Please try to remain exegetical in thread.

@Brendan Golledge @Arcane Sandwich - settle down please.

That I'm hungry.

I don't have anything worthwhile to say on the matter I'm afraid.

No.

I don't care.

Ok, but we can all agree that this is a problem, right? This is what I would call "a bad thing" in Joshs's sense of the term. — Arcane Sandwich

Yeah! And I think that's how @Joshs is construing "correlationism" as a term. Right? There's a certain stodginess associated with correlationism when you call it that. You get "trapped in it". Like being "trapped" is a bad thing. You lose sight of the great outdoors, wilderness, the thing-in-itself in a substantive sense. All of those seem like bad things with that way of describing them. But you can adopt the position as if it's a good thing still, on its terms even. You probs won't though, if you're in the bucket of fans of so-called correlationist philosophers, since it seems like a distortion and a slur.

Satisfied? — Arcane Sandwich

While I think the term is strictly speaking value neutral, I think its origin as a critical term of various strands of philosophy isn't a neutral move. So it's one of these cases, I believe, that adopting the vocabulary can prejudice your perspective. As an example, I doubt the correlationists accept the framing of the mediating role subjectivity/agency/discourse play in terms of subjectivity's/agencies'/discourse's relata. I'm aware that this is part of the framing in After Finitude too, but you don't need to accept this if you're a correlationist {or someone branded as such}. If you'll forgive me the bloviated metaphor, the ghost of the relationship between subject and object isn't seen as haunting a correlationist flavour of metaphysics from the inside. You kinda need to get tricked through argumentation into seeing the mediating medium as an object, transcendental warts and all. And that move isn't accepted by our hypothetical correlationist friends here, I believe.

He conceived assemblages as including active inorganic, organic, technological, and informational non-human components. — Number2018

Oh yes! And it is a great irony that the meticulous inhumanity of Deleuze's metaphysics gets used to imbue the universe with human affect and structures with human discourse.

Meillassoux explicitly says in After Finitude that Deleuze is neither a weak correlationist nor a strong correlationist, his philosophy is instead "subjective metaphysics". — Arcane Sandwich

Yes. I don't think Deleuze is a correlationist. I do however think he gets interpreted as one. People tend to use his theory, I think, to highlight the social mediation of everything.

It looks like you place strong emphasis on the synchronic aspect of the assemblage, where all its workings and functioning are fully realized in the present moment. No doubt, this perspective allows for interesting research. However, an exclusive focus on the synchronic dimension may obscure various political and ethical implications. Assemblages permeate all domains of contemporary life, and individuals involved can become completely consumed by the intensity of their assemblages' directed activities.Elaborating on this tendency, Deleuze equates the internal relations of assemblages with relations of power. For him, assemblage theory becomes an inquiry into the genesis of current power relations, how they evolve, and potentially a theory of practice regarding how to exercise or resist power. — Number2018

I was under the impression that, as far as assemblages are concerned, one man's synchronic is another's diachronic. Like you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of theorems and proofs and arguments. Or you could form a history of maths, as an assemblage, as a history of institutions and geographies. The first guides the second and the second guides the first.
Or if you wanted to do a history of violence in the political north, you might be able to do it from the perspective of lead in paint.

If you want it in jargon, the same assemblage can be territorialised in multiple ways and have its {the} body without organs face multiple strata. I think, for historical reasons, people strongly emphasise the socius' mediating role on assemblages, even though nature plays an expansive role in that mediation. I see that as a loss of flexibility in the theory due to its usual emphasis.

Edit: "New Materialism" wise, I think this latter emphasis is why you can lump Deleuze in with the "correlationist" stereotype, if you read him as another philosopher of total social mediation.

Ah yes, I think Number2018 might agree that this is what Deleuze-Guattari refer to as the molar dimension, which they argue is a surface effect of processes within molecular assemblages. — Joshs

:up:

I don't like using the vocabulary since it's nuts for people who have no background in it.

I agree that various types of causality can be relevantly applied within different assemblages. Moreover, some causal relations can even be universally applicable. However, let’s consider your example: "Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you." There are four heterogeneous elements: ‘eating,’ ‘a lethal (sufficient) dose,’ ‘cyanide,’ and ‘killing.’ One could start by asking about factors that brought these elements together. Following Durkheim, one might invoke the concept of anomie, which designates a state of degradation of the social fabric that leads to an increase in suicidal deaths. Alternatively, one could turn to the death of Socrates and examine the practices of execution in ancient Greece. In either case, the inevitable conclusion would be that the extraordinary encounter of political-social forces is necessary to assemble these disparate components.This is also true for your other examples, such as the needle-heroin-addict-socius or the pool cue-strikes-ball-goes-into-table-pocket assemblages. Moreover, what distinguishes an assemblage from a mere occasional aggregate, is a pattern of recurrence, a regularity of appearances. Therefore, it makes sense to determine a kind of causal relation that is ultimately responsible for the temporal durability of the assemblage. — Number2018

I agree that one could do that, and it would be a relevant way to study how the assemblage of eating cyanide was generated. Nevertheless, one can hold the individuating conditions for a given assemblage fixed and give an account of how it works as an assemblage. In the same way as you don't need to know the history of pool cues to describe a pool cue striking a ball.

