A description of what it means to avoid conflict. One area where I'd disagree is that the conflict that is avoided is not wiped away as trivial, but it is avoided precisely because it's seen as critical and unresolvable. I appreciate this description might be my own neurosis, but it's nonetheless personally truthful. That is to say, if you are very leftist and I'm not, we could get along quite well as long as we made our dispute a trivial part of our relationship. That is, we must declare not to personally care about that difference because it isn't trivial. It's critical, and if we allow it to remain in the forefront of our interaction, we are not be able to get along. — Hanover

If agreeing to disagree becomes the middle ground mutually and easily, it's definitely a way of dealing with the conflict that preserves both people with little effort. If a calculated, mutually, indifference like that isn't able to solve the conflict clearly the mutual recognition that it is irreconcilable is one outcome with its own consequences, lots of other strategies of reconciliation are another.

I dated a very liberal woman once, and I told her that nothing she believed offended me, that she was entitled to all she believed, and I even truthfully stated to her that I liked it that she held passionate views, despite I disagreed with her in very large part. And she had trouble with me, saying she had trouble divorcing her personal opinions from our relationship, although she finally came to terms with it. The challenge was hers far more than mine because I have no problem avoiding conflict. She did. God did she (but that's another story). — Hanover

I think this warrants an autobiographical response. A lot of the arguments I've got into with partners have been rooted in when I see something as trivial and they do not, or vice versa. These are differences in what is cared about, how that care is expressed, and the intensity of caring. My immediate response to conflict is to understand why it's come about, ask questions etc. This was troubling to one ex who had difficulty putting their feelings into words, so in my view most of our conflicts were suspended until a later date; that is, still ongoing. For her, she'd express herself by being moody or quiet and distant until the conflict had resolved itself in her head, and that was the way of dealing with it. We never came to some compromise on a way of dealing with conflicts and that was one of the reasons, I imagine, that we eventually broke up.

But, contrary to you saying she finally came to terms with it, I had the opposite response and didn't position myself as the one who didn't need to change; I tried very hard to limit introspective conversation, and to meet her at her halfway (middle ground). It was a difficult middle ground for me to occupy, and it showed. For me, self expression and coming to an understanding was a trivial given for any interpersonal conflict. She, however, neither needed nor wanted to develop such an understanding. Just like I neither needed nor wanted to deal with sustained negative expression until she felt better.

The point here is that the means by which to decide who's right and who's wrong in circumstances like that is internal to the decisions made, not an external factor which conditions them. There's no system of forms to register complaints, and no legal framework for evaluating what's right and what's wrong; the schema is the precedents set and lived within by both agents independently. Which, therefore, has to be changed through mutual effort. Otherwise such a resolution is no negotiation or compromise.

This isn't to say that such mental and behavioural gymnastics are required for all decisions regarding others, most decisions regarding others are largely irrelevant so long as they are within usual social and ethical parameters. That is to say, most decisions are already made for us in a reasonable way.

The change in perspective brought on by seeing how you think of things as part of the problem is uncomfortable, and can't (shouldn't?) be sustained long term. It could engender being an extreme doormat as much as a faithful and considerate partner. So it should be contrasted with seeing how they think as part of the problem too.

I've always liked "50 Shades of Cthulhu." Ol' Lovecraft was way ahead of his time.

I tried to write a parody erotic fanfic of a forbidden romance between a Shoggoth and a Night Gaunt at one point. It was quite difficult to make the indescribable have sex with the mysterious.

And maybe that's the real solution, which is just to admit an incompatibility when you realize that your sensitivities don't match up. That is not a "let's all get along" attitude though, but more of an admission you don't get each other, where the sensitive person is always feeling wronged and the less than sensitive guy feels like he's always having to apologize.

I don't think this is always the solution. If it can be the solution, generally the stakes are very low. Like professional tolerance of coworkers, or different opinions of acceptable topic for smalltalk.

Advocating this solution resigns all parties involved to a neutral, non-dependent ground; where their moods and personalities are seen as independent and reactive to their other's actions. This is resigning both parties to a calculated but essentially impossible indifference to the other. We have a problem, let's agree to ignore it. Another wrinkle is only one side of the emotional/rational dyad, the personas in the conflict, will see calculated indifference as a solution; the one who sees the engagement as a triviality to begin with. The world would look a lot different when you see yourself as a problem - the problem in this case.

Linking this back to more philosophical themes, indifference to the other renders ethical conduct towards them impossible. How can something be negotiated when one party puts themselves beyond the bounds of negotiation? The answer is simply; it won't, they refuse.

So when you say:

But, it does abandon the idea that one side is more right than the other, with it being no more correct to yell "bully" as it is to yell "pussy." As long as both have the ability to successfully interact in their own worlds apart from each other without conflict, then maybe that's the safe place to stay.

it engenders a kind of agent-agent ethical decision in which one party is radically indifferent to the other; so much so that 'let's agree to disagree', in all its reasonableness, acts as a principle to ignore yourself as a thorn in another's side. When they can't, by assumption, see it like the triviality it is. Gentle ribbing is usually done precisely by people who have a broad sense of triviality in interaction, and we shouldn't let ourselves seize the middle ground purely out of our own sense of reasonableness; the tyrant (edit: or the bureaucrat) is the model of such self justification.

Actual ethical decisions are opportunities for self transformation - a leap of faith into a new sense of what is reasonable and what isn't. Which isn't to say reasoning frameworks should be jettisoned in making ethical decisions, on the contrary, it echoes the etymological root of reason - ratiocination, to consider rather than to impose as already decided.

I don't see anything to disagree with. It doesn't really address the points of difference between ribbing and long term abuse or bullying, or being chronically that guy. The cynic in me says that precisely because your response is so reasonable it positions non-reasonable responses as always unwarranted - implicitly worthy of understandable scorn. I understand why Andy would want to punch through the wall, it probably makes sense in the context of being chronically that guy and a target of institutional bullying. Sure, he over-reacted there, it's pretty understandable why he would. A pox on both their houses.

If you've ever been the target of a sustained campaign of bullying, every single instance becomes reminiscent of the whole thing. The belief that the target's highly emotive responses are over-reactions is as much another condemnation, another reason to permit and retroactively justify your actions towards them, as it is just being sensible.

I think you're missing that the middle ground is always contested territory.

For better of for worse, this is the most stressful thread I've ever participated in. A conversation about patterns of conversations. Every post is both part of the conversation and also an object to be talked about as example within the conversation....ahhhh

I think this is a function of your stance towards the thread more than anything. It is a very unusual thread, a nauseating psychological hall of mirrors. Is it possible for you to see yourself as one of the reflections? In it rather than beyond it.

I wonder what came to be to make this thread how it is. Very strange.

What I mean is that sometimes lovers are equal partners dealing with the business of life. At other times one lover wants to show off and be admired by the other ('I'll be the child and you be the impressed parent.') Of course the unpleasant stuff is one partner trying to parent the other oppressive. Or trying to play the child when the partner is in the mood either for adult-adult conversation or are themselves impatient to be the adored child.

I imagine we're making much the same point in different vocabularies. You're emphasising the adaptability of roles, I'm emphasising the adaptability of persons. The only difference is going to be how much people are seen as a series of games. Maybe that's a big difference in worldview, but it's a small difference in conduct here, I think.

