past you thought people like Whitehead were too extreme in their metaphysics and that there had to be a middle ground between process and substance.

Quoting apokrisis

Great.

Fantastic.

Quoting StreetlightX

The larger point is that religious thinking about science has a tendency to latch on to the uncertainties necessarily latent at the bleeding edge of science, rather than at any point where the scientific work is well established. In every case it's just low hanging, God-of-the-gaps bullshit, a kind of desperation to slot God in to any (rapidly diminishing) space available. A theology with a bit of dignity ought to probably find the divine at work in everything, but then again, the theological engagement with the sciences gave up it's dignity long ago.

I mean, I don't necessarily disagree with this, but I would also say that scientists can also be blamed for making wild assertions based upon the very latest theories and not the history of theorizing and paradigm shifting. This is one of the reasons why I generally take appeals to contemporary science, like neuroscience or cosmology, with a grain of salt, because the theories are likely going to change in the future and that by itself gives very little, if any, solid foundation for a metaphysical claim.

Quoting StreetlightX

Anyone who tries to 'prove God doesn't exist' has already conceded too much to theology - has taken God to be in any way a legitimate problem at all.

I agree, this is also why I hesitate to call myself an atheist. Atheism is too strong of a position to hold.

Quoting StreetlightX

Not God's 'existence' but his relevance ought to be perpetually put into question - which is why I much prefer 'naturalism' to 'atheism', insofar as the latter is still too oppositionally defined by a relation to the divine. I would prefer simply not to care about the very idea of God, let alone to argue 'against' it.

Yeah, apatheism has been sort of my mode of operation for a while. Although I'm getting interested in it all as of late. A personal argument I have against theology though is sort of anti-theistic in nature: that there is suffering in the world, if God exists he should be condemned for not preventing this from happening, and because of this God does not deserve to be studied.

Reply to apokrisis

What seems obvious to anyone all depends on how that one thinks about phenomenological observation. It's always going to come down to the question of whether you prefer one set of presuppositions or another.

Quoting darthbarracuda

If something exists, and if this something can be known to us, then it must be able to be predicated upon. The predicates latch on to properties, or at least describe a collection of simpler properties.

I'm not getting your difficulty. Once things start to get stabilised, they become the platform for further development. Its hierarchy theory 101.

So after the Big Bang, the bath of radiation cools enough and massive, slower than light, particles emerge. A lucky asymmetry means that nearly all of the negative anti-protons have gone, likewise nearll all of the positive anti-electrons. That lets you have some persistent basic ingredients - oppositely charged electrons and protons. From there, you can get stellar physics and planetary chemisty.

So the emergence of complex materiality - stuff with properties - is no big deal at all. What is a big deal is getting behind that to the story of how anything could emerge to start the story in the first place.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Well cause I remember sometime in the past you thought people like Whitehead were too extreme in their metaphysics and that there had to be a middle ground between process and substance.

People call Whitehead a process philosopher. I don't. I am arguing pansemiotics, not panpsychism.

And you don't need a middle ground between substance and process as the argument is that substantial being is a process.

Being a triadic or hierarchical metaphysics, the middle ground is what you get automatically. When constraints interact with freedoms, something arises as the persistent equilibrium balance of that action. And we call that "something" things like substantial being, particularity, or actuality.

Quoting John

Well it all depends on how you think about phenomenological observation. It's always going to come down to the question of whether you prefer one set of presuppositions or another.

Yeah. And I have reasons to prefer one set of presuppositions. They are the ones that happen to be demonstrably better at making phenomenological predictions.

Reply to apokrisis

Any presupposition that consists in thinking that the instrumental or predictive efficacy of some hypothesis justifies it's being preferred in contexts that go beyond that instrumentality or predictive efficacy cannot itself be supported by the mere fact of said efficacies because that would be to reason in a self-enclosed circle; in other words, it remains question-begging.

Reply to John Remind me of some actual question that is in fact being begged.

You might not like the answers that physicalism gives when used as a framework to analyse beauty, good and truth, for example. But that's another matter.

And again, those physicalist universals can tested because they are mathematical-strength concepts. They are not vague ideas that are "not even wrong".