Another way of putting it is that assemblages, once they're up and running, are often created and sustained through internalised networks rather than the ones which partook to their genesis.

I'm sure you agree with that, I'm mostly spitballing.

I don't think so. Is the idea that if people's standards for determining what is true changed, what is true would also change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not quite. The idea is that people can tell whether something is dependent upon human opinion for its properties, or existence. And assessing what senses that dependence has. Assessing such dependence/independence is part of our epistemic apparatus, and is something which is correctly assertible sometimes and not others.

I understand the counterargument you and @Leontiskos are advancing against my position as follows:

Call correct assertibility of a sentence A C( A ) and truth of a sentence T.

1 ) There exists a system of norms N such that {following N in assessing if A is C( A ) forces C ( A )}.
2 ) N is conventional.
3 ) N can thus be changed to some M such that {following M in assessing if A is C( A ) forces { C( not-A ) or not C( A ) }.
4) Assume that T ( A )
5 ) Then it's possible that T( A ) and not C( A ).
6 ) Therefore C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ).

Things I agree with in this argument:
A) I agree with 1.
B) I agree with 3, up to restricting the scope of which changes are appropriate given that N has actually assessed A and found C( A ) - it could very well be that no moves are possible from the current state of N such that not-C( A ).
C) I agree with 5.
D) I sort of agree with 6. I agree C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ), but I don't agree it follows from the rest of the argument.
E) I could agree with 2, depending on how convention is construed.

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )}, moreover the inference from 5) to 6) is something I reject, since two predicates sharing an extension doesn't meaning they're used the same way {Clarke Kent and Superman}.

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.

Perhaps a better example is the discovery of atomic orbitals. In ye olde days atomic physicists believe all positive and negative charges obeyed the Coulomb force rule. They also knew that this entails that electrons were attracted to the nucleus of an atom. They also knew that electrons did not collapse into the nucleus of an atom. In this regard when they adopted the coulomb force theory, they were correctly asserting something - charges attract or repel in an inverse square law - but also correctly asserting something which contradicted it - some charges do not attract in an inverse square law. The difference is in context. You might be able to think of this as a quantifier restriction on the scope of the prior coulomb law, but I'm just going to say it's different contexts of use. Regardless, people behaved as if the coulomb law had unrestricted quantification over charges and restricted quantification over charges at the same time. And this was fine, science did not implode.

It's also a case where people knew the coulomb law was not true in some absolute sense, but could be asserted without problem {correctly!} in some contexts! I'd made prior comments about the difference between truth as a concept and assertibility as a concept is that asserting a statement is true means enacting a particularly precise and pernickity form of correct assertibility.

You might say that this doesn't clear anything up, as if it's a sub case of correct assertibility you can reiterate the above argument. And there I'd agree, you can. But I don't think this is a problem.

What would be a problem was if in the same context of use something was true and untrue, or correctly assertible and not correctly assertible. Then that context of use would be committed to a contradiction of some sort. Which can be... alright, pragmatically.

Why is it that people agree on so much? I think this comes down to how norms of judgement are generated. Peoples' eyes agree on object locations very durably, so location within a room works like that. Even if they might disagree on the true locations of objects when the rulers come out - like if my coaster is 30cm or 30.005cm from the nearest edge of my desk to me. If correct assertibility is an assay, truth is crucible.

When people share the same contexts, the overwhelming majority of conduct norms about such basic things are very fixed like that. That includes various inferences, like "if you put your hand in the fire, you'll burn it", "don't put your hand in the fire" comes along with that as the judgement that burning your hand in the fire for no reason is bad is very readily caused by the pain of it.

In the latter regard, there's a room for a moral realism in terms of correct assertibility, since the conventions are so durable and there's room to claim that "needless harm is bad" is true.

But I doubt you will find any of this particularly satisfying.

I didn't say the quoted text. Think this is a typo on your part.

Well I can't control how you read it or must parse it in your terms. @Number2018 seems to have no problem with it in principle! But that's probably because we come at this from similar perspectives to begin with.

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

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

"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. — Leontiskos

It is nevertheless what happened with Newton's method of fluxions. You can even read Berkley's and Marx's criticisms of it. It was well understood that his mathematical artifice was self contradictory, and no one cared because the ideas in it were essentially right nevertheless. People do this all the time!

There are only indirect, mediated effects and implications. Immanent cause designates the autonomous organization of a system of implicit operative conditions, which acquires a temporal mode of self-sustaining autopoiesis. — Number2018

That would be worth another thread. Some assemblages behave as if there is a relevant concept of sufficient cause - pool cue strikes ball, ball goes into table pocket. Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you. Things like that. The changes propagate in each case, but to the extent an assemblage can be split into distinct entities with relations, it makes sense to see the state of one relation propagating into others given a change.

The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages — Number2018

I read that as less a statement of arbitrary, recursive mediation and more a statement that assemblage-level laws {abstract machines, things like physical laws} are coextensive with the behaviour of their components {concrete assemblages}. It's roughly a way of saying a law of nature says nothing more than what things already do and can do.