Boy. This is hard to read. I'm trying to think of myself in similar situations. The only times I can remember having a reaction similar to what you're describing is the contempt I have sometimes felt for people, usually boys or men, acting, being weak, vulnerable, pitiful. Thinking back, it's probably always boys or men. Not a good feeling. Looking back on it from many years in the future, I came to realize my feelings of contempt happened because I recognized the same weakness in myself. It was shame. Is that what you're describing, or is it something else? Is it purely social behavior - something you do with a group of friends - or would you do it when it was just you?

I don't think the reason I obtained remorse or even stopped is because I saw myself in the target. Some of it was that I couldn't get away with it any more; I did find more socially acceptable cruelties which took a lot longer to stop; some of it was humanising the target. One of the rationalisations - well, it was true at the time for me - I had to vindicate the bullying was that since the target was a member of no social groups, and the social group I was in allowed him a limited amount of autonomy. Remember, only insofar as he was forced to be the unwilling jester, the sad clown. Him being bullied was a social contract of inclusion as much as it was a series excluding and belittling actions. Every skilled bastard fosters codependence and feeds off it.

Maybe the only similar thing I've seen, which isn't usually identified as similar, is that guy at work. That guy hangs around, everyone thinks he's a bit of an asshole, everyone thinks he's annoying. But nevertheless he's formally included in your group because it's impolite to exclude him. The condition that allows the members of your group to keep him there? Continual mockery behind the back, two-facedness, crocodile smiles. A smorgasbord of passive aggression.

I think you nailed it. I know this contempt. It's all their in the word 'pussy,' which in a crude vocabulary serves as both the primary kind of sinner and the officially sanctioned object of desire. A rough theory would be that men repress their vulnerability and find it again at a safe distance in a woman (in the heterosexual case.) He is the shell. She is the shameful but delicious goo inside.

I don't think it's surprising that a self identified male social group would have a derogatory term for women as a mark of exclusion. But, I don't agree with the symbolism - men aren't hollow, women aren't without restraint. Men aren't aligned with cosmic order and women aren't aligned with chaos.

The extent I agree with the symbolism is: insofar as maleness is seen as the regulative ideal of identity, femaleness looks like a shadow cast from that regulative ideal. It's a bunch of tropes; ideological machines; that people struggle against, and I don't think it's helpful to regurgitate their stereotypes. We can all chew.

On a more abstract level, feminine identity shouldn't be aligned with the negative while male identity is aligned with the positive. You end up with gendered dyads like (negative/positive = female/male generates) passive/active; subservient/masterful; non-assertive/assertive; weak/strong; emotional/indifferent; petty/generous. It isn't exactly a metaphysical truth to assert this dyadic opposition, it's a conceptual generality of the tropes we live in.

I appreciate this, fdrake. I have been bullied. I am quiet and small in stature and he was a very big man and profoundly aggressive and because I did not respond to his sexual advances he resorted to true authentic cruelty. It was horrible being a joke to them because my humanity was taken away from me and those who followed him and believed in him appeared as though they were allowed to treat me that way. That laughter at the so-called 'weakness' is pretty shocking.

I find sexual aggressiveness and shaming due to non-consent pretty disgusting. But I can try to bend myself into the role a bit. I very much doubt that your abuser saw himself simply as bad, if he did he probably wouldn't have continued behaving like that. Perhaps he was unreflective and regurgitating things he's seen before, perhaps he knew what he was doing was wrong but continued anyway because, at least, he knew what he was doing was wrong. Perhaps he was frustrated because you'd shown him the limitations of his power; and how humiliating that a simple 'no' suffices to destroy a persona.

The worst part about it was that I thought he was a good person, I really wanted to believe it.

Did you take actions to avoid being bullied or did you allow (he made?) his bullying to become a twisted intimacy between you?

I think we could give examples for both the bad and the good to humour, so I am unsure how to proceed. Are you suggesting that perhaps humour is too ambiguous because it is an oversimplification?

I'm trying to demonstrate that humour isn't aligned with positive or negative, it isn't inherently good or bad, what matters is how it's used.

Totally agree. Modes. I think in sexual relationships this fluidity is especially evident.

I'm not sure that having reflexively assumed roles is usually a good thing in relationships. If both people know what's going on and are OK with it, sure, but I don't think this happens as much as its converse. Games played are usually bad, or at least worse than an alternative.

Couples probably have the greatest need to play games with each other because they're the most vulnerable and exposed to each others' actions. I believe they therefore owe it to each other to find out where games are played and whether they should continue play upon being revealed.

Having your vulnerabilities bared while resisting becoming a victim is difficult. Becoming dependent upon your victimhood is another popular game.

@TimeLine

The laughter evoked by non-humorous jokes underlined by a passive-aggressive hostility or Othering can be amusing to bullies; when I think of this young girl who was taunted by several men, they found it funny and it evoked laughter, yet it is clearly not humour. Humour is ambiguous because it can reflect several different conditions and even then to categorise can be an oversimplification. So, I look at humour from a functional angle rather than attempting to ascertain why we find some things humorous and see that playfulness is an important part of human cognition and can bring us joy. — Timeline

I've been a bully before, one of the things I remember most acutely about it - or rather remember as conspicuous in its absence - is that cruel actions aren't seen as cruel to the target. Their humanity is suspended in the decision to belittle them. The target becomes part of the narrative of jokes surrounding them. Their needs were silenced and the dissatisfaction of those needs is their only voice, spoken in my terms; as hilarious weakness. Formally, they were not excluded by my (and friends') actions because they were already excluded from any empathy as a prerequisite to bully them without cognitive dissonance or bad faith. Truly authentic cruelty. If it wasn't so funny we wouldn't have all laughed.

We were absolutely playing and infinitely playful - the target had no recourse, anything they did was interpreted as part of the game we made of them. It was play all the way down, only it was indifferent to them all the way down. Really - how funny, to suffer.

This is not humour, though, not authentically where people are laughing mutually and are being playful.

Do you think humour is necessarily part of mutual amusement and play? I'm not sure this is right, it seems broader to me. Mockery and rebuking are humorous but neither are reciprocal play.

I've seen someone be very playful with how much they like to cut themselves and how worthless they think they are. It was something like 'hey it doesn't matter if I cut myself if I'm worthless right? At least it's something I get to enjoy now and then!'. Structurally, a joke. It was sort of funny in the 'man hanging himself by his own belt and then his trousers fall down' way. Also coming home to an ex mid suicide attempt (vodka + pills) 'What are you doing?' 'I'm thirsty'.

I mean, humour isn't just this generator of positive feelings, it can easily be repurposed for all kinds of dark shit.

Edit:

I laugh because I don't need to feel.

Yeah, I think this is good. If someone really is beyond feeding a compulsion or depressive circular thinking, most of the time anyway, laughing about it might be a signal that they're doing ok and a way of ensuring that they're doing ok.

I'm down with that, so long as the roles are kept as transitory states which are adopted and not permanent mental archetypes. Someone can be an 'adult' at one point and a 'child' at another.

Since people are sharing games, I'll share a few little ones.

From the book 'Why Don't You Yes But'. People are trying to help someone and are suggesting things for them to do (why don't you...) and the person who is being helped refuses every proposed solution (yes but), and seeks no novel solutions themselves. The purpose of doing this is because remaining in the problem gives them an emotional payoff - perhaps they're 'the responsible one' and good at dealing with problems, perhaps its a means of expressing frustration with their partner (who is the problem), perhaps they're trying to show that they're beyond help while asking for it. How to avert the game is by asking them what they're going to do.

