For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." — Leontiskos
That misrepresents. I argued that the logic of dichotomies is the general logic of Nature and demonstrably the logic of brain architecture. So it is not surprising that we would find that lay language should also arrive at such distinctions itself - just not recognising the logic at work behind the scenes, whereas psychological science got going by noting attention-habit as a major dichotomy of cognitive organisation.
This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances. — Leontiskos
This is a waffling attack on attack on a systems science argument you don’t yet understand. The theory of dichotomies says each side of the reciprocal equation is as different from the other as it is possible to be. And yet that difference connects them as it is the other that serves as a measure of the separation.
So we start with the generality that they are both forms of cognition. And then we can see how it makes sense that they map to the key cognitive dichotomy that is attention-habit. We can say that to the degree we are attending to some aspect of the world, we are not dealing with it habitually. And vice versa. When we are reacting on automatic pilot, we are not engaging all the higher brain capacities for holding something in the spotlight of working memory, pausing to treat it as a novel situation demanding our full self-aware narrative engagement.
So each does speak of its own qualities as a contrast to the qualities of the other. That is how each tightens its own definition. Every question about one is answered by finding some counterfactual to distinguish it from the other.
You could even call it a system of antimonies if you wanted to use the half-baked understanding of what is going on logically here.
Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. — Leontiskos
Sure. Argue against dichotomies by employing dichotomies. Prove my point for me.
So if wisdom is the experience of age, then cleverness is the excitement of youth. And if it is possible to be sharp, it is because it is possible to be perfectly otherwise – to be blunt.
All knives might have an edge but that is itself going to break into some useful to mention polarity. So all knives are knives, however some are sharp, even perhaps at the limit of sharpening, while some are so blunt we might as well re-term them spatulas.
So dichotomies are Aristotelean essential distinctions. And you can walk language as far as you like to organise your world in a hierarchical cascade of such dichotomous divisions. It works as symmetry-breaking is also the logic of Nature itself. Evolution and development produce self-organised hierarchies even at the level of the Cosmos.
And so it is with sages and dunces. We are not all created equal either in our degree of youthfull cleverness nor elderly wisdom. And if you want to turn the conversation to a discussion of sages, then as you say, this carries further qualitative contrasts we would want to mention so as to point to some hierarchy of the wise. Or even just the old. Or even just the experienced.
So the sage understands the whole – and not just fragments. The sage understands in terms of general principles and not just miscellanious examples. The sage is not just thinking practically but also engaged in the more socially-prestigious endeavour of thinking speculatively.
By appealing to a set of distinctions, you have constrained what one could mean by "sage" with quite a useful collections of dichotomies.
It seems a good definition to me. I just point to the manner in which you had to arrive at it.
And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. — Leontiskos
But if a sage is most critically someone long experienced and generally acclaimed in the habit of speculating, then I'm afraid that sagacity is still a sub-class of the category of intellectuality we call wisdom.
At the level of distinctions you have moved the discussion to, the primary dichotomy becomes the question of whether this elderly person with a clear habit of speculative thought is indeed one of our community's sages or one of our community's crackpots.
A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanation—in this case the brain—relates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant. — Leontiskos
You miss my point again. The bigger picture to what I argue is the systems view, the natural philosophy view, the pansemiotic view. Peirce's central insight was that the Cosmos is rationally structured. There is a general logic to self-organising systems that can stand both for how a Universe could come to be and how the life and mind that exists by successfully modelling the ways of this world would employ the same logic in organising its own cognitive structure.
So ontology and epistemology share the one logic. Or at least they clearly do once we become clear-eyed enough to see that this is what lies at the bottom of our philosophical confusions.
So yes. I make no apologies for looking to the natural world for its own explanation of itself and not casting my eyes heavenwards to some supernatural creator.
Science works as it is pragmatism made habit. The Church wanted to keep the humanities out of the reach of the pragmatic process of inquiry. But tough. Naturalism as a metaphysics now reaches into even sociology and history as fields of rational speculation.
