until now I would have said that substituting "thought" for "representation" (again, within Kant-world) isn't a major misunderstanding — J

@Mww explained the difference between thought and representation in some detail, but the basic logic here is straightforward:

The I think must be able to accompany all my representations — Kant, CPR, B131-133 (pp. 246-7)

vs.

<Every time p is thought, I think p is thought> [Rödl] — Leontiskos

(Or else, <The I think accompanies all my representations>.)

Rödl is misrepresenting Kant whether or not we (mistakenly) allow "thought" and "representation" to be interchangeable.

• Kant: "The I think must be able to accompany all my representations"
• Pseudo Rödl: "The I think accompanies all my representations"
• ...
• Pseudo Kant: "Every time p is thought, I think p could be thought"
• Rödl: "Every time p is thought, I think p is thought"

Kant says, "All hamburgers are able to be accompanied by ketchup." Rödl says, "Kant thinks every hamburger has ketchup on it."

- Great, thanks. That is helpful. :up:

My own knowledge of Aquinas is fairly rudimentary, but I find this line of analysis intriguing and wonder if you see its merit. — Wayfarer

In my opinion it seems correct in large part. When we talk about "realism" and "idealism" and such things, we really need to set out what exactly we are talking about, because such terms mean different things to different people. Depending on how you define idealism, Aquinas could be an idealist.

Despite this difference, both philosophers share a commitment to explaining how the mind and world are fundamentally related—a link that modern empiricism, with its emphasis on mind-independence, tends to deprecate. — Wayfarer

I suppose I would want to understand the nemesis here a bit more clearly. What does this "mind-independence" mean, and who are its proponents?

Could you recommend any work or scholars who explore this intersection? — Wayfarer

A short piece that might be helpful is Gyula Klima's, "Intentional Transfer in Averroes, Indifference of Nature in Avicenna, and the Representationalism of Aquinas," which begins on page 33 of volume 5 of the journal, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (my post <here> has some background information).

The other thing that comes to mind is what I pointed to here, although it is longer and more difficult:

A good introductory resource for classical realism is the first issue of Reality, especially the introduction and initial essays (link). — Leontiskos

I haven't looked at this issue in some time. There are probably better resources that I am either not thinking of or unaware of.

This is preserved in Aquinas' epistemology, as I understand it. And behind that, is a mysterious doctrine called 'the unity of knower and known'. If you search on that phrase, you will find many recondite scholarly papers mostly about either Thomism or medieval Islamic scholasticism. And I believe Rödl is articulating a similar theme. The underlying rationale is that of 'participatory knowing' and 'divine union' which have long since fallen out of favour in Western culture. — Wayfarer

Yep. Good post. :up:

- Good posts. :up:

No, Frege was much later than Kant... — Wayfarer

Yes, good point. :nerd:

-

...then it follows that whatever must accompany all representation does not necessarily accompanying all thought... — Mww

I suppose what is tripping me up here is the question of whether thought is a form of representation. Thought is, "the synthesis of conceptions into a possible cognition," and conceptions are the representations of understanding, and therefore thought synthesizes one kind of representation without itself being a representation. Is that right?

Thought is an activity, in the synthesis of conceptions into a possible cognition; “I think” represents the consciousness of the occurrence of the activity, but not the activity itself. — Mww

Okay, that makes sense. I think Aquinas would agree with this. Then is the "I think" a sui generis kind of representation?

What would you like out of a theory of truth telling? — fdrake

I think the problem is that there is no truth-telling occurring. You are allergic to the word: — Leontiskos

Why is it that our culture is so often allergic to the idea of truth? I think it's because it can't be bought. It doesn't fit neatly in a model. And if we are the masters with our hammers, then if truth doesn't want to play ball and act like a nail, so much the worse for truth! Truth is a pain in the ass. Let it be banished!

Truth is what judges the Model Builder's model. In this case, to the model builder who wants to model only behavior, truth says, "This isn't up to grade. Your model handles quacks but it doesn't handle ducks. Back to the drawing board." The model builder might appeal to norms, or social constructions, or all sorts of other things, but all these courts of appeal defer to the Court of Truth, whether they like it or not.

Is the contention from both Kant and Rödl simply that any thought that <p> is necessarily entertained by a conscious subject? Meaning that the subject is implicit in any thought? Which is aimed at Frege’s contention that the object of thought can be entirely independent of any subject. — Wayfarer

I read Kant to be saying at minimum that representations are unified in relation to the subject which has them. For a more detailed exegesis than that I would defer to @Mww, who is much more accustomed to Kant's language than I am. Surely there are a lot of different things going on in that passage.

I don't have any reason to believe that Kant is responding to Frege. In the thread on Kimhi's critique of Frege, the general takeaway seemed to be, "Well, Frege's distinction may be imperfect, but it is also very important and useful, and Kimhi doesn't seem to have any clear alternative on offer." I think Frege's distinction is probably more relevant to contemporary philosophy than @Banno would like to believe, but that is a separate question.

Frege lays this out in a famous essay called ‘The Thought’ (in translation). — Wayfarer

Do you take Rödl to be criticizing a position that Frege lays out in that paper?

The prohibition against drinking blood is a big one for me. — BitconnectCarlos

Also interesting on this point is that many Christians maintain this prohibition, for it is reiterated in Acts 15:29. That is, John 6 is not seen as a reversal of the Hebrew law against consuming blood.