@TimeLine

Let's not forget humour (what counteracts depression) and positive relationships between people either, otherwise culture deteriorates and we would live within a mechanistic environment where responses are without quality of character. You breed weakness on both ends of the spectrum, so it is about achieving the balance between the two.

Humour has another pathological use as a coping mechanism. It's like Zizek's laugh track, it laughs so you don't have to engage. Only it is you. It downplays all problems and stops resolutions by posturing yourself as already not needing help. Particularly cunning depressions seem to be able to use humour as a means of self alienation, which behaves like the former, only humour is used to fill the hole flattened affect (generalised low intensity of feeling) leaves. I laugh so that I don't have to feel.

Edit: I forgot to include a personal example, 'Why don't you just' - this crops up between people who live together, partners and at the work place. Someone makes a demand and downplays the effort required to satisfy it by saying 'Why don't you just' - refusal to 'just do it' paints you as a bad worker since you can't 'just do' a simple task. If you do do it, you take on a rather annoying or circuitous task which has been downplayed. (and perhaps the fucker who 'suggested how to do it to you' will take the credit).

Between cohabitants, it crops up through chore allocation and responsibility disavowal of it. Living communally with n people means (just for demonstration) (n-1)/n of the rubbish is not yours, so everyone appears messy. 'Why don't you justs' usually allocate extra cleaning duties to housemates, asking them to clean up more than their share.

Between partners, it can crop up a lot of times. It's usually used in some kind of posturing where the person who says it has an emotional attachment to a particular way of doing something - 'why don't you just... do it this way'-, and not doing it that way would be stressful for them.

How to avoid the game 'why don't you just' depends on the context, as that tells you how you can affirm the difficulty of the thing you're being asked to do. Between cohabitants, 'why don't you just' for household task responsibilities; ask if the person would like to help you do more than your fair share, as the mess is mostly everyone else's anyway.

At work, 'why don't you just' can be resolved by simultaneously affirming that you want to do the task, but that you are already busy and would need to sacrifice X Y Z to do the task, or if you're not already working overtime, you could work some overtime you demand compensation for.

With a partner, I don't have any general advice for avoiding it. Still working on that one. ;)

The games make sense without much of the theoretical background. Adult/child don't have to be interpreted as features of the psyche with a rich structure, things still work with the approximation that adult = the responsible, fettered one and child = the irresponsible, free one. Most of the games take on the character of responsibility shifting, disavowal or branding.

You're not going to find a cure for depression in a book. You're not really going to find a cure for depression anywhere except in practicing better coping mechanisms and finding out what bad ones you have. This is always hard.

In terms of books that can help you find bad coping mechanisms, I'd recommend 'Games People Play' by Edward Berne. There are loads of cheap copies of it on Amazon. Other than that, if you have no trouble with helping others emotionally - or at least find it easier than helping yourself - try to think of yourself as another person and ask how you'd try to help them... Then do it, as best you can.

If you're completely nuts and enjoy highly abstract approaches, try Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guttari. Without much background it's like reading a self help book written by aliens.

Good luck!

Those who think that thought merely 'reflects' the real in a 'transcendental' sense (w/r/t Laruelle use of the term 'transcendental' - a use, btw, which bothers me to no end), miss precisely this power of thought, it's introduction of novelty into the world in which it thinks about.

Eh. I imagine using philosophy to find things out about stuff is precisely what Laruelle intends by a transcendental stance towards philosophy. Treat it as a synthetic a-priori generating machine, but one among others - not the. Perhaps this is a misreading, but it reminds me very much of Deleuze's remarks about concepts as bricks.

'A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.'

@StreetlightX

But then I'm always tempted to ask: who actually thinks that philosophy functions in the way Laruelle does? Who - apart from maybe Hegel - will say 'My system covers everything, even the (its?) negative!'. I mean yeah, there are some nameless idiots here who walk around with blinders so strong that they don't even realize they're wearing them, but generally if you press people they'll acknowledge that at best they're working with a series of intuition pumps or attempts at framing things so as to bring out relevant features of the world (or of specific situations), and so on. I mean, this is just what thinking is: you make a distinction, and then you attempt to reason on the basis of that distinction. The alternative is that you get interminably bogged down arguing about 'the system', and I can't imagine anything more philosophically anemic.

I think this is true on a meta level. People's beliefs about their own philosophical conduct are probably usually something like 'it's a hodge-podge of intuitions, research and what seems reasonable at the time', but I don't think it's true when actually doing philosophy. The best example of this I think is 'biting the bullet', in which a person acknowledges an inconsistency of an intuition but nevertheless asserts their now (momentarily?) non-intuitive position on pain of consistency. It marks a moment where there is a severe failure to look around, as @csalisbury put it. To examine stuff as it is without, or with minimal, blinders. When you go down the pub and talk with philosophers they don't fucking know anything just like me, but I'll be damned if denying that wasn't an operational necessity of the job.

Though, I do think it's appropriate to believe that someone always has some interpretive apparatus at work, and this is a precondition for sensitivity to the real. I enjoy the distinction between an interpretive apparatus sensitive and subservient to the real and one aimed at it, which produces transcendental thought. Sensitivity/topicality science/philosophy is a fun dyadic pair. Then of course you have people like Andy Clarke and Ray Brassier and Steven Pinker (however much he's disagreeable) and Merleau Ponty that actually kinda do both. I like that dual sensitivity.

I'm pretty sure, however, that the reason you find Laruelle's claims trivial is because Deleuze sees things very similarly, Zizek has similarities too, and you also like Brassier. Also that you already think 'non-philosophically' in the broad sense. Most do not; how hard it is to bend your mind that way in terms of wordview isn't just a function of the difficulty of Laruelle's writing. It's because it really is difficult to be a slave to the real.

I wanted to make a note on a non-philosophical real vs a philosophical one. Let's take Zizek's real since it's probably a point of commonality between most of the active participants in the discussion. It's kind of a negative concept - delimiting the sphere of sense. Sometimes it erupts and breaks stuff. It marks a point where the always-already interpreted is reformed in some way. Most of the time we don't experience it, since it's the site of transformation which engenders a subject. It's sensed only as a failure of previously established sense. It's never seen as it is since it is the breakdown and reformation of identities (which are always symbolic).

Laruelle, at least as I see it, interprets this as a philosophical dyad, in which the character of the real is just a delimitation of sense, contrasted to our entrapment in the play of signs. The real is determined through its account, even as it resists determination as the part of any account. This is seen as a performative contradiction, how can the real be attuned to this or that philosophical position when it breaks the category of sense? The real becomes a shadow - taking the shape of the negation of sense, with different accounts of this negation; shadows always have something other than them determining their shape.

I think the idea of a caesura is a good analogy for what the real is in this kind of account. The pauses between words are a determined absence, which is always-already delimited given an understanding of the spoken language. The significant, already interpreted absence that constitutes a caesura is much harder to hear when unfamiliar with the language - the words bleed into each other, removing the gap.