And when you call the brain merely an intermediary for culture, I reply that my argument is that society is just as organismic as a level of self-organising nature. It is all the same thing happening at larger scales of semiotic order.
The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated. — Leontiskos
Both reflect the culture of their times as they must. And what I drew attention to was that despite that, they were laying the ground for a general logic of Nature. Nature could start to explain itself rather than having to be explained in Supernatural terms – the mysterious Big Daddy in the Sky in whose image we were for some nutty reason created as an imperfect version.
If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. — Leontiskos
I didn't say good and bad were a convincing dichotomy to the naturalist. I instead said they were rather useless terms for understanding reality. Even as part of the cultural technology of a self-organising human social system they do more to confuse than to enlighten in exactly the way you describe.
As a natural philosopher, I would say that as members of a civilised society we ought to be organised consciously by the dichotomy of competition~cooperation. That is the dynamic which is actually at the centre of our collective lives. And both tendencies are "good" in their own ways. A system has to be that balanced mix of its global constraints and its local freedoms.
This applies to physics as much as human theories of Utopia. As a metaphysics, it is maximally general and minimally mysterious. We can see directly why it pragmatically works at every possible level of natural existence.
Whereas waffling on about good and bad just winds up in endless confused qualification. The terms end up meaning just the difference between what I think you should do versus what I think you shouldn't do. Or to give it some spurious metaphysical heft, what Big Daddy up in the Sky says you should and shouldn't do.
I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. ↪Darwin himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. — Leontiskos
Another misrepresentation. The systems science position is based on being holistic and thus including finality. But then it is naturalistic in placing teleology on a hierarchical scale of development.
So following Stan Salthe, we would distinguish the three grades of teleology – teleomaty, teleonomy and teleology. Or the purposefulness of physical tendency, of biological functionality and of neurocognitive reason.
My metaphysics doesn't just embrace finality as cause. It provides a theory of finality in natural terms.
For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from. — Leontiskos
This would be my own argument too. And it is why I agree with Peirce in prizing habit.
Something basic to my story on neurocognition is that brains aren't striving to be conscious of the world but instead the opposite. The brain has the developmental task of learning how to predict the world so well that it no longer needs to pay it any particular attention.
So the normal lay understanding of cognition is that the desired goal is to be aware of absolutely every last detail of what is happening and not miss anything. But a pragmatic understanding of what brains are for says it is all about laying down reliable habits.
Of course, the more you habituate, the more you can then lift your level of focused attention to some next level beyond what you have made automatic. Once the baby has some mastery of walking, it can turn its mind to the creativity of dancing.
The wise baby doesn't even have to think how to place one foot in front of the other. It can now be the clever baby skipping with attention to some new rhythm.
The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up. — Leontiskos
Not sure those are dichotomies in any sense I defined. Remember that a successful dichotomy leaves you feeling that both sides of the equation are equally true even though they are both sides as mutually contradictory as possible.
The logical definition of a dichotomy is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". In maths terms, a reciprocal or inverse relation.
Transcendence and immanence is the more usual go at that metaphysical dichotomy. Either cause comes from without or cause comes from within. This is why natural philosophy might call itself an internalist metaphysics to contrast itself with the "other kind".
So put in those terms, transcendence and immanence can at least be debated as cool rational terms. Maths has claim to transcendent existence just as much as religious notions of creating gods. And even the systems view would accept it needs transcendence in some strong sense if it is talking about Nature being entrained to fundamental logical structure.
So create a dichotomy that works and you can start a decent discussion. The systems thinker has to make sense of transcendence and immanence as the two side of their own rational position.
I could point to Ontic Structural Realism as a recent metaphysical enthusiasm that has just this kind of problem. It is all form and no matter. All downward constraint and no matching account of upward construction.
Again, Peirce was here with his triadic metaphysics that tried to fix this exact problem by adding the category of vagueness to the dichotomies and the hierarchies. A proper understanding