- The OP is about two related approaches to philosophical issues, the "Model Building Style" and the "Deflationary Style." It says nothing at all about perception or cognition.

www.gutenberg.org, J. M. D. Meiklejohn, ca1856, searchable but w/o pagination; — Mww

Okay, great. That is very helpful. :up:

Of course, ↪J is within his dialectical rights to argue from the major as he stated it, but he shouldn’t have attributed it to the specified author that didn’t actually say it. — Mww

@J is probably taking Rödl at his word when Rödl tells @J that Kant holds the position.

Anyway….not that big a deal. — Mww

Seems highly relevant to me. If the only argument in favor of the OP's thesis is found in Kant, then to Kant we must go.

"CPR, B 131. More precisely, he [Kant] says that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations, for all my representations must be capable of being thought. This presupposes (what is the starting point of Kant's philosophy and not the kind of thing for which he would undertake to give an argument) that the I think accompanies all my thoughts." — J

And here is Kant:

§ 16
On the original-synthetic unity of apperception.

The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. That representation that can be given prior to all thinking is called intuition. Thus all manifold of intuition has a necessary relation to the I think in the same subject in which this manifold is to be encountered. But this representation is an act of spontaneity, i.e., it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility. I call it the pure apperception, in order to distinguish it from the empirical one, or also the original apperception, since it is that self-consciousness which, because it produces the representation I think, which must be able to accompany all others and which in all consciousness is one and the same, cannot be accompanied by any further representation. I also call its unity the transcendental unity of self-consciousness in order to designate the possibility of a priori cognition from it. For the manifold representations that are given in a certain intuition would not all together be my representations if they did not all together belong to a self-consciousness; i.e., as my representations (even if I am not conscious of them as such) they must yet necessarily be in accord with the condition under which alone they can stand together in a universal self-consciousness, because otherwise they would not throughout belong to me. From this original combination much may be inferred. — Kant, CPR, B131-133 (pp. 246-7)

(It looks to me that Kant is saying that the I think must be able to accompany all my representations. I don't see Rödl's interpretation that <Every time p is thought, I think p is thought>.)

what exactly it is that [Pat] is right about — J

This, I think:

• Pat: "If I interpret your claim at face value, it is false [for these very good reasons]. So the onus is on you to give the words some non-standard meaning in which they are not false. Go for it."

Full disclosure: It was quite easy to write Pat’s lines for her because I pretty much share that experience. So I think we ought to say that Pat is right about this. — J

Yep:

I take it that you are Pat. Maybe you should try writing to Rödl. :grin: — Leontiskos

It's sort of like the teacher gave you a homework assignment, "It seems like Rödl is wrong. Why isn't he?," and now you're asking TPF to help you with your homework assignment. Which is tricky given that no one has read Rödl.

J can correct me on this, but from my own reading of the OP, the primary question was: is the (Cogito-style) actuality of “I think” requisite for all instances of “I think (proposition) p” without exception? And the only way I can find this to apply is if the concept of “thinking” is expanded to include all cognitive processes, very much including cognizance. Otherwise, the stipulation that “I think” as a proposition always accompanies the proposition “I think (proposition) p” is, for my part, utterly absurd: it would entail that for each and every explicitly stated “I think that […]” there would necessarily be implicitly expressed “I think that I think that […]”, which is absurdity—in part because it would allow for if not imply an infinite regress of “I think”. — javra

That's a good counterargument.

For myself, I don't see the philosophical point of these threads on Kimhi or Rödl where we play this game, "Here is an obscure and unlikely claim. Let's try to defend it. Oh? You don't know what it means? Well, neither do I. Let's also guess at what it means."

On a philosophy forum obscure and unlikely claims need to be elucidated by the author of the OP, usually through primary or secondary texts. It is the responsibility of the author of the OP to elucidate what they mean by their claim, and why the claim has plausibility.

Typically Kantian, and perhaps not an exact iteration, the so-called thesis is in B407-413, concluded as “yielding nothing”, which is tantamount in Kant-speak to representing that which reason is inclined to ask when it doesn’t control itself. — Mww

Okay, so we have the outlandish thesis of the OP, <Every time p is thought, I think p is thought> (). This thesis is attributed to Kant, but no source or quote in Kant is provided for such a claim (!).

Now outlandish theses need to be interpreted and argued for. If @J is not going to argue for the outlandish thesis, then we need to know either why Rödl thinks such a thing or else where he believes Kant claims such a thing.

You give two options:

the so-called thesis is in B407-413 — Mww

and:

B133, in three separate translations — Mww

Now apparently you are pointing to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, no? Is this edition available online somewhere? Or can we get a quote? And is Rödl thinking of B133 or B407-13?

The OP is treating its outlandish thesis as if it isn't outlandish, and that creates pretty significant problems in an OP. If this were a book club where everyone had already read Rödl's book the OP would presumably make sense to us, but as is it takes far too much for granted.

(The Kimhi thread was very similar, except after a number of us finally looked at the book the outlandish thesis was not helped.)

For my part, this issue boils down to what one interprets by the term “thought”.

If one holds that cognizance (a fancier way of saying “awareness”) is in itself a form of thought, then there can be no apprehension of p in the absence of thinking p. — javra

Thinking p requires thinking p. No one disputes this. The question of the OP is whether thinking p requires self-consciously thinking p; whether it requires thinking "I think p."

It is fairly clear that it doesn't, and @J has yet to offer arguments for why it would. The only argument I have seen is an argument from authority from Kant, and yet the Kantians on TPF don't find the thesis in Kant.

- Not every thread is about perception. For example, this thread is not about perception.

- Yeah, you rolled in your schtick. Model/norm != perception.