Contrast this to silence, which is heard in the same way for all people - as the absence of sound. Irrelevant of how the ear is trained, a contextless silence is the background under which the spoken word takes its shape. Caesuras are the image of this background insofar as they delimit words and more generally meanings. The background itself was already there, but was not always-already interpreted.

Hearing the caesuras as a prerequisite for understanding the spoken word is essentially (still an analogy here) auto-positional, an interpretive apparatus must be always-already there to count the silences as part of speech. Just as in philosophy, when faced with an idea there is a filter for relevance, weaknesses in accounts, and that addressing these things consists in doing more philosophy. Apply this to the real, as the limit of sense and the liminality of sense as such. The idea that a sufficient account of the conceptual structure of a hole in an idea (real as hole underneath all ideas, roughly) would well characterise how the real itself works is, for Laruelle, an example of the principle of sufficient philosophy - the endless chain of absences, unintended consequences, limits to the account that provides more avenues for philosophising.

Contrast this to quasi-empirical and truly scientific methodology, discoveries are unexpected, they orient research programs, they orient scientific thinking as much as they are produced while thinking scientifically. But, at least in principle, without an organon for what good observations could be. That there is no 'conceptual grammar' which determines the consequences of the observations is seen as a big contrast to philosophical thought, in which the consequences play out in more philosophy if they play out at all. The interminability of debate in philosophy - and philosophical research programs as elaborations and exegesis of previous ideas - I think, is good evidence for this auto-positional character of philosophy.

This isn't to say that philosophy is bad in principle, but it is to say that philosophies of the real begin in philosophy and project the ideas through the delimiting and negational concepts conditioning sense as such to the real. Laruelle sees non-philosophy as beginning in this real, and following one's nose on what it suggests. This turns architectonic systems into interpretive apparatuses, and the conceptual necessity with which those architectonic systems hang together then becomes a logical function of simply being reasonable. As Laruelle puts it, 'I content myself with simply being consistent', using philosophical ideas to generate interesting interpretations of things, but never vouchsafing their necessity through conceptual necessity.

To link this back to Sellars, seeing language as a closed, flat plane - the dizzying immanence, as csal described it iirc- is very much like characterising sense in preparation for the introduction of a philosophical interpretation of the real. This resonates very will with seeing the unfolding of language use as a series of natural causes - thought holding itself indifferent to its content. It seems for Sellars this will be furnished with a representational account of language use as somehow picturing and gesturing towards nature (here, a real). Will the account find the principles of unfolding of language use as a series of natural causes? Perhaps it will, but hopefully it will be seen as a description of our conduct rather than reifying the interpretation of the real of language into another 'hole filling' in an architectonic system.

Edit - I realise that this is a nonstandard use of the word 'caesura' to mean pause, but I wanted to connote the poetic version of it which contributes to the overall expression.

Look around.

Jump up jump up and get down!

I think here you may inadvertently be granting the point more power. A [pair of like objects] is definitely a type, but as you say, there are no types in general. It's exactly for this reason that I don't think we can generalize from the conditions under which monkeys can identify pairs of objects (qua pairs of objects) to a broader set of necessary conditions for identifying any type.

I think this is very perceptive. It would be very easy to hypostatise an account of types by imbuing it with a metaphysical vouchsafe of necessity. If it thinks, it thinks thusly. Instead of such a project, I think Sellars - and hopefully everyone who's been engaging with Street's excellent recent threads - is providing a conceptual analysis of types and tokens descriptively. It reminds me of your link to that philosophical-anthropology article on Gri Gri; in essence a a description of concepts at work, like Strauss and his masks.

So, we've taken type/token relations as a type, then turned it into a token for conceptual analysis. I think this makes the ideas consistent under operational abstraction - Sellars is doing the same thing as his descriptions of what people do with types and tokens; a description of their general features, and what is reasonably implied by these features. Types/tokens are encountered out there in the world as uses of language and we have a quasi-empirical account of them.


@StreetlightX

The ouroboric effect you refer to, an effect of 'thought being indifferent to the things it is thinking about' is I think precisely the desideratum of a materialist conception of thought. It means that the very form of thought is not sanctioned by some kind of 'pre-established harmony' between that form - always indifferent to the real - and the real itself. At best, it is just a kind of machinery that gets put to work in this way and that way, such that the real is always 'autonomous' (read: indifferent) with respect to thought. This kind of approach is what - I think - Laruelle and his cabal of 'non-philosophers' are always going on about, but I can't be sure.

From what you've said so far, Sellars is gesturing towards an extra-philosophical world which constrains and inspires philosophy and provides it with its problems. Philosophy isn't a privileged discursive practice in this regard. So, insofar as nature isn't read as the other of language and provided with a positive philosophical - that is transcendent, here - character, this is one of those open philosophical abstractions and materialistic.

Is it open in the right way? Concepts like the real and the one and Earth and Event - the real as caesura rather than the silence thought struggles to hear... If the latter, his is an immensely non-philosophical gesture. If I've read Laruelle right anyway. Here's an excerpt from his discussion with Derrida which is uncharacteristically pedagogical:

It is the defining characteristic of philosophy, of the principle of sufficient philosophy,
and its unitary will, to believe that all use of language is ultimately philosophical, sooner or later. Philosophy, which I characterize as a "unitary" mode of thought, cannot imagine for a single instant that there are language can be used in two ways: there is the use of language in science, which is not at all philosophical, contrary to what philosophy itself postulates in order to establish itself as a fundamental ontology or epistemology of science; and the use of language in philosophy. Philosophy postulates that every use of language is a use with a view to the logos or that which I call a use-of-the-logos, language being taken as constitutive of the being of things. From this point of view, if there were the only possible us of language, then obviously, there is no question of escaping from philosophy. But I postulate – in reality I do not postulate, since I begin by taking them as indissociably given from the outset, the bloc of real as One and a certain use of language which corresponds to this particular conception of the real. Since I take as indissociably given from the outset a certain use of language, which is not that of the logos, and the One that founds it, I do not contradict myself, I do not relapse into philosophical contradiction. Philosophy has a very deeply ingrained fetishism, which is
obviously that of metaphysics but which may not be entirely destroyed by the philosophical critiques of metaphysics; and this is the ultimate belief that ultimately every use of language is carried out with a view to being, in order to grant being, or to open being, etc., that every usage of language is "positional".

An account of language which leaves all of its instances open to engagement with nature without projectively determining it and their character, I think, is exactly the kind of thing Laruelle would approve of. The grammar of ideas isn't the dynamical relation of nature, but the space of relations of thoughts and the relational unfolding of nature themselves relate (without hypostatised codetermination!) in the aggregate of human activity.

A really interesting avenue here is the extended mind Clarke is so fond of, an account of how embodiment produces the distribution of a mind into environment through sensorimotor/neural feedbacks is radically open in the previously expressed way. Thus the problematising capacity of nature for human activity, as embedded and embodied.

Perhaps you're making Clarke Sellars' Schopenhauer? (from SEP's article on Schopenhauer)

Having rejected the Kantian position that our sensations are caused by an unknowable object that exists independently of us, Schopenhauer notes importantly that our body — which is just one among the many objects in the world — is given to us in two different ways: we perceive our body as a physical object among other physical objects, subject to the natural laws that govern the movements of all physical objects, and we are aware of our body through our immediate awareness, as we each consciously inhabit our body, intentionally move it, and feel directly our pleasures, pains, and emotional states. We can objectively perceive our hand as an external object, as a surgeon might perceive it during a medical operation, and we can also be subjectively aware of our hand as something we inhabit, as something we willfully move, and of which we can feel its inner muscular workings.