So you complain about the self-contained strength of my approach. Yet that is why it is epistemically better. It does make an argument that actually could be wrong when we test it against reality.

Quoting apokrisis

So after the Big Bang, the bath of radiation cools enough and massive, slower than light, particles emerge. A lucky asymmetry means that nearly all of the negative anti-protons have gone, likewise nearll all of the positive anti-electrons. That lets you have some persistent basic ingredients - oppositely charged electrons and protons. From there, you can get stellar physics and planetary chemisty.

So the emergence of complex materiality - stuff with properties - is no big deal at all. What is a big deal is getting behind that to the story of how anything could emerge to start the story in the first place.

The problem I see with this is that it still doesn't prove anything about universals, because you use universals in the description. Or, to be precise, you use natural kinds like anti-protons, anti-electrons, radiation. Or you use descriptions without a subject, like "symmetry" or "asymmetry" but these must be predicated of something in order to be even coherent.

You said yourself that there are some persistent basic ingredients (these can endure but complex structures can't, I guess?), yet what makes these basic ingredients what they are? Properties. And we're back to square one: how do we see the property of negative charge of an electron as? A universal, a trope, what?

The nominalist is going to argue that the fact that we use universals in our scientific language descriptions doesn't prove jack shit about the actual reality of properties.

Quoting apokrisis

People call Whitehead a process philosopher. I don't. I am arguing pansemiotics, not panpsychism.

Then what would you consider him to be? He is basically univocally seen as a process philosopher. You can't just assert that he's not.

Quoting apokrisis

And you don't need a middle ground between substance and process as the argument is that substantial being is a process.

Yet this becomes a monism. You reduce substance to process, in the same way Aristotle would reduce process to substance.

Reply to apokrisis

There problem is there are no answers that we are able to rationally demonstrate to be wrong (other than out and out contradictions) when it comes to beauty, goodness and truth. Such a thing is possible only in logic, math or, more controversially, science.

So, the fact that you think beauty, goodness and truth can best be modeled in physicalist terms (personally I am far from convinced that they can be coherently modeled in physicalist terms at all, but I am allowing that they can for the sake of being generous towards your argument) cannot ever be more than a person belief that is not demonstrably true. Whatever reasons you might favour for thinking it is true will be rejected by another, and you can have no independent criteria to support them.

Quoting John

So, the fact that you think beauty, goodness and truth can best be modeled in physicalist terms ... cannot ever be more than a person belief that is not demonstrably true.

Well that's hardly a problem given that universal scepticism is no longer an issue once you have already given up the pipedream of "demonstrable truth".

I happy with states of belief that are open to falsification while demonstrably minimising uncertainty. We seem to be uncovering the secrets of existence at an exponential rate doing that.

Quoting darthbarracuda

You said yourself that there are some persistent basic ingredients

Well, only the one. Apeiron. Or however we would best understand that appeal to material principle in our best physicalist theories.

I agree there is an issue here. I'm the first to point it out when ontic structural realism is raised, for example. String theory and quantum field theory have precisely that problem - the material action to breath life into the formal descriptions (of symmetries and symmetry breakings) do still have to be inserted by hand.

But the whole point - following triadic hylomorphism - is that whatever the material principle is, it can't be itself substantial in the kind of sense you have in mind. It can't already possess properties, as positive properties are the product of formal causes, or constraints.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Then what would you consider him to be?

A mystic. A pseudo philosopher.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Yet this becomes a monism. You reduce substance to process, in the same way Aristotle would reduce process to substance.

A "monism" that is irreducibly complex in being a triadic process.

Quoting apokrisis

Well, only the one. Apeiron. Or however we would best understand that appeal to material principle in our best physicalist theories.

Quoting apokrisis

A "monism" that is irreducibly complex in being a triadic process.

Which is it?

Quoting apokrisis

But the whole point - following triadic hylomorphism - is that whatever the material principle is, it can't be itself substantial in the kind of sense you have in mind. It can't already possess properties, as positive properties are the product of formal causes, or constraints.

Then what exactly is it?

Why can't we say that there are some properties that exist thanks to a history and some properties just are, brute fact? Saying that a "principle" exists and yet denying that abstract transcendental properties exist seems like word play.