Why in the world would Rödl think this? He believes that Fregean logic can't make sense of self-conscious thought — J

But no one in this thread has any real idea why one would hold that thought is necessarily self-conscious, including yourself. :grimace:

It's like if I started a thread which simply assumed that 2+2=5, and then everyone in the thread keeps diving out of the way as the elephant in the room shifts about.

2+2=5, says Kant. Sebastian Rödl agrees with this...

Suppose my friend Pat replied as follows:

“Sorry, but I don’t think 2+2=5.”

Which of these responses do you think would be appropriate to make to Pat?:

1. You've misunderstood. The thesis is not based on empirical observation. It’s not about what you experience; whether you are aware of having such an experience is not decisive either way. Some people are aware of it, some are not. But we’re not relying on personal reports when we claim that 2+2=5.

2. The “2+2” is an experience of 5, and requires 5. When you say you are “not aware of it,” you are mistaken. But you can learn to identify the experience, and thus understand that you have been aware of it all along.

3. The "5" is not experienced at all. It is a condition of thought, a form of thought, in the same way that space and time are conditions of cognition. "5", in Rödl’s sense, is built in to every 2+2, but not as a content that must be experienced.

4. If your report is accurate, then the thesis that "2+2=5" has been proven wrong.

See how crazy that thread is? What makes it crazy? The absence of some argument in favor of the idea that 2+2=5. Outlandish theses must be argued, not indoctrinated.

Yes, but human perception is neither a lens nor a camera. — Joshs

Looks like you need to try reading that post again.

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all? — Srap Tasmaner

Not sure what you're getting at.

When one talks about a magnifying glass and looks at a magnifying glass while under the impression that the magnifying glass itself is the object of interest, they have misunderstood what a magnifying glass is, and how to use it. So too with norms, models, frames, etc.

• What do you see?
• A magnifying glass.
• No! What do you see!? The magnifying glass is there to help you see small things.

This sort of reification of norms is not innocuous:

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. — fdrake

Or to put a finer point on it, say, "The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our norms of truth telling, and our norms of truth telling understand that." This gets us a step closer to fdrake's (quasi-redacted?) idea that "counting as" has no necessary or sufficient relation to "being", and vice-versa. Which is tantamount to despair of truth.

And I realize that these problems bother fdrake. Well they should. But he keeps trying to paper over the problems and pretend that all is well and good. ...And all the while his inner engineer seems to be jury rigging a Newtonian "self-contradiction isn't so bad" parachute. :brow:

I am interested in what else you would want? What would you like out of a theory of truth telling? — fdrake

I think the problem is that there is no truth-telling occurring. You are allergic to the word:

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict. — fdrake

Are you capable of using the word 'true'? Do you think it has meaning? Do you think it can be replaced with your frames and models and norms and "counts as" and "correctly assertible"?

Or as Srap said:

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model. — Srap Tasmaner

To "switch on" a model or proffer a model is apparently to make a claim that a model is true or represents something true. You seem to want to substitute model-play and frame-play for truth talk, and then you want to pretend that your model-play and frame-play are not simply presupposing truth in the first place.

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )} — fdrake

I don't think you have any clear sense of how truth is supposed to relate to the things you are trying to substitute in its place:

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. — fdrake

...I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. — fdrake

More:

I think there existing M and N such that C( A ) in M and not-C( A ) in N is working as intended. This isn't logical contradiction unless M=N. I also claim that it's a good description of how things work. I've given an example of that before with Ramanujan coming to adopt the system of norms of mathematics and thus being able to correctly assert his claims, even though he couldn't correctly assert them before. — fdrake

Do you even know what you mean by "correctly assertible?" You've already vacillated a few times on whether Ramanujan's early claims were correctly assertible, actually contradicting yourself . That doesn't surprise me.

Generally I would see something as "correctly assertible" in relation to some conventional norm. But this just begs the question of how the assertion relates to truth and how the norm relates to reality. We can rearrange norms, models, and frames until the cows come home, but the question remains: what do these norms, models, and frames have to do with reality? What do our statements in these languages have to do with truth?

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality.

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or is there another response that seems better? — J

Pat is correct.

If Pat is correct, does that mean that my #4 is the right response? — J

Sometimes people make self-conscious judgments and sometimes they make un-self-conscious judgments. If you want to call that a proof, then sure, it has been "proved" wrong. But note well that, unlike every other option, #4 is hypothetical.

Right. And for Rödl (and I think Kant and Sartre) it isn't even a matter of "prefixed"; the "I think" is supposed to be structural or internal. — J

And what is that supposed to mean? "I think" is a self-conscious, intentional act. Does Rödl think people engage in self-conscious, intentional acts un-self-consciously and unintentionally? Do they think "I think" without realizing that they think "I think"?

I think developmental considerations often give the lie to these theories. When a child runs up to a puppy to pet it, upon recognizing a puppy they are not saying to themselves excitedly, "I think puppy! I think puppy!" This seems fairly uncontroversial.

The error that Kimhi and apparently Rödl make is both serious and uncommon, and I don't really see why anyone would fall into this pit. Is there some boogeyman they are trying to avoid that gets them into the pit where all thinking is self-conscious thinking? It seems like you were leaning heavily on Kant's authority saying that thinking is always self-conscious. Now that we know Rödl misled you regarding Kant, the premise of your thread is undercut. The bizarre claim that all thinking is self-conscious is in desperate need of support.