From this observation, Schopenhauer asserts that among all the objects in the universe, there is only one object, relative to each of us — namely, our physical body — that is given in two entirely different ways. It is given as representation (i.e., objectively; externally) and as Will (i.e., subjectively; internally). One of his notable conclusions is that when we move our hand, this is not to be comprehended as a motivational act that first happens, and then causes the movement of our hand as an effect. He maintains that the movement of our hand is but a single act — again, like the two sides of a coin — that has a subjective feeling of willing as one of its aspects, and the movement of the hand as the other. More generally, he adds that the action of the body is nothing but the act of Will objectified, that is, translated into perception.

Well, that kind of thing usually happens in relationships. You and your partner have a personality conflict where're they're just wrong and you're just wrong, and you repeat the actions that provoke them and vice versa. Something like, a moral or ethical mistake isn't achieved by doing something you think is wrong, it's when you're doing something you know is right.

Another example might be an alcoholic with depression trying to recover, recovery is hard so the alcoholism comes to play as a coping mechanism. I drink because I'm sad, I'm sad because I drink. The drinks do help though.

If you fail to be compromising on the matter - and in cases like this it means working on your personality and behavioural patterns (self mutilation, incredibly painful change) - you'll suffer. So you can choose to suffer transformatively or suffer meaninglessly.

Most moral decisions aren't concerned with transformation, they're procedural and somewhat legalistic. An application of principles. Being principled is being ethical, but not necessarily being moral.

If you want an example of an intellectual debate in which empathy 'splits the world in two', look at the Israel Palestine one. Or prisoners voting. Or sex worker rights. These are excellent examples of where each side has prefigured what reconciliation means and is thus obviously right.

The times when you will be most wrong are when you know you're right.

Have you ever been in a situation where you made a decision and it was wrong, but not just that, that the way you make those kind of decisions gave you a self sustaining repetition of the same mistake?

Some of the things I was trying to condense.

To me, making moral decisions is pretty simple.

Simple because passions - feelings about stuff - inspire the reasons to fit the decision in the process of making it. The simplicity is something which hides the complex web of feelings because it is equivalent to that web expressing itself. The most basic feeling about something or motivation for a moral decision is actually very complex when put under the microscope.

I don't often need a lot of deep thought to decide what's right and what's wrong

Again, since moral reasoning follows from becoming impassioned. Most moral decisions are not serious ones, and feel obvious. Only obvious because they are largely irreflexive endorsements of the background of your moral decision making in general. This background is a person's ethical code, no matter how nascent. A person's ethical code is an intersection between what opinions and maxims inform their moral decisions and the passions which start deliberation running before, and keep it running while making those decisions. Thus, ethical codes are liminal spaces between inspired, emotive action and retarding thought.

Moral decisions concern agents. You and others. How things about those agents can become relevant during making a moral decision rests on empathy, as empathy facilitates recognising the plights in their/your situation. The degree of empathy co-occurs with the degree of inspired emotion - more feels more I get you man, less feels more indifference.

Hence, simple decisions - in which the intensity of feeling is low - require little effort because they rely more heavily upon the pre-established ethical code you have. Bunch of inherited norms and your own opinions and rules of thumb. These aren't really ethical decisions in my book, they're decided by the usual parameters of the situation.

But to empathise is also, then, to demarcate the situation surrounding a moral decision into things which are relevant for it and things which are not. To care is also to negate. The degree of caring and the intensity of the negation are also concomitant with the degree of inspired passion. 'That's just wrong' and 'That's disgusting' are more applicable to child predators than to people who leave food on the plate. Notice that less people care about the latter waste and this norm is also concomitant with a summary of feelings on the matter.

In the same spirit as the example, a moral decision which is not felt much as one is made for you by the background - since an ethical code is the engagement with this background. When the background dominates (as in bureaucratic or legal decisions), the feelings go.

Conversely, when impassioned, the background recedes and you're left with yourself and your own devices. The background receding is simultaneously a call to what's at stake in the decision. Do I tell my wife I've been unfaithful? Do I tell my boss I leave food on the plate? The ridiculousness of the latter and the seriousness of the former contrast the extremes of transformative and procedural moral decisions.

Thus, a non-procedural moral decision is one you find yourself - or another agent - at stake in. They are empathised with, their particularity is emphasised, their plights are felt, conflict with them is painful. In this sense moral decisions, that is non-procedural moral decisions, leave you at risk. They require you to rethink things from the ground up, change your behaviour in the long term etc.

This finding yourself, or another, at stake is the work of empathy. Disgust, hatred, the inverses of empathy, instead more narrowly circumscribe the agent they are directed towards - their plights, particularities are minimised with passion. With indifference, with which the majority of moral decisions are made, the agents concerned in them are not felt at all.

I tell my wife I've cheated on her - self mutilation, but done for the right reasons (ethical code at play). Telling her; to make amends and repair, to treat her as human herself and not an extension of my interests and beliefs; to treat the wound of cheating with the blood pouring from the decision to tell her, the hopes of working through, the resolution with or without closure. Structurally, things are always gained: more grist for the mill of affect, more stories for the background, more maxims for the code.

Have a series of self indulgent aphorisms.

(1) Passions inspire reasons.

(2) Thus using your morality is also creating it; as removing a shard of glass from skin lets blood. (1)

(3) Compassion dwells in what we decide is such a wound. (2)

(4) Empathy, then, has already split the world in two. (3)

(5) Moral discovery is being surprised to find yourself so predisposed. As pain calls attention. (2)

(6) To decide without risk is to be indifferent to your choices. (5)

(7) An ethics is a constellation of indifferent opinion, involuntarily cast onto the world like we pin their celestial analogues to the sky. Their function is to promote decision as if your decisions were already made for you. Not by you. (5,6)

(8) To live morally is more than to decide ethically, it is to act as skilfully in moral decision as in all things you are able. It is to adjust and adjust to the interplay of emotion and surprise. (1,6,7)

(9) Ethical conduct, then, is self mutilation (2) to tend another's wound (2,3,4,8) with the blood (1).

A lot less words than previously, but essentially the same meaning.

Is so surprising that whether stuff exists is arbitrary when existence is embedded in the abstract concept of relation and relativised to it? Nah. Existence being arbitrary isn't really a feature of reality, it's a feature of how you've set up the avenues for questioning about it.

Consider when ontology is characterised solely by answering 'what is there' questions; and when it doesn't matter if there is anything in terms of our understanding of things. Of course ontology becomes a hollow discipline and 'true inquiry'; whatever is left of accounting for how things are in the general sense after the OP's levelling of ontology to a catalogue of existents; is concerned with what is stipulated to be of interest and independent of 'what is there' questions.

And this is a bit funny, because an ontology is usually concerned precisely with the relations between things. Man and being, substance and God, substance and mode, difference and trace, primary and secondary qualities, individual and community, history and idea...

It's like you've said 'assume studying language is only about studying when red is red, therefore linguistics is meaningless'. Reading nothing but your questioning framework off of the world it has provided the logical syntax for!