The something extra I would like it the notion that things are in some sense actually true, not just true relative to norms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

For me, there are norms of what count as discovery. That includes actually doing things like opening the window to check the weather. The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. Our norms of truth telling also understand things like if people stopped using a currency, it would cease to have value. See what I mean? I mentioned this in the previous thread. With @Leontiskos. That people routinely assess mind independence as part of social norms, and it's a real thing, you can go look.

Some philosophers will object that ideas don't occur separated from sentences. I think they can. — J

Up to quibbling on the concept of separateness I agree.

2. The “I think” is an experience of self-consciousness, and requires self-consciousness. 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. — J

I'm not responding to your exact words, I'm responding to what I see as the construal of consciousness in it.

The construal of "I think" as a universal mental surveyor is an odd one. The mental image of it is that there's a bunch of sentential content bubbling up from/in the mind, some surveyor partitions it into A-OK and "dump it" - the latter of which is discarded somehow. The A-OK stuff gets labelled/willed as "I think", associated with the selfhood/subjectivity of that person, and that stuff can get asserted by that person. Call that account A.

Alternatively the "I think" is what takes mental/bodily gubbins and puts it in sentence form and filters it into A-OK and "dump it". Then the remainder of the first account holds of the sentence forms. Call that account B.

A and B have different qualitative characters, the A would be an experience similar to finding clarity in an encapsulation of an idea, B would be similar to having an idea or having a particularly arresting idea and discarding preformed bollocks at the same time.

The B would have an intentional object different from a sentence though, it's even hard to say the quale is affiliated with an intentional object , as it's an experience of generating/forming a distinct sentence which could be thought and discarding others. The qualia associated with it are thus at best awareness of sentence fragments and fleeting perceptual impressions, being combined together into a more definite and unitary state.

So I think the latter form doesn't behave like the "I think" seems to, since "I think" has an implicit sentence placeholder which it would be directed toward, but the quale is associated with the genesis of what a state may be directed towards as part of the sentential content/sentence's emerging mental landscape.

I'm not sure the former construal makes much sense phenomenologically either, it's purportedly a state of universal meta-awareness of every part of one's state which has been flagged as assertible. I, personally, am just not aware of a cloud of sentences associated with environmental objects and my own thoughts. The majority of my meta-awareness is perceptual rather than sentential, and the parts of it which are linguistic are more broadly narrative than declarative. The thing which makes "I think" as a form of self consciousness implausible to me is its scope, and the image of awareness it has - I'm just not constantly experiencing sentences.

Though when I'm writing, like this post, there might be a quale similar to the fragments stitching themselves together. But I wouldn't call the state of awareness in it exclusively directed toward a sentence like "I think" construes, the overall directedness of the state is toward the expression of an idea rather than a particular sentence, the sentences are more like a vehicle for it

Moreover, if "I think" was required for self consciousness, it would be odd, right? Because some animals are definitely aware of themselves but don't have language. And not all aspects of one's self awareness are sentence-y and intention-y to begin with. Like sensations, I'm aware of them but I'm not typically directing my consciousness toward them.

Hi fdrake, How are you? Would it be possible for you to explain to me, a non-mathematician, what that means, to mathematicians? I don't understand the underlying concept here. Is it a mathematical concept, or a moral concept? I'm not seeking to debate this point with you at the moment (though I might, in another Thread, in the future). All I'm asking for is a bit of clarification for the readers in general, including myself. Thanks in advance. — Arcane Sandwich

A mathematical idea, or proof, which is morally true is one which says something which is correct or ought to be correct but in an imprecise or inaccurate way. The way it's said or written also makes the statement false or misleading in some important respect.

An example of something "morally true" might be 1/0 = infinity. It suggests a right idea - that if you divide by smaller and smaller numbers you get larger and larger numbers - but is false.

Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth — Leontiskos

I don't seek to reduce correct assertibility to utility. There are correctly assertible things which aren't useful in context - like using "Luke's father is Vader" in this discussion. And there are useful things which aren't correctly assertible in some contexts, like the idea that economic growth is always exponential.



It ultimately comes down to whether you see description relative to a frame as the same concept as description relative to an arbitrary frame. I don't. It seems you and @Count Timothy von Icarus do. 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.

I reject that in two ways, firstly that a ground in the sense you mean it is necessary to begin with - the concept is inherently "unrelative", so is a presupposition I don't have and don't need to adopt unless I'm trying to argue in your terms. Secondly that frames aren't arbitrary, and can serve as grounds for correct assertibility.

We've been going back on forth on me stating a presupposition, and you stating a presupposition, but neither of us are arguing which presupposition is "better" in manner which relates our perspectives {very well anyway}. Which, as fas I understand it, was @Srap Tasmaner's point in the OP.

So let's go through why I like this perspective with a worked example or two.

I gave an example of something which is comprehensible in terms of a background which is nevertheless changing - a mountain path and the mountain. I also gave an example of correct assertibility with Ramanujan and Hardy. Which I'll go through in much more detail.