Or is there another response that seems better? — J

I take it that you are Pat. Maybe you should try writing to Rödl. :grin:

When we get down to it, it seems like you want to say something like, "Yeah, my approach is contradictory. But it will work itself out in the end." Or perhaps you would just say, "But it's cromulent/pragmatic, and that's all that matters." Again: Bacon.

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. — fdrake

"And our norms of truth-telling understand that." This is tantamount to Banno's refusal to go beyond <"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white>. It is similar to Michael's refusal to reckon with the limitations of nominalism. You can't just appeal to poetic metaphor and pretend that it's metaphor all the way down. Norms don't understand anything. That happens to be a problem.

You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge. — fdrake

No, we just want truth-telling, and we're pointing out that your theory doesn't get us there.

In which Ramanujan's statements prior to his collaboration with Hardy were correctly assertible but he did not assert them while following the norms of mathematical discourse at the time — fdrake

Which is proof that what is correctly assertible deviates from the norms, and this is what you keep denying. You have odd equivocations going on between 'truth', 'correctly assertible', and 'norms'.

His principles were useful but not correctly assertible, but people believed them nevertheless, and just didn't give a crap about the self contradiction because the overall endeavour seemed cromulent and useful. The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}. — fdrake

"Not giving a crap about self contradiction" doesn't seem like serious philosophy to me. I don't think you can stand on that and call it a day.

I was planning something like this, but Count already did it:

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall?

I would maintain it is not possible. Adolf Hitler will not become the first President of the USA at some point in the future due to any relative shifts in "frames in virtue of which things are true." I think I'm on fairly strong ground with this assertion.

However, if I am mistaken, and background frames can shift such that Adolf Hitler was the first president, then surely claims like "we need not worry to much about this shifting because it is occurring very slowly" are also liable to become false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a good entry point. If everything is mutable then what about the first President of the United States?

No one denies that norms condition the manner in which we tell truths. But that is not enough. Truth outruns and precedes the norms, and it is not enough to say, "Yeah, well the norms know that truth outruns them." The norms are not an omnipotent deity in which all of reality can be grounded. Studying norms is not first philosophy. First philosophy requires us to study the things that the norms norm. Norms can be right or wrong, and this itself proves that we need to talk about something other than norms. If we are honest, frame-talk can't replace truth-talk.

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is quite right, and I think it feeds into the points @Count Timothy von Icarus is making against @fdrake.
(And no, you can't model switching on a model - in the relevant sense.)

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva. — Srap Tasmaner

No, I don't think so. I was wondering when that would come up.

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem occurs when one says, "Everything is a verb (and nouns are taken for granted)." Or for @fdrake, "Everything is a socially constructed norm (and norms of truth-telling understand that things go beyond socially constructed norms)." All Aristotle is doing is not taking the quiet part for granted.

The virtus dormitiva flies over the head of the modern, but let's apply the same thing to your duck example. Note again:

Why does it speak at one time and not at another? Because it has a power to speak English. — Leontiskos

[On Verbism,] If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns. — Leontiskos

If you don't admit that the duck and its quack are two different kinds of thing, then your "commonsensical" claim that everyone knows ducks quack and that ducks are not constantly quacking, is petitio principii.

Ducks have a power to quack. Sometimes they quack, sometimes they don't. The quack comes from them. It is their quack. The noun and the verb are not the same thing, but are related as substance-accident.

Now you can say, "Yeah, duh!" But if you don't accept that substances and accidents both exist, then you're begging the question. You can't begin, "Only behaviors exist; ducks are not behavior; therefore ducks do not properly exist," and then go on to say, "But the quacking still comes from the duck." You can't annihilate ducks with your left hand (which are beings-and-not-behavior) and then conjure them up again with your right hand.

There was a very stark example of this:

Like general principles "a being is what it does" — fdrake

This is a straight up contradiction. "A noun is a verb." "A being is a behavior." It isn't. These are word games. Or poetry in search of philosophical coherence.

Fair enough. In the synoptics I can more easily understand Jesus as a law-abiding Jew, but by the time we get to gJohn I have difficult time maintaining that conception. The prohibition against drinking blood is a big one for me. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes, well John 6 is a different case. That is clearly going against the letter of the law.

And from this we reach the conclusion of B above, that it there is no sense in which any description of or beliefs about reality can be more or less correct than any other. At best, they can be more or less correct relative to some arbitrary frame — Count Timothy von Icarus

BTW, this itself is also an absolute statement. To claim that "everything is relative and mutable" is no less absolute than claiming "some things are not relative and mutable." — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are very good arguments against @fdrake, and I do not see them begging the question.

Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different! — fdrake

So what are the norms of correct assertibility?

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised. My position's roughly stated in terms of the following inequalities:

socially constructed != arbitrary != false. Fallibilism != skepticism. natural != conventional. — fdrake

These sorts of answers are characteristically evasive. It's a lot of words that never actually tell us what you think correct assertibility is. "Dogs aren't cats and they aren't spoons and they aren't made of lava and they aren't a numerical sum." "Er... So what are they? Telling us what they are not is no great help."

I think the criticism of @fdrake is fairly simple: he presupposes truth (correct assertibility) but his whole approach precludes it. It is that odd modern tendency to have the knowing subject so radically separate from the frame that the question of accounting for him never even arises. And fdrake even sees this better than most moderns.

I earlier spoke of utility and pragmatism vs contemplation, and my point also applies to discursive inference and other parts of discursive knowing. In order to model a duck you have to truly understand ducks, truly understand your model, and truly understand their relation. Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth. It presupposes it.