Pretty much agree. That the universe is a mathematical structure (and is not merely modeled by one) is not new. The latter half seems to be what I've been exploring, and one which I have not necessarily seen litterature, let alone even a name for the stance.

The giant object is nearly equivalent to the class of objects. Membership in the class is given by the ability to denote the member. If you restrict this even bigger 'set of all things' style object to the set of relations of arbitrary arity with arbitrary related terms, you get essentially the one I tried to construct above. Pegasus is as much a member as rocks rolling down hills, the rocks and the hills, and that 'my feet are positioned below my knees relative to my body' considered as a conceptual object.

I'm indifferent to the claim that the universe has a mathematical structure. Insofar as 'mathematical structure' means 'exhibits patterns which are analysed well through mathematics', I agree. Further ontological commitments - like reality itself being fundamentally like something essential to mathematics - I don't want to go that far, nor to discuss this here.

When I say I don't think it's the time to discuss that, I'm gesturing to that I think your OP is different problem from the alleged mathematical nature of reality. Subordinating being to to relation; to be is to be part of a (chain of) relation (s); what it is is how it is; is something that can be done regardless of whether you believe the real existence of the related terms. Put another way, if all this was 'merely a fiction' it would still be the same except insofar as 'is a fiction' makes a difference.

Aggregating everything together into one of these giant objects whose implanted structures are then identified as the rules governing particulars in the object (rather than terms which are standing in for them...) isn't without its problems... Another irrelevant thread.

Even if you grant that this agglomerative operation is justified before adjoining 'is a fiction' or 'is real in the usual sense' to its product, it doesn't make much of a difference to the OP's argument. What I really wanted to take to task was this:

This is a key concept, demonstrating why objective ontology (or lack of it) makes no difference in the relations between different parts of the same structure.

relates a very impoverished understanding of what an ontology is. Loosely, an ontology really is an account of the relations between different parts of a structure, where 'parts' are understood in a exceptionally loose sense. (eg an ontology can look for how things came to be and develop a conceptual apparatus surrounding that, things coming to 'parthood' is also within ontology's subject matter). Picking which structures to designate as primordial, which as derivative, privileging none.... etc and to provide a conceptual apparatus circumscribing the most general ways in which things are is exactly what an ontology does.

Picking out a structure from the giant object because it in some sense mirrors our world leaves an account of the mirror; and the explication of the chosen structural symmetries. In the OP, nothing is lost by refusing the question because it sets out a picture of ontological accounts in which nothing can be gained from them.

Most of what's in the giant object is totally alien to us, so we're situated in a way to ask questions and question those questions. The existence of the giant object isn't particularly consoling in this manner. It functions as an already presumed terminus of ontological questioning despite those questioners, us, not knowing the full extent of what's in it and what obtains in it.

Oh hey, Brassier has two lectures featuring clear exposition of Sellars on youtube.

The Myth of the Given: Nominalism, Naturalism & Materialism.

That Which is Not: Plato, Kant and Sellars.

This post has two components, one is an attempt to sketch the construction of a ridiculously inclusive mathematical object which serves as the background 'model of things' in the OP, and the other attempts to situate what an ontology is in relation to the ridiculously inclusive object.

If you take any particular, there will be various different types of relation that apply to it. Every event can be related to any other event through the relations of antecedence and subsequence - occurred before and after interpreted as an ordering relation. Each proposition can be related to every other proposition through the relation of consistency partitioning arbitrary well formed logical formulae into consistent and inconsistent models. I think it's reasonable to posit that every particular can be related to every other particular in some way, and all relations can be related (and so on).

Imagine that we have access to the set of all particulars and every n-ary (generalised) relation between them (a construction similar to this but allowing 2-morphisms to map to 1-morphisms and introducing such 'cross' relations of arbitrary order and scope). This collection is a mathematical abstraction, but let's say that all of its elements are as real as any other, and every concrete particular and every relation between concrete particulars and abstract particulars (including all higher n-ary relations thereof) is contained within it. This is essentially the universe as considered in the OP. It's a jumble of everything in the broadest possible (or at least ridiculously broad) mathematised sense of a jumble of everything. Unsurprisingly that kind of object is not well understood.

Examples of elements in the jumble to remove the jargon - rocks are in it, the relationship between rocks and hills as 'currently rolling down' are in it, the relation between 'currently rolling down' and every possible physics-based description are in it, the individual rock's relation to every physics-based descriptions are in it, the rock's relationship to the mathematical abstraction of a group are in it. The abstract relationships between groups and every possible pairing and sub-pairing between these abstractions and rocks are in it. Everything in it is considered as an object in the same sense. Is anything interesting gained by asserting the existence of the whole thing or denying it? Probably not, as Quine noted:

A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—‘Everything’—and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this is merely to say that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries.

in terms of giving an account of this 'everything', nothing about the properties of this giant jumbled object is determined by any insistence that the whole object exists. Rather, the properties of any subobject are determined conditionally upon their relation to any other subobject. In the giant jumble object itself (assuming we're allowed recourse to true and false as binary...), they'll be partitioned into subobjects consisting of obtaining relations of other subobjects and non-obtaining ones. If it is possible to construct (or assume there is) a choice function (or collection thereof indexed to subobject types) which acts on the giant jumble object in order to select every and only obtaining subobject relations, this gives a model of what there could be in terms of a sense of what obtains about it.

Unfortunately, the task of ontology is not to decide whether the giant jumble object exists or does not exist, it is to filter what obtains (questions of relation) and how/why it does so. In this formal sense a question of whether something exists in any sense is really only answerable to the sense in which it operates - Pegasus and a stick operate differently, who cares what we call existent and not, the operational difference suffices. Ontologies give fundamental ways of structuring questions about (and thereby elucidating) chains of relations and usually have their own native problematics. EG Heidegger's ontology isn't an ontology of dynamic ontical changes - and concerns the relation of human and Being, Democritus' atomism doesn't place much emphasis on the emergent relations of composites -it's concerned with the fundamental constituents of stuff, Hegel's doesn't place too much emphasis on the realities of social change - it's a historico-logical syntax of ideal development... Russel spent a lot of time dealing with fictional objects as problems for reference as a fundamental issue, others are indifferent to this problem - seeing fundamental issues as conceptual clarification with philosophical language as the medium for that clarification. It's conceivable that someone, perhaps like Jordan Peterson, would stress the reality of Pegasus in terms of its mythical-discursive structure - the relation between human and myth holds indifferent the contrast between Pegasus and a rock.

They all contain within them an idea of appropriate emphasis on what the fundamental questions are - the filter - and an account they deem appropriate (or at least in the right direction) for those questions [the constructed choice function].

Ontology neither begins nor ends with a decision on what exists, it concerns itself with the hows and whys of those things. So when you say 'it doesn't matter whether it exists or it doesn't' - you're missing the sense of why in question. Even if it doesn't matter there's still a hell of a lot of work to do interpreting the thing.

Hm, a load of posts here just went missing.

Edit - oh they just didn't display. Refreshing the page a few times made them appear. Weird.

@StreetlightX, @Pierre-Normand

Although I've mostly withdrawn from the discussion, the Sellars-Davidson thematic link is pursued by Rorty. It's an interesting transposition of the 'very idea of a conceptual scheme' into a mere interpretive apparatus - locating such things as at most a common thread among a community of language users. This also dovetails nicely with Rorty's appropriation of Quine's critique of the analytic/synthetic distinction - something being analytically true is still formally conditioned upon an interpretation. IE concepts unfold and are discursive functions.