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, and could not due to his lack of formal training - so they were not considered as true until that occurred. All there was to the truth of Ramanujan's claims was whether they were correctly assertible in accordance with the norms of mathematics taken in toto. They were, and were shown to be.

Note that "they were, and they were shown to" imputes a somewhat fixed structure of justification to mathematical discourse, like proof. But it isn't a unitary phenomenon - like published mathematical proofs tend to be formally invalid, and corrections are submittable to published and believed proofs.

So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine.

An assemblage like that which produces mathematical knowledge has pretty strict and durable rules, but many forms of them. And those rules are identical with an idealised form of current practice. And current practice has both a potential and an actual component, as well as an idiosyncratic concreteness. People follow the rules in their own way, and improvise and revise the rules to more fully explore/extend the scope of mathematics.

The assemblage of mathematics production is also open ended in terms of its operation - if you deleted all universities and mathematical knowledge from the world, the norms would die too. That would impact the production of mathematical knowledge despite having nothing to do with the content of mathematical practice. It's also self organising, like the Langlands Program was generated within it and has ordered a lot of research and thought within it. It develops according to its own idiosyncrasies as well as its constraints, and is nevertheless sensitive to whatever milieu it finds itself in. Maths looks different if it's done on the tables of aristocrats or the laptops and whiteboards of universities and is submitted to different social forces.

Correct assertibility in that milieu has changed over time. Newton's proofs of his calculus principles were formally invalid, and it was known at the time - infinitesimals were 0 and not 0 at the same time in his proofs, at different stages. 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}.

Nowadays we could interpret the proofs as a germinal form of something formally valid - his calculus with fluxions is much the same as our nonstandard analysis or formal calculus with limits. So we can "repair" his proofs and see his results as correctly assertible, as well as being morally true at their publication.

Hopefully the above worked example illustrates that although the background can shift, that doesn't render the justifications using it arbitrary.

It operates like a machine, but unlike a mechanism, it lacks a predefined or intentional design. It sustains itself and maintains its consistency through the regular reiteration of divergent elements, which do not follow a direct causal order. — Number2018

We probably agree more than disagree. I just wanted to note that jettisoning causality from assemblages entirely {not that I'm saying you do this} is one of the paradigm's worst excesses. With reference to addiction studies, the sheer discursivity of heroin addiction makes people want to prohibit conceiving heroin as an addictive substance. As in, heroin is not addictive, it does not cause addiction. This is a lot of fart huffing and ceases to take materiality seriously, in materiality's name.

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle.

When I'm writing those dashes, I'm intending to treat the connected terms as a fully connected network, in which every concept and event set implicates all and only those it is reachable with a "-".

The consistency that emerges is not the result of predetermined design but of the free interplay of parts. — Number2018

Yes. Though I'd want to stress that {I see it as} the "free interplay" is a freedom from any external or conditioning necessity, the assemblages just is what it does, what it can do {openness, singularity}, and finally what it might do and is drawn to do {its abstract and virtual characters}, so it's "free" in the sense of being unconstrained by anything but its own nature. Including human concepts of representational adequacy.

For @Count Timothy von Icarus - I think a big difference between the perspective you're advocating and the one I'm coming at this with is that our perspective is also one thing among many, another material process. It's another form of assemblage that acts upon others.

I don't see why I would need to man the gates against relativism? Everything I've said is an attempt to provide a good vocabulary for the correct description of things. From my perspective, I could want nothing more than this. Especially since it's correctly assertible that things which have counted as knowledge - been knowledge - in eras past have turned out to be false.

Does the world behave as if it's full of intelligible principles? Yeah, there's loads. But there's different principles everywhere. And more than one way of describing each of those, those means of description might be inequivalent too, even if they stand on equal epistemic grounds {competing models}.

From my perspective, seeing relativism as a problem which must be defended against only invites it into the space of relevant problems. I've made no reference to incommensurability of conceptual schemes, the relativity of whether X is true to an individual's perspective, the relativity of whether X is known to an individual's perspective and so on and so on. From where I'm sitting whatever relativity I'm committed to is in the territory. Things really do behave as if they're relative to a context. Whether that's a path on a mountain or a response in a thread.

To simply reply "I don't feel that is a very useful way of looking at things," just courts the reply "well I do." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You've construed me as committed to this when I don't believe I am? Correctness conditions for assertibility aren't the same idea as usefulness. Simply because being correct isn't always useful, and being useful isn't always being correct. We agree on that. Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different!

My question is: "what's you're response?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

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.

It's correct to assert plenty of stuff, even if it doesn't turn out to be right upon new evidence, or appears to be a non-problem if the norms change. I see that as a descriptive statement rather than a proscriptive one - I'm making first a descriptive claim that the norms of discourse regarding knowledge construction are not arbitrary, and a proscriptive one that in order to create knowledge using them one must act in accord with them.

A good example there is Ramanujan the mathematician. He wrote a lot of correct things, even though he couldn't assert them correctly with the standards of mathematical proof at the time. When he was trained to do such a thing in his collaboration with Hardy, he produced a lot of knowledge. Before that, all he said was conjecture. What made his conjectures knowledge are that they were correctly assertible, and they were so even before their proof.