-

Edit: I also don't want to abandon this issue ad extra:

But I'd also disagree in my terms, relative fixity is more than enough of a guarantee. It works for the mountain and the mountain trail, and it works for our word meanings. Even though we know they change over time we can still speak and understand each other, partly because the word meanings change slower than the speech acts which use them. — fdrake

I think there are problems with this epistemology. Change requires permanence - the two notions are co-implicative. This is why Aristotle had prime matter and we now have conservation of energy, for without that underlying stability and permanence the idea of change is incoherent.

A background? Like a mountain is fixed relative to a path on it. I don't mean this facetiously, what type of ground do you think is required of a philosophy? And why is it required to be that?

I don't think any unique ground is necessary, even if some grounding is necessary for each context. Do you believe there is a unique, correct ground to do philosophy from? Or a metaphysical structure of the universe? Why, and what is it? — fdrake

Mathematically, you are trying to say that the mountain changes less than the path, and you want to ground predications about their relation in the Δ between the two rates-of-change. But "changes less" makes no sense apart from a point of fixity that exists outside both of them. "Rate of change" requires some kind of unit or measure in order for it to be coherent. Without a notion of the unchanging the notion of change can't get off the ground. This is back to @Srap Tasmaner's "conceptual priority." It also brings us back to Aristotle, who sees physics as bound up in the puzzle of motion/change.

Thanks for that. I am short on time and I actually don't know that much about assemblage theory, so let's look at your example:

An indicative phenomenon for that perspective might be a kidney transplant, which takes two entities {damaged kidney to be replaced, replacement kidney} with material differences {they're not the same kidney} but equivalent functions {what kidneys do} on the level of the body's self regulation. No material substratum is needed to reconcile, or render compatible, that manipulation, only a check of functional equivalence - or really, functional substitutability. Does the new kidney work in the old one's place.

Which is probably very unintuitive if you're not used to thinking of it in that way - the new kidney is clearly not identical to the old kidney, but it's equivalent to the old kidney's old function as part of the body as an assemblage, even if there are material differences involved in all the constituent parts and those differences might even make a real difference in the real functioning of the process. Like the new kidney might be rejected. — fdrake

This strikes me as an odd example, because if a duck is not a substance then I don't think organ transplants make sense. Organ transplants exemplify the part/whole relation of organisms, which is different from the part-whole relation of aggregates.

Regarding the bolded, the material substratum that is needed seems to be the living body that the kidney is regulating. This is the thing that it "might be rejected" by. Without that substratum an organ transplant is a non-starter.

Another big departure from Aristotle's view of the world - at least on assemblage theory's own terms - is Aristotle's habit of hierarchically organising categories into genus, species and differentia through conceptual distinctions. The equivalent of categories in assemblage theory are fungible, and the hierarchical organisation principles aren't strictly based on type-subtype relations {or they don't have to be}, it's more based around functional parts arranged in a modular fashion. — fdrake

I think genus/species is plenty fungible, but the key for Aristotle is that without the form of intermediation represented by such a thing, one would be incapable of identification or categorization. So if Aristotle is right then the assemblage theorist will be as indebted to genus/species orderings as anyone else.

As demonstrates, Aristotle can be quite flexible. Hearkening back to the OP, I think we are asking whether behavior-modeling is sufficient to account for things like ducks. And the foil of the OP is "questions of being," the meaning of which we haven't tried to mete out. How do we reorient the discussion back to that original topic? It sounds like you want to say that the difference between a noun and a verb is accidental or a matter of degree. Everything is in a state of irretrievable change, it's just that some things are decaying/corrupting more quickly than other things? Substance-identity is ephemeral?

(If so, I think the particular part of Aristotle you're concerned with is the distinction between organic wholes and accidental wholes, or the idea that the most proper substances are biological organisms.)

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A key difference would be that Peirce makes formal cause clearly immanent rather than leaving it sounding transcendent. You don't need an outside mind imposing a design that is "good". The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. There is an optimising principle at work. But it is self-grounding. It is whatever is left after all else has got cancelled away because it didn't really work. — apokrisis

Thanks for this and for the generous post. I hope to come back to some of these points.

- Intellection isn't fast thinking. I thought we already addressed this in the past?

C.S. Lewis - The Discarded Image — Count Timothy von Icarus

I went back and read this section in its entirety. It is an excellent summary of the difference between intellection and ratiocination, as well as the decline of intellection since the modern period. :up:

This is good: you are making me think about this more. — Bob Ross

:up:

I agree, this isn’t true; because justice would be relative to the community, and the nation would be the highest community. — Bob Ross

This isn’t true as well if we are talking about how citizens should treat each other and not what goods the government should be providing. More on that later. — Bob Ross

Okay. :up:

Here’s the interesting part: distributive justice seems to require the community to take care of that child—if the resources are available in a sustainable and reasonable sense: do you agree? — Bob Ross

Sure, I think so.

This gets interesting though, as most people would disagree with this, prima facie, because most people would say one has a duty to keep an orphan baby, which was dropped off anonymously at their house, as long as required until the authorities arrive or despite any authority ever being on their way. — Bob Ross

How do you understand the relationship between the individual and the community? I would say that if the community is taking care of the child, then some individual(s) is taking care of the child.

Agreed; but how do we decipher what distributive justice entails? I started re-reading Aristotle to try and get some clues. — Bob Ross

Here is Aristotle:

That which is just, then, implies four terms at least: two persons to whom justice is done, and two things.

And there must be the same “equality” [i.e. the same ratio] between the persons and the things: as the things are to one another, so must the persons be. For if the persons be not equal, their shares will not be equal; and this is the source of disputes and accusations, when persons who are equal do not receive equal shares, or when persons who are not equal receive equal shares.