This dovetailing destroys representationalist accounts of concepts just as much as it problematises the eternity implicit in the a priori; a realm where what is true will remain so since it's there already. Prosaically, the 'there' is seen as a fictitious projection of the structure of things to a conceptual landscape containing the same things but in expressed form. The world then takes the character of their grammar (logical syntax) in the expression.

Schema and their conditioned elements are entangled as (and through) discursive practices (no scheme/content distinction), destroying the logical priority of what conditions each analytic fact on one axis. And historicising the schema through the aforementioned entanglement destroys its logical priority in the usual sense of the term on another axis. Schema mutate over history independently of their function as constraints on interpretive possibility; destroying the pristine eternity of the logical space of true conceptual relations.

Those two axes that were independent [pure relations of concepts and instantiating conditions of satisfaction] and used to chart conceptual spaces in their representational character [what else does a representationalist epistemology need other than facts to mirror world and a semantics of the mirror]? are shown to be interpretive tools which are an artefact of a way of looking at the world.

Edit: snake's biting its own tail, there's a Laruelle-ian decision taking place for the representationlist but there's also an amorphous one left in the shadow of highlighting it. The space of reasons for that criticism is still vouchsafed by the very commitment to its ambiguities... Just a note since I remember there are a few non-philosophy interested people here.

That appeal to equivalence classes again looks like it demands something we've just said we can't have, real ideals, real types to ground the equivalence, and that backing off to our practices instead is no help. My suspicion is that it does help because the project of communal living gives you a choice: provisionally deem someone to be speaking a language you can understand or give up.

See the problem. @Nagase pointed it out too. Thinking of them in terms of equivalence classes adds an extra layer of complexity for little gain.

I'm a nasty combination of busy and having a fever at the minute. Unlikely to happen. Oh well.

Also, if there's anything controversial we talk about it. It isn't like someone can delete pro-Palestine or pro-Israel posts depending on personal taste. Or that I'd delete @Nagase's posts in my recent engagement with him despite holding opposite opinions... It's also not like someone gets banned arbitrarily when they put effort into their posts. Sometimes people who generally behave very well lose their temper and get annoyed.

Also, this being a forum where posters are expected to be able to put things together and highlight inconsistencies, observations like yours are expected. If you believe any decision taken by a mod is unfair you should probably tell a mod or admin about it.

I hope this doesn't discourage you too much. Your other threads have provoked some nice discussions. :)

Mods aren't robots. We also aren't all on all the time. It's also likely that we will all respond differently to threads.

Furthermore, if an OP has already garnered good responses, the thread is less likely to be pruned. I think that one was also in science and technology, and was given a philosophical context through the title. That's a pretty clear case of the guidelines being relevant - the OP and the title were related. The sarcasm @Wayfarer showed also expresses a reasonably interesting philosophical position - a criticism of scientism, or what is interpreted as scientism.

And it has the philosophical context of 'look at this absolute howler that we get from pop sci headline grabbing science interpretations'.

I also believe that posting in science and technology is more forgiving on lacking detailed, expressed philosophical content.

I wouldn't delete the thread now.

PS: if you're thinking 'you're saying that because you posted it' - that thread predates me becoming a mod.

If you don't think that it has any philosophical implications, I wouldn't put it in one of the philosophy subforums - and would ask such a question to Google, physicsforums and Youtube (try 60 symbols, they have some pop-sci videos on gravitational waves) before trying to chance it with a particularly informed person here. We're more likely to be able to give good replies to philosophy questions.

The specifics of a scientific theory or experimental results generally aren't philosophy of science, they're science. If you want to try and draw some philosophical conclusions from them maybe try it again with a stronger opening post sensibly linking gravitational waves to a philosophical issue. Lots of us use examples from other disciplines to try and illustrate points in the threads here, so it's really a question of sufficiently good explication and being philosophically relevant in a broad sense, or made so by the context. As the guidelines state - context matters, so does content.

PS. if you want to alert someone to a reply, the syntax isn't @name, it's @name (double quotes around the name). EG @kym doesn't do anything, but @ "Kym" does (when posted without the space between the @ and the first ".)

I deleted threads of yours which had an OP with a single sentence, a blog link, and a terminology of science question. This is a philosophy forum, original posts of threads should ask a coherent and detailed question, state a coherent position with an argument, and importantly be philosophical in nature.

You'll notice that I didn't delete the other threads you've made, because they fit the site guidelines (to my reckoning anyway).

@Nagase

It feels kind of dirty to be arguing about a specific counter-example to a far more general idea, if you'd want to transfer this discussion about how mathematical abstractions work to another thread I'd be interested in it. We're not really talking about Sellarsian nominalism any more, we've simplified to an avenue which the logical falsity of the idea turns on but we're not learning much about the idea through the discussion. At least, if you're similar of mind to me on how to learn about stuff.

I'd say that yes, those are examples of natural kinds. As Frege would say, they have all passed the "acid test" of concepts, namely their fruitfulness.

It's strange to me that whether something is natural, rather than reflects what is natural, depends on their role in discourse. I can make sense of this if 'is a natural kind' is interpreted like 'is a useful model', but abstract objects like categories and transfinite cardinals are not, currently, a model of anything physical but themselves as interpreted as discursive formations.

Physicists think about things quite differently from mathematicians. The former should principally be dealing with mathematical objects that reflect nature or simplify previously established theories of nature. The latter deal with mathematical objects simpliciter. Like physicists taking the real part of imaginary quantities because real quantities aren't imaginary - pedagogically this is the mantra 'take the real part to find out what's real'. Or looking at bouncing as a geometric series - the mathematician would say 'infinite bounces are required to stop bouncing', the physicist says 'that isn't physical, it will stop at some point despite the model'. This 'despite the model' is a big difference between mathematical quantities qua physics and mathematical quantities qua mathematics. In mathematics it's only the model and the properties - with some imaginative background which is reflected to make it a model. In physical uses of mathematics the imaginative background mirrors, represents, tracks, call it what you will, the world.

I have the opposite idea. I think the semantics of mathematical kind terms is very similar to the semantics Kripke-Putnam sketched for scientific natural kind terms, in the sense that mathematical kind terms are (primarily) non-descriptive, i.e. their semantic value is their reference. That is why we can say that Euler and Cauchy were mistaken in (e.g.) treating convergence as uniform convergence (yes, I'm aware that the historical debate here is controversial). So, according to my story, it's not that we started with fuzzy, open-texture concepts and proceeded to precisify them; rather, we started with a collection of examples and proceeded to unveil their structure. Of course, this story needs to fleshed out, and fleshing it out is one of the projects on which I'm currently working

Regarding the history - it's really a methodological distinction. Do you prefer to read the history retrospectively from the current heights of modern insight, or do you prefer to try to look at it as it developed? I'm quite sure that there's a reading either way in terms of non/nominalism that furnishes it with some historical weight. The former looks to me like a history of mistakes, the latter looks to me like a history of expressive writing. Prefer the latter, it makes the mistakes interesting.