Quoting apokrisis

A mystic. A pseudo philosopher.

You realize this is, as of now, an unjustified opinion?

Quoting darthbarracuda

Why can't we say that there are some properties that exist thanks to a history and some properties just are, brute fact? Saying that a "principle" exists and yet denying that abstract transcendental properties exist seems like word play.

Good job I don't say principles "exist". Or that they are "brute facts".

And saying that about properties would be inconsistent too.

Quoting darthbarracuda

You realize this is, as of now, an unjustified opinion?

Sigh...

Quoting apokrisis

Good job I don't say principles "exist". Or that they are "brute facts".

And saying that about properties would be inconsistent too.

Then I can safely disregard anything you say about principles, since they do not exist and are thus irrelevant.

Quoting John

Of course directly shared experience might be nonsense, but experience is obviously shared via language or we would be unable to communicate effectively about anything.

Ok. now you introduce a thing called language, and language is related to ideas and universals, as well as the experiences of individuals. But language is not experience, nor is it ideas. or universals. So you introduce all these different terms as if one is supposed to resolve the meaning of the other, but the way you introduce them is just mumbo jumbo.

Quoting John

Personally I think your analyses are anything but true, but if you are happy with them, that's up to you.

What do you mean by a "true" analysis? Analysis is to break something down into its composite elements. If the thing is simple, and cannot be broken down, then the attempted analysis is misguided. But to claim that things like inter-subjectivity, and shared experience, are fundamental and cannot be broken down for analysis is simply ridiculous.

Reply to apokrisis

OK, fair enough, man.

Quoting darthbarracuda

Then I can safely disregard anything you say about principles, since they do not exist and are thus irrelevant.

You believe that nothing is real unless it exists - i.e., that there are only material/efficient causes and brute facts?

Quoting aletheist

You believe that nothing is real unless it exists - i.e., that there are only material/efficient causes and brute facts?

No, I think they exist but they have be predicate-able. To me, it doesn't even make any sense to talk of something that has no discernible nature but somehow is causally relevant.

Quoting darthbarracuda

No, I think they exist but they have be predicate-able. To me, it doesn't even make any sense to talk of something that has no discernible nature but somehow is causally relevant.

So you don't think that things can be predicated of formal and final causes?

And the Peircean distinction between real and existence seems to have gone over your head.

Peirce says:

"I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.”

"I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched."

So to exist covers the usual material case of substantial being. And to be real covers the usual notion of universals.

Quoting apokrisis

So you don't think that things can be predicated of formal and final causes?

No, I think they can, I just don't think causes "exist" as some kind of ephemeral entity of sorts. I'm more into dispositionalism. Causal nets based upon thresh-hold dispositional properties, not too dissimilar to Scholastic realist conceptions of causality.

Quoting apokrisis

"I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.”

"I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched."

So, noumenon?

A consequence of the influence of materialism is that whole classes of ideas - including many of the kinds of ideas associated with theology, which in Western thinking includes a broad sweep - are ruled out a priori. That illustrates well the sense in which science has displaced religion as the 'arbiter of truth' and as the yardstick by which respectable people make normative judgement. So this is just another facet of 'science as religion' - hence the visceral reaction to anything that suggests religion.

I said that

Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind.

And the problem of universals is just such a problem. But If you interpret universals in the general sense of including logical principles and natural number, and the like, then any kind of science depends on such universals.

In pre-modern thinking, universals were nearer to the source of being, namely, the divine intellect - they are woven into the fabric of the cosmos (a sentiment still echoed by Peirce with his 'matter as effette mind'); whereas for modern thinking, ideas are the product of material evolution and are ultimately explicable as such. They're very late, and very junior in the scheme of things. That is the sense in which Darwinism inverts idealism - mind is a product of matter, rather than matter being the passive recipient and medium for expression of ideas.

The ontology of mathematics is controversial for empiricism, for the same reason. In an argument about 'the indispensability arguments for mathematics', we read:

Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought. But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.

So here, even philosophical rationalism is dismissed on the same grounds - that if numbers are real, then it undermines physicalism. So we can't have that! Whatever account we provide, must be, in principle, grounded in the objects of experience - hence, immanent, 'within nature', something explicable in terms of empirical principles.