This is also plainly indicated by the common phrase “according to merit.” For in distribution all men allow that what is just must be according to merit or worth of some kind, but they do not all adopt the same standard of worth; in democratic states they take free birth as the standard, in oligarchic states they take wealth, in others noble birth, and in the true aristocratic state virtue or personal merit. — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.3

-

It seems like the community’s distribution of goods based off of trying to promote the human good (e.g., institutionalized marriage [in the sense of giving tax breaks and incentives], foster care system, CPD, etc.); so why wouldn’t it be obligated to give a base income, e.g., for each citizen if that were feasible (given the abundance of resources)?

It seems like why you and I wouldn’t go for universal base income, is because it, in fact, doesn’t work and is not sustainable; but what if it were? In principle, would that be distributatively just? — Bob Ross

The UBI is an interesting example. For Aristotle the standard of distributive justice is the measure of equality set out above. I'm not sure how Aristotle would view a welfare state, but it would probably be considered qua democratic rule.

The basic question is whether the UBI provides an equal distribution, and it's fairly clear that it doesn't, especially because it is meant as a form of welfare. Welfare is "merited" (on this conception) in light of need; and therefore to give everyone money when not everyone is in need is unjust and unfair. But the UBI crowd is full of strange ideas. To this they might say, "It is unjust, but it is less unjust and wasteful than other means" (which I believe is false).

I forgot to mention another thing: although it is not unjust to choose to not help a person who is not of your nation; I do still find it potentially lacking in beneficence, which could result in it being immoral albeit not unjust. — Bob Ross

Sure, I agree.

One of the points Aristotle makes is that belief and knowledge cannot be reduced to mechanistic (efficient) cause and effect. If belief is just the rearrangement of atoms, then it is hard to see how it can be "false." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, and a key premise here is that the intellect/nous has the formal capacity to know everything, and that which knows all things is not itself one of the things known. Usually this is phrased in terms of materiality: the intellect can know all material things and must therefore be immaterial. Rödl may be up against some variety of materialism, which limits the power of the intellect.

For the materialist the intellect is different and lesser, and therefore knowledge is different and lesser, and I think we see this play out in a lot of discussions on TPF. For the materialist the object of the intellect is determinate and limited in a way that Aristotle and Rödl do not accept.

being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat — fdrake

Okay, thanks for the clarifications.

An event is something which happens.
A process is a sequence of interrelated events.
A behaviour is a type in a process, or a type of process.
An assemblage is a network of events, processes and behaviours.

If you want entity too:

An entity is an process with a slow rate of progression relative to a background. — fdrake

"Interrelated" and "type" are doing heavy lifting here, to put it mildly. You can try to shift the ground to "arbitrary propensity for interaction," but once those two terms get cashed out I think the propensities for interaction will be anything but arbitrary.* To bring it back to that simple point, the differences between nouns and verbs do not seem to be arbitrary, and if being's propensity for interaction were truly arbitrary, then there would not be verbs and nouns. Once we agree that being's propensity for interaction isn't altogether arbitrary or undifferentiated, then we must ask how non-arbitrary it really is. ...Of course one could detach from the universe in the same way that one detaches from the street level when one takes off in an airplane. From that perspective cars and people look like ants, and from that vantage point everything is plausibly arbitrary. But if we want to understand the street level we don't want to hold it at a 3,000 foot distance. It might look like arbitrary relations from that altitude, but only because we've obscured our view.

Or to put it differently, it seems like you want to emphasize relations. That's fine up to a point, but I don't see how an emphasis on relations can so thoroughly ignore relata, and this seems particularly true when it comes to assemblage theory.


* What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). He ends up using different language to say the same essential thing.

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle. — Number2018

Isn't it commonly agreed that a social entity is not governed in this way, namely that it isn't a substance?

but that may be because natural science isn't the right science to do this, not because no science does so. — J

Right, and Aristotle is clearly happy to study the intellect in De Anima. It would also be within the province of metaphysics. But I hesitate to say what science or sciences Aristotle sees as proper to the study of the intellect. Rödl could be right that there is no science of judgment (as distinct from logic).

Couldn't "included" simply mean "studied" or even "taken into account"? — J

I think Rödl is using it correctly when he says that the science of perception must include the object of perception. So for example, the science of sight must include the object of color. So yes, something mild like "taken into account" would count as inclusion. To use Aristotle's word, sight and color are "correlated."

Note though that to study sight one does not need to study every individual object of sight or even every individual color. It's therefore unclear why an "illimitable object" precludes study. It seems to me that it only precludes an exhaustive study, and perhaps a science.

- :up:

- This strikes me as somewhat standard, depending on what precisely you are asking about.

Now it is in the latter of these two senses that either the whole soul or some part of it constitutes the nature of an animal; and inasmuch as it is the presence of the soul that enables matter to constitute the animal nature, much more than it is the presence of matter which so enables the soul, the inquirer into nature is bound to treat of the soul rather than of the matter. For though the wood of which they are made constitutes the couch and the tripod, it only does so because it is potentially such and such a form.