I don't agree that mathematical terms are primarily non-descriptive, mathematics concerns itself with the relationships of abstractions and sometimes abstractions to real world. To me this seems like saying 'logic doesn't describe anything because its elements are just a universe of discourse'. Put another way in a series of examples, the interesting things about a group aren't the underlying set - hence group theory. The interesting things about topologies aren't the underlying set - hence topology. The interesting things about their intersection isn't the underlying set - it's algebraic topology, all those loops and holes and shit. A group just is something which satisfies its axioms - something which functions in the specified way.

Mathematical abstractions, in terms just of their reference, are usually 'part of the background' when studying or producing new maths. Expertise allows you to adjoin some of their description to their reference - hence 'trivial' and that mathematical papers usually aren't written as logically valid arguments -. This scoping context reflects the use of the abstractions, and which things may be considered constitutive of them will depend on the context of the math. This is also part of what makes it so hard for people in different sub-(sub-sub-sub-...-sub)fields to communicate, and interdisciplinary work so insane (and interesting).

Another aside, I'd be quite surprised if there wasn't an equivalence relation approach to tokens and types here, in terms of exemplifications. Like in the construction of fractions. 2=1+1=4/2=...(every other possible expression for 2), then the number 2 is defined as [2], that set of expressions which evaluate to 2. And arithmetic is defined in terms of operations on equivalence classes rather than on their constituent terms (this is why algebraic substitution works). Thus simultaneously every object exemplifies the type.

The same thing would apply for continuous functions; in demarcating a collection of functions from other functions there's an equivalence between partitions of this space -into discontinuous and continuous- and that property of continuousness, so 2 functions are equivalent iff they are both continuous. That gives the partition, and they all represent it as exemplifiers and generalities - representative of class and class.

The question becomes how are the representatives taken as representatives, and how are two things related to each other (this is probably related to the sortal idea).

Edited for clarity, did my usual 'leave a sentence fragment' error.

Maths bit.

I strongly disagree with this statement. I actually think the opposite is true: by paying attention to the history of mathematical concepts, we see that they emerged not because we "made it just so", but were rather forced on us by the nature of the entities in question and the problems surrounding them. To my mind, mathematical entities form natural kinds, and the most fruitful mathematical definitions (such as continuity) capture the structure of those kinds.

This isn't meant as a refutation, it's an honest series of questions to see if you've got any internal distinctions between 'mathematical kinds'.

Are transfinite cardinals or ordinals natural kinds? Are categories natural kinds? What about partially ordered sets or finite fields?

I suppose I just don't see how they could be anything but man made, in response to a history of problems and the conceptualisation of new problems. I quite like the idea that 'natural kind' as a type is part of the discursive play of concepts, same with the type-token distinction. All of these are part of the self annihilating critical battery of philosophical abstractions.

From a modern perspective, mathematicians like Euler and Fourier would have gotten away with their 'intermediate value property = continuity' blunder/equivocation because continuity, differentiability and the IVP apply to most of the interesting functions these mathematicians studied. It was only after the axiomatisation of these properties that you get pathologies like the Weirstrass W function and these Darboux ones. It's tempting to read the history like that, but it's very retrojective.

I prefer to read it as the evolution of a concept whose boundaries are fuzzy - something like a composite of continuity/differentiability/IVP - becoming more demarcated when the level of mathematical precision was elevated through the emphasis on axiomatisation. I don't see what insisting that mathematical objects are real does to help someone actually doing/teaching maths (the community thereof + history is where mathematics comes from).

Now for the other bit.

If the questions is 'what makes the tokens stick together in the type' - why isn't 'they're used together with some commonalities between them' a sufficient answer? Something like 'I see red' and 'I see red', if there's an underlying redness it better also reference anger; 'red' is a lot more complicated than 'redness' in the colour. Where do you get the ontological or epistemic resources to glue tokens together relationally? Also, how's this furnished through there being an abstract object or natural kind to save us and instantiate itself?

The point of giving all that historical detail is to illustrate that math, especially math, is just so because it's how we made it just so.

How do you represent the property of "for every e>0 there is d such that for every x if |x-a| < d then |f(x) - f(a)| < e

This is an interesting example, as the formulation of the epsilon-delta definition of continuity was, historically, an answer to various problems about limits.

Initially, limits were implicit in Newton and Leibniz in their treatment of differentials - fluxions and the dy we know today both manifest as limiting phenomena. At this phase of conceptual development they were just implicit, and famously criticised by Berkeley (and less famously criticised by Marx in the mathematical manuscripts). Treated as a quantity which is 0 at some points in a derivation and nonzero at other points.

After this, while the level of mathematical precision required for pure mathematics still allowed definitions in plain text, you end up with things like this:

“But (which for us here suffices) they continually approach more closely to
the required ratio, in such a way that at length the difference becomes less than any
assignable quantity”

Euler's understanding of continuity is now equivalent to the intermediate value property - the old idea that a continuous function is a function which can be drawn without lifting the pen from the page.

The modern one is Weirstrass', as you posted. Darboux proved that the intermediate value property does not imply continuity by constructing a pathological counterexample. See Darboux functions. This level of precision then allowed the construction of the modern notion of continuity - as an instance of topological continuity. There's thus a construction like P(x) for continuity of x, which while being equivalent to x being continuous in the sense you wrote (Weirstrass'), you can now simply write:

$P(x) \Leftrightarrow x \in \boldsymbol{C}(\mathbb{R})$

to cast it in that form. I imagine a similar trick would work for every logically complex property - by transposing its logical vocabulary into set form (which is always possible up to the objects being too big).

If the difficulty you're highlighting is with regard to predicates requiring higher order quantification, I imagine that this is an obstacle in terms of details rather than one which refutes the central idea Street's been expositing.

Reference on the history of limits which tells roughly this story with greater historical refinement

I don't know. Golf and sex are similar because one should never confuse holes.

They're probably part of games in a different way. Real life is surprising, novel, resistant and unexpectedly crap or good.

In the context of this thread, I'm thinking that abstract objects are at most part of discursive practices - stuff we do with language. Steps linking each abstract object to each other are moves in games with well known but modifiable rules and scoping contexts. The abstract objects themselves are nothing but their roles in the game, and reference to one is a kind of summary of its roles.

Archetypal abstract object - a group of symmetries of a square, what is it? Well, it's a bunch of interacting terms that let you rotate and mirror the square in a few ways. Where does that leave the square's area? Richer context - the area's invariant when you rotate and mirror it. Why's the area invariant when you rotate it? A bunch of theorems relating codifications of size of something (measures) with possible ways of changing the object (functions and derived actions). Why is the square a square? Eventually it comes down to how we've set it up and nothing more. It's a sufficiently stable and well demarcated bunch of roles to be a general thing - stuff hangs together. It's so stable that a square is formally a model of the symmetry group of a square, so the object doesn't have to come first once it's sufficiently well described - it becomes a satisfier of various patterns and roles.

The properties of the square might be 'out there', but they're 'out there' in terms of how we can sensibly play with notions of the square and make symbol follow symbol. Analogously, word follow word, exposition follow exposition.

This is a completely different question from how does the square in the above sense mirror 'real' squares, like blocks of flats in inner city grid iron. Part of that is that we built it that way. The thread topic might undermine word corresponding to world, like 'red' corresponding to redness or 'square' corresponding to square-properties, but there's probably another way of accounting for this mapping between what's out there and what's in here... An account of that mapping would still be in here, interestingly.

If I'm not speaking total garbage, anyway. :)