Hi, fdrake, can I ask for some clarification here, please? That's a biblical phrase (it's John 14:2), specifically. What did you mean by that, when you used that phrase in the context of your latest post? Thanks in advance, and please feel free to ignore this comment if what I'm asking is trivial. — Arcane Sandwich

Mostly I'm needling {what I see as} @Count Timothy von Icarus''s insistence on a single way of doing philosophy as clearly, but unstatedly, Christian. And I'm needling with that phrase as it's sometimes used as biblical support for Christian religious pluralism. Considering the underlying dispute between our dear Count and I in this thread, as I see it, is between an expansive form of pluralism in metaphysics and epistemology {me} and a thoroughly singular Aristotelian+Christian worldview {the Count}, it seemed appropriate.

A. You have to accurately (perhaps more or less so) describe "what's there." This, by definition, isn't arbitrary. The model, description, etc. has to be, in some sense, adequate. Presumably it can be more or less adequate. But this to me seems right in line with the idea of truth as "the adequacy of intellect to being." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You're right. The state of things isn't arbitrary. It's very flexible. There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws.

A description of how things are can be more or less adequate. We agree that there are more or less adequate accounts of how stuff is, and we agree that metaphysics is alright. Shouldn't that give you pause? You're arguing against a perspective I don't hold, nor have I advocated for.

Now, the issue of "fixity" shows up if there is nothing at all stable about what constitutes being "more or less adequate." Perhaps adequacy can vary (although, personally, I think that in an important sense it does not), but it cannot vary without any rhyme or reason (i.e. some regularity that "stays the same") to it, else we are essentially in scenario B above, since what constitutes "adequacy" is inaccessible. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you're interpreting me as committed to a relativist "everything goes all the time" approach. I am not. I doubt any sensible person is. Connecting "absolute" fixity to the possibility of adequate descriptions is something you're positing, not me. And that needs to be argued for on its own terms. Why is it the case?

Compare that to a model of discursive knowledge based on something closer to an equilibrium of truth seeking norms - negotiated conditions of correct assertibility. If you want me to put it in metaphysical terms, you can describe an assemblage adequately when an assemblage of knowledge production can couple with the other assemblage in a discursive fashion that satisfies the norms of correct assertibility.

I think where you're coming from has a certain alignment of One Methodology and One Metaphysics. "Functionalism all the way down" has a similar alignment - of a methodological pluralism and a circumscription of ontologies to contexts. Even if some contexts are really expansive.

So when you're reading me as performatively contradicting myself, or committed myself to logical contradictions, I'm just going to read that as you projecting your own presuppositions onto me. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to make that move so long as you're following One Methodology One Metaphysics.

And I think the views and criticisms you've made have merit, of course. But allow me to make a similar move - I can see that your views and criticisms have merit, and a scope of application, because the philosophical paradigm {as it were} I'm sympathetic to has a great deal of room in it for alterity. Whereas your instinct seems to be to rebuke this. Even though we both agree {act as if there is} on there being a structural symmetry between the metaphysics stuff we're saying and the methodology stuff we're saying. The father's house has many rooms.

So yes. Of course you're going to read me as contradicting myself, and maybe I am, but the ones I've seen you point out are contradictions based on your presuppositions of how things work. And not mine.

IDK, it strikes me as a weird sort of double standard. We cannot have metaphysics — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't believe that. Instead I believe avoiding metaphysics is a great hypocrisy, as every philosophy has metaphysical commitments - the question is whether they're explicit about it or not.

That's pretty much saying "make arbitrary systems, so long as they aren't actually arbitrary." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why?

But what's backing this aside from blind faith or assertion of "usefulness"? And fixity relative to what? — Count Timothy von Icarus

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?

I don't mean these facetiously either. I can understand disagreeing with my points, but we're currently disputing whether fixity relative to X makes sense, I gave you an example where it did. It seems to me you're saying that there needs to be a unique ground of things in order to provide a satisfying answer to your question - am I right in that?

To my mind, the key issue here is that you have to ask: "is it really useful?" Or "really most useful?" Because, it seems fairly obvious that we can believe that something is useful, choiceworthy, etc. and then later discover that we have been mistaken. This is a ubiquitous human experience. And presumably, there is some truth of the matter about what we shall immanently regret prior to the moment we start to regret it. Likewise, it does not seem that all ways of describing the world are equally correct. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. I agree.

This seems to be looking at species and genera more as the later "calcified logical entities." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes. Ex-post-facto logical entities that have good explanatory and descriptive power, but are not baked into the structure of the universe. Though they may be characteristic features of some assemblages. Like the flow of organisms organised into a cladistic tree, splitting based on presence or absence of traits.

Okay, thanks for the clarifications. — Leontiskos

No bother. I try to be as direct as possible so that people can disagree with me substantively.

What you say sounds in some sense Peircian, but Peirce of course ends up with Aristotle (or very close). — Leontiskos

Yeah. My impression is that you're imagining infinite semiosis, coupled with the idea that material stuff can count as signs? I think assemblage theory is a bit like that, but it also departs very strongly from it. To my knowledge, signification in assemblage theory is a particular flavour of process, there are others. Lots of processes contain signifiers, which can link in with others {smoke => fire, when someone may infer it}, they are signifying to begin with {like a conversation}, or alternatively they're mixed {like a conversation to manage the development on a building site, which contains various things to fix which signify required actions...}.

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. 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.

Parsing that would be that the entity - the kidney - isn't exhausted by its current set of interactions, it also has a field of potential interactions. Above and beyond that it's singular, it's this or that kidney, and it will only ever be that one as it's the only one which was individuated as that one. It has its own entire history.

Another difference is that assemblages tend to be organised in networks rather than trees. The entities corresponding to abstractions loop around in terms of their causal flows. A worked example with addiction - the substance behaves more addictively if you've had adverse childhood experiences or a history of mental illness, both of those latter contexts are societally mediated or outright social phenomena. The consumption is also socially mediated - ritualised, consumed with friends or at parties, when the dealer's got good the best smack. The social stuff is also drug mediated, as it depends upon the addicts being repeat customers and being the demand for the business.

Complex systems of mediation are the paradigmatic object in that metaphysics. They don't "nest" very neatly at all, as soon as you start talking about one concept you tend to need to start talking about another. Because the events tend to propagate that way through the different registers of concepts. Different registers brought together into the same event sequence, a tangle. And they need to be thought together "in their own plane", in a manner true to them.

You can enter paroxysms about the sheer degree of mediation in an assemblage, and focus on mediation so hard you forget about causes entirely - and that's IMO an all too common pitfall of the approach. But "a deaf ear for context" induced by "flatness" it does not have. Its emphasis is on engineering ontologies for situations based on how they behave, a kind of descriptive metaphysics.

But it does have general themes and concepts in it, you just don't ever think "oh yeah the world is made of assemblages" like you might with a substance, or ideas. "made?", nah, "behaves like".

Some concepts are clearly so broad and so implicated in assemblages that they're worth extracting as general abstract patterns with their own principles - like matter and signification, or as generic principles that assemblages seem to work with - coupling, decoupling, dissipation , structuring into a context . There are also relevant meta principles, like you might want a word for the sort of... thingybob... matter and signification are in terms of assemblages, a "stratum".

So yes. This is an odd mix of being profoundly anti-systems building but also profoundly for systems building - yes, make arbitrary systems, go nuts, so long as they describe what's there.

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves. — Number2018

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be.

time? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Proper time? Seems to be dependent upon motion and vice versa. And nothing like ye olde absolute time exists right.

paths — Count Timothy von Icarus

Seems an ambiguous reference. A mountain path can change.

but does what it mean to be a path constantly shift, — Count Timothy von Icarus

I know very well what you intend with the question, but I don't want to play ball with the assumptions regarding concepts and essences it comes with. If you could flesh out what it means for you for a meaning to be fixed I'll play ball though.

then that sentence is no guarantee of anything — Count Timothy von Icarus

Willing to bite the bullet in your terms. I don't believe there is an "absolute" guarantee of anything, the fundament is always relative to the task. The fundament of our life is Earth, everything on it depends upon the Earth's existence in plenty of small ways. A meteor is irrelevant. Unless that meteor will collide with it. In which case the fundament shifts.

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.

Does this have to presuppose that all entities are mutable? That everything is mutable? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see why it would have to presuppose that. If a background doesn't change fast at all it doesn't disrupt any ontogonetic processes which use it as a foundation. Example, mountain range, a path on it, a person walking on that path, a bead of sweat on their face. The mountain range changes in the rate of epochs, the path changes in the rate of years, the person on the rate of days, the sweatbead in the rate of seconds.

“say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why? You can say that the bead drips down the walker's face, regardless of whether the path will be there when the mountain falls.

Take the following as provisional definitions of process, behaviour, event, assemblage. I think they work for my posts.

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.

Yes, the sense of behaviour is very big. I think this makes sense. "What's the behaviour of the system?" is the sense of behaviour used, it isn't like walking. It's more systems theory inspired.

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. — Leontiskos

You can read it like that. Or you could read it that being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat. It isn't so much a flatness of "everything is the same thing", it's a flatness of arbitrary structure and nesting. Flatness through lack of {global} subordination of one register to another.

The quoted bit sounds to me much more like the early-modern-period-and-on's focus on reductionism (also a trend in the pre-Socratics). I — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes I had forgotten that classical philosophy meant the classical period's philosophy as well as paradigmatic approaches. Forgive me. I know very little about the classical period at all.

like science (which it really seems to want to be) — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's a good question. What makes me want to engage in metaphysics which are naturalistic and kinda flat is that I see them as providing good bridges between intuitive and scientific concepts, when I am aware of them anyway. A bit like a language of mutual framing which enables a reciprocal connection between the concepts.

This is the usual "philosophy is a bridge between the scientific and manifest images" jazz. Though I'm framing metaphysics as an intimate part of the bridge. It's a form of "conceptual engineering", of propagating changes and insights from one to another.

Though plenty of metaphysics are useful for this. I'm sure @Joshs would have lots of good things to say about Matthew Ratcliffe's work using phenomenology as a lens to link psychology concepts with clinical practice - a move between the theoretical and practical through an articulated metaphysical medium. Rather than taking the nascent ontologies of mind in psychology research.

@Srap Tasmaner - if you wanted me to make a more ontological argument for why thinking about things as assemblages is a good idea, I could try to scrape one together. But I figured a pragmatic justification would do for now. As usual.

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

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others. One context I'm familiar with assemblages "in the wild" is in addiction studies. And as frustrating as all all the rhizome woo can be in that field, it's a useful framing to take. Why would use this approach as a framing device? Because it enables some descriptions, provides a good lens, and a unifying vocabulary for a set of problems. If you've got an ontology which says "agents first", you've got to grapple with how a chemical can override an extant agency, if you've got an ontology which says "bodies first", you've got to grapple with how people in hospital who're given morphine don't tend to suffer addiction to heroin.

that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

I think the reason you'd want a flat ontology, not necessarily even assemblage theory, is in circumstances where a unique stratum doesn't behave like a fundament for your inquiry. If you're doing chemistry, treat matter as a fundamental thing, fine. Law? The law and its politics and institutions. As soon as you end up needing to cross registers, eg how violent oppression can create intergenetational trauma - bridging the political with the agential with the bodily - , a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense. When the world's causal networks seem to look like that.

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary? — Srap Tasmaner

So yes, if you notice that the appearances have those weird causal tangles, adopting an appropriate ontology for it makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are others.

But, more generally, at this point I'd need to press on the distinction between a description and an explanation, those two things are very linked. If you describe that someone who injects heroin tends to become addicted to it, you have a little causal model of addiction. If you describe that someone in a wheelchair gets depressed when socially excluded in some way, you have a causal model of why they were depressed after work booked an inaccessible venue for their night out.

That isn't unique to assemblage theory obv. That's just about descriptions and explanations in general. If you describe something's causal structure you've provided an explanatory model of {some aspect of} that thing, like if you described duck flapping and lift you'd have a model of them flying, but thus an explanation of why when they flap they fly.

Networks, assemblages, all that jazz, don't however tend to isolate variables like the above when they're used. They're used to highlight mediations between layers. Like the social context mediating addiction in hospitals vs in the street, hospitals make less addiction for the same chemicals, why. Rather than trying to isolate aspects of causal chains which span registers.

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it?

I think something particularly good about it is that it lets you leverage how "flat" the ontology is to span disparate themes.

From a philosophical standpoint, emphasising interaction like assemblage theory does has a nice effect on some philosophical problems. You just don't end up worrying about most of them. As an example, the interaction between bodies and souls goes away when you just sort of start with "it's all networks all the way down, soul? Not causally isolated, part of network. Body? Not causally isolated, part of network. They're all networks. And if they're not networks they're emerging from fields or networks".

Which is a similar argument for why one would want to adopt modal realism, it lets you say lots of neat stuff about philosophical problems. Or dissolve them. And even create new ones! Cry havoc.

The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable. — Leontiskos

I'm also going to @Srap Tasmaner as this post gestures toward a metaphysics of "processes all the way down".

I'm suspicious of treating all nouns as substantive - that is, naming a demarcated natural entity. Where does this or that cloud end? That seems to be a matter largely of our fiat. Whereas the endpoints of a duck do not seem arbitrary.

I think that there's an interesting functionalist response to that boundary. Though it may be a way of passing the buck on an individuation question to another set of concepts.

There are some processes, potentials and properties which distinguish the duck from other things. Process - its own homeostasis. Potentials - it can fly through flapping its wings. Properties - its bill is its. You can read this as a collection of predicates which only have that duck as their extension, but that's a consequence of what I'm getting at.

Like @Count Timothy von Icarus suggested - you can treat the duck as a bundle of coupled processes, properties and potentials, and you can construe processes as series of patterned events. Even though all of those processes are also coupled with environmental processes, there's a substitutability of the environment in some of them. When the duck flaps its wings, the exact molecules the air is made of near the wings doesn't matter for the wing function, only that the air has certain properties - like sufficient density. Its digestion doesn't care too much about the chemical constitution of its food, only that the food is digestible and has appropriate macronutrients to integrate with its internal biochemical processes.

There are two concepts at work there - a sharp autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's wing flapping with the air molecules, and a loose autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's digestive process with the arrangement of chemicals in its food. That makes how one process individuates itself from others a matter of quality and degree. The gut doesn't care if this worm is eaten before that one, only that both go down in a single act of eating.

Then let's return to the cloud. I think this works decently well for a cloud - which is a field of condensation of water droplets, so the fungibility of its boundary, its condition of individuation, gets explained by a distance from its already localised molecules. The field of condensation is a localising process, and brings with it potentials and properties. Like the droplet size in the cloud, the type of cloud, and the volume of rain it will create. The ambiguity of the boundary humans will draw between the cloud and its environment is explained by the cloud's nature as a field, and its constitutive process as a matter of dissipating concentration away from its already constitutive water. Its boundary is ambiguous for humans because its characteristic functions are dissipative over space.

Two more supporting intuition pumps for using processes as individuating conditions. Some - likely all - types of process are generative. And processes tend to have conditions of dissolution. The former creates individuated patterns, the former marks that an individuated pattern is present because it can end.

By generative, I mean that processes couple patterns of events together, and thus create joint patterns and pattern forming mechanisms. Gestating an infant is a paradigmatic example, one process individuates another by setting up the latter's internal constitution.

By dissolution, I mean that processes cease to function as they do when their subprocesses decouple. If you decouple digestion from the production of energy for an organism, the processes that depend on it dissipate - the human dies when ingesting the cyanide pill. And note the human who dies is also the one whose digestive process is dissipated.

What this perspective does replaces problems of individuation with problems of relevance. How does one process become coupled to another? And to what degree? I think that is a genuine problem. It is a similar flavour of problem to mereological ones, only regarding functional parts. What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole?

I should also say that the underlying flavour of metaphysics above is assemblage theory, rather than process philosophy, but the concept of an assemblage is more academically obscure than the concept of process. Everyone knows roughly what a process is, few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole. The above is based on engagement with the naturalistic assemblage theory of Manuel De Landa and a reading of Deleuze which emphasises what I'd called "tangles" {my term not theirs}, which are assemblages that span multiple ontological registers {strata}, like the act of opening one's window to check the if it's raining tangles the weather with ideas. The tangle there is between the state of rain outside with my knowledge of whether it's raining.

You seem to be saying that the deflationist and the functionalist (or "behaviorist") occupy the same position, but the former occupies it dogmatically and the latter occupies it tentatively. — Leontiskos

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.

Though I also imagine that I would construe something which went outside the schema as another flavour of schema, without any convincing reason not to. However I do agree with our dear @Count Timothy von Icarus:

Right. For instance, when we see a sleeping tiger it is still "behaving" in how it interacts with the ambient environment, light bouncing off its body, etc. However, there is a serious problem for the functionalism mentioned by ↪fdrake and ↪Srap Tasmaner as a "universal solvent," how exactly do you decide where different being start and end? Everything is just a heap of behaviors. Are all our groupings of them into beings and entities ultimately arbitrary? They certainly don't seem arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Some things I think resist being put into the schema are ontogenetic questions. Events need to be individuated in order for there to be patterns in them, events need to be patterned - what individuates events? How are events individuated? What patterns events? How are events patterned? It's difficult for me to imagine how to tackle those without taking some domain of entities as a fundament, which would then give rise to another domain of entities. If someone wished to ask ultimate questions about things, they would not find my perspective very helpful in that endeavour, and would vehemently resist the way it frames metaphysical questions.

For my part, I do think individuation only occurs as part of an extant process - like a crystal appears as a distinct unit out of a solvent, or a volcano from subduction of tectonic plates. The question of how the crystal distinguishes itself from the solvent, or a volcano from the plate subduction, definitely has a metaphysical flavour to it.

I think classical approaches to this grant that there is a primary register of beings - like a substance, or god, or idea, and try to show how everything else is a mode of that's elements. Which for me is a similar move to the above, holding one entity set constant so another can emerge upon it. Only I think this applies to disparate entities of different types rather than whole regimes. Rather than all arising from one type of entity, consider something like: a body eating a cyanide pill erases a human mind from existence, causing grief in that person's loved ones, through inhibition of a cellular process. That's a death. It implicates natural, social, metaphysical and perhaps even spiritual orders in one event, in a manner which is not a raw juxtaposition of parts. Beings are not isolated, they clamour together. I think this speaks to @Srap Tasmaner's point about bundles of behaviour, that bundles in the map show up because the territory comes prepackaged.

The framing of metaphysics would be: providing descriptions of mechanisms abstracted from encountered patterns. The schema I provided is, I think, a prototypical example of such a thing. You take notes about a thing's behaviours, think about them a bit, then put them together. A bunch of stuff has to be posited in the background in order for such a thing to get going. Whether you can get at that background with a more general functionalist description is anyone's guess.

I'm inclined to say "yes" in some sense, and bite the bullet of @Count Timothy von Icarus's regress. Since infinite regressions tend to work through infinite chains of presupposition needing distinct justifications for why they're there, things on one level of explanation presupposing things on another. And with reference to Chesterton's madman, it can't be turtles all the way down if you arrange them in a big circle.

Though I believe that the events themselves are "arranged in a big circle", because every single thing which happens is a terrifying alchemy of ontological categories - a nation can end due to bloodloss of a leader, a civilisation due to its empty stomachs. And their patterns are tangled between registers (thoughts, cellular processes, chemical processes, geology, social institutions}.

I also believe that the tangledness of things is "in the territory", and so if a functionalist perspective appears tangled, that is because what it views really is.

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

Thank you for accepting my apology, fdrake — Arcane Sandwich

:heart:

My apologies, then. — Arcane Sandwich

No worries. You didn't do anything against the site rules. No one knows exactly where a thread will go, and we rarely keep things on topic with mod actions.

@Arcane Sandwich

Arcane, T - please remain civil to each other. @MrLiminal. If any of you wish not to engage with Arcane Sandwich's responses due to considering them off topic, please do so.