What has been said suggests the question, whether it is the whole soul or only some part of it, the consideration of which comes within the province of natural science. Now if it be of the whole soul that this should treat, then there is no place for any other philosophy beside it. For as it belongs in all cases to one and the same science to deal with correlated subjects—one and the same science, for instance, deals with sensation and with the objects of sense—and as therefore the intelligent soul and the objects of intellect, being correlated, must belong to one and the same science, it follows that natural science will have to include everything in its province. But perhaps it is not the whole soul, nor all its parts collectively, that constitutes the source of motion; but there may be one part, identical with that in plants, which is the source of growth, another, namely the sensory part, which is the source of change of quality, while still another, and this not the intellectual part, is the source of locomotion. For other animals than man have the power of locomotion, but in none but him is there intellect. Thus then it is plain that it is not of the whole soul that we have to treat. For it is not the whole soul that constitutes the animal nature, but only some part or parts of it. — Aristotle, Parts of Animals, Book I, 641a27..., tr. W. Ogle

Aristotle is basically saying that the study of animals requires a study of the vegetative part of the soul and the motion-causing part of the soul, but not the intellectual part of the soul, because a study of the intellectual part of the soul would implicate the objects of intellect, which would include everything.

But is Rödl correct in saying that the intellect (nous) cannot be included in any domain? I don't actually see Aristotle saying this. Aristotle is rather arguing from premises such as, "Natural science does not include everything in its province," or, "Animal nature is not intellectual." He is not arguing from the premise, "There is no science which includes everything in its province."

Can the intellect be "included in any domain"? I would say that it can be included but not contained or exhausted, but I'm not sure where Rödl is going with this.

Though I am biased, I absolutely love the filth of things. — fdrake

a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense — fdrake

Cry havoc. — fdrake

Huh!? Flat ontologies are squeaky-clean. Diversity is what creates tangles. If there is only one thing "all the way down" then there are no tangles at all. Metaphysics is the science of the fully tangled realm, and it only makes sense for someone who admits a large variety of different kinds of entities. Bad metaphysics happens when specialists in sub-disciplines conflate their partial territory with the whole, thus oversimplifying the whole in the direction of their familiarity. For the flat ontologist the tangles are entirely illusory. For example, substance metaphysics is much more complex and tangled than Atomism, and Aristotle's moral theory is much more complex and interactional than the sorts of things that are in vogue today. The point of flat ontologies is simplicity and unification. A flat ontology "makes sense" of the tangled appearances by reducing them all to one or two simples.

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others. — fdrake

But to what end?

for a set of problems — fdrake

...it is to the end of solving problems. It is, I think, a form of pragmatism. It's a bit like saying that we should develop lots of tools, even if we don't currently know what they are for, so that we will have more tools to draw on in confronting future problems. Sort of how the defenders of the moon landing will point to all the inventions that were harvested from that endeavor.

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if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far — Leontiskos

Oh yeah, really far. — Srap Tasmaner

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which @apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena.

If this is right then it helps highlight the problems with "behavior" and the resultant need to stretch it. In a sense behavior is too explanatorily potent to function as a top-level ontological concept. It is explanatorily potent in the sense that it is so useful in describing the class of organisms. If such an explanatorily potent concept could ground all of reality, that would make for an astoundingly unified theory. But because it can't do that, we have to go outside of behavior, either by artificially stretching its meaning, or else by introducing new concepts and pretending they are no different than behavior (function, process, etc.).

What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole? — fdrake

few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole — fdrake

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Depending on what fdrake means by “assemblage,” there are those who have explored this in great depth and in a programmatic way, namely the dialectical materialists. This in turn gave the Aristotelians a very clear target to develop their own views. One example of this is Richard Connell’s Matter and Becoming, which I have profited from. The Aristotelians cast this as what I called the “issue of accidental wholes vs. organic wholes.” An accidental whole is something like an accidental collection of substances, or as Connell states, “an accidental whole results from the composition of a substance or substances with an accident” (66). For example, a bronze statue is a bunch of bronze arranged spatially, and spatial arrangement is an accident of bronze. Bronze cares not whether it is spatially arranged in one way rather than another. “Accidental whole,” “Aggregate,” “Collection,” and, “Composite,” would be other names for the same sort of thing. Fdrake’s “two simples to make a whole” is an example of this.

And why does Aristotle think that not everything is an aggregate? Because he thinks there are organisms (organic wholes), such as ducks, and organisms are not aggregates. In organisms the relation between part and whole is not accidental. Bronze does not care how it is spatially arranged. You can break the statue in two and the two parts will still be bronze. But a duck does care about, say, the way that its internal organs are ordered. If you cut the duck in two it will no longer be a duck. This idea of dialectical materialism that there are only aggregates is also found in the mechanistic philosophical paradigm flowing from Descartes, which sees everything as a kind of machine (with accidental relations between parts and whole).

This means that for Aristotle ducks exist and statues don’t, at least qua whole. “Duck” names a real whole and “statue” names an accidental or artificial whole. Unlike the duck, the statue is an arbitrary collection of bronze, a true social construction. Thus the two nouns refer to very different realities, and so @fdrake is right to be suspicious of “treating all nouns as substantive.” Indeed, this is precisely correct, for the statue is not a substance given that it lacks a substantial form, i.e. a soul which integrates it as a single organism and whole. Yet the question is not whether all nouns are substantive, but whether some nouns are substantive. ...It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at this topic, but a substantial form is something like an internal principle of motion and change, which Aristotle attributes to vegetation and animals (in the sub-lunar sphere).

To bring this back to “behaviorism,” if fdrake (or his “deflationist”) is a behavior-atomist such that behaviors are the only real things and everything else can be reductively explained in terms of behavior, then for such a person there are no ducks in just the same way that there are no statues. If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns. We say “The duck quacks” in the same way that we say “The foot belongs to the statue.” In both cases the attribution of part to whole is pure imagination, for the “whole” is nothing more than the sum of its arbitrary parts (which do not even belong to it in any real sense).

Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Why do that? For the dialectical materialists, it is ultimately because Marx wanted to change the world rather than simply understand it (not unlike Bacon). So you focus on matter, which is malleable and changeable. (And, going back to my last post, even among the dialectical materialists one will find speculative thinkers (non-pragmatists), because for Aristotle wonder and simply understanding are characteristically human activities which will occur wherever you find humans. But that speculative inclination will in this case be hamstrung by an environmental pragmatism.)

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Everyone knows roughly what a process is — fdrake

Do we, though? I haven't adopted your term 'functionalism'. Why? Because you kept talking about behavior instead of function, and they are not the same thing. Now you are talking about processes.

A basic characteristic of the OP is that it tries to paint the whole world in one color "all the way down," and this approach has trouble saving the appearances. But when you uncritically introduce new tools, such as behavior, function, process, assemblage, etc., you look to be introducing new colors without admitting that you are introducing new colors. If new words and concepts are really needed, then behavior-atomism has already been abandoned. In that case what is really going on is this, "Yes - I admit that behavior is insufficient to capture reality, but I think that behavior+process will be enough to get the job done."

(Note that I haven't yet read fdrake's three most recent posts. Maybe some of this is addressed there.)

(I wrote this last night, and although it pushes things a bit far, I am going to post it. That is, it may be more appropriate for later in the thread, and maybe I will come back to it then, but if we have no anchor for speculative knowledge then I'm not sure there will be room for things like science, scientific explanation, and understanding, to breathe. That is, I think scientific understanding precisely in the classical, "useless" sense is at the bottom of much of this.)

Nah. I see myself in the functionalist camp, and see the modelling thing I mentioned as how I approach metaphysical stuff. Being able to talk about whether it's up to the task of metaphysics, I think, is something that distinguishes the thread's deflationist stereotype from non-deflationists.

It could very well be that there are ways of asking questions about being, or finding things out about it, or structures of knowledge, which don't resemble anything like the structure I've outlined. There might be questions which that schema can't handle even in principle. I suspect that there are, even. — fdrake

Well if you think your behavioral model is incomplete then it would seem that you are not modeling a duck; you are modeling a duck’s behavior. It looks like your deflationist is the one who uses behavior to (completely) model ducks. You part ways with this deflationist because you think there is more to ducks than their behavior. (Apparently your model would be a bit like an x-ray that captures a duck’s bone structure but does not pretend to do more than that.)

I think that’s right. I think there is more to ducks than their behavior.

The natural scientist or philosopher wants to understand ducks. They want to know what a duck is. Others are different insofar as they have only a limited and practical interest in ducks. They may want to know how to cook a duck, or how to hunt a duck, or how to get a cute photograph of ducklings. The one who wants to understand a duck’s behavior is somewhere in between. They seem to seek speculative knowledge of the duck, but only of one part of the duck (unless they are the sort of deflationist who sees behavior as the whole). But the difficulty for this person is that the boundary of their interest is a bit arbitrary. Why be interested in the duck’s behavior and not the duck beyond the behavior? If they are a descendant of Francis Bacon then the answer lies in a value judgment, and in that case their interest in nature really is practical rather than speculative. Hence “functionalism.”

I see that as the inflection point: the Baconian lens of something like utility or gaining power over nature. After all, models are the tools of engineers, and engineers make things happen. The goal is pragmatic. Granted, there are rare cases in which a “behaviorist” (like perhaps fdrake’s deflationist) would not be a pragmatist. And although the way that the modern mechanistic paradigm feeds into Bacon is important, a speculative-mechanistic motivation nevertheless looks to be quite rare. So I would expect the lion’s share of “behaviorists” (and functionalists) to be pragmatists in the lineage of Bacon.

If this is right then it might account for why the behavior-modeling approach continues to haunt those who see it as insufficient. They are left with a question like, “What else is there to do with ducks beyond modeling their behavior?” To say just a bit more, I think that if one is able to weaken that pragmatist-Baconian lens then it will be easier to relativize behavior and use a wider palette to paint the duck, and it should also become easier to access a speculative (or what in Aristotle often gets translated as “contemplative”) mode. For Aristotle contemplating the duck in its wholeness is the highest stage of philosophy, and this act is “useless” and certainly not pragmatic. It may be easier to grasp the idea if you think of a lover rather than a duck. It would be absurd to constantly construct models of a lover or her behavior without ever simply appreciating her, just as it would be absurd to constantly take pictures of her without ever seeing her or gazing on the pictures. It is a bit like, after spending a semester studying the technical and discursive details of impressionism, then simply sitting and gazing on a piece by Cézanne for long hours, where the wholeness and splendor of the piece impresses itself on you and is finally allowed to shine through. Such contemplation can only occur when the pragmatic mindset has been quieted, and it answers the “What else…?” question in a way that is unanticipated and yet meet, in much the same way that at the end of a chain you don’t find yet another link, but you also don’t find something that is unrelated to the links you have been following. ...And the paradoxical irony is that Cézanne often repays the contemplative even with the sorts of wages that the laborer seeks.

* Many of these discussions over the last couple weeks have reminded me of Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture (link). His thesis is basically that useful things are for useless things, and we have become hamsters on a wheel after forgetting the properly useless ends. There is a way of understanding merely to understand, and also of allowing that understanding to simmer, develop, and unfold of its own accord. But such understanding is not self-conscious. It rests in the other and forgets itself – a kind of intellectual wu wei. Receptivity of the knower calls forth receptivity of the known.

- Farewell and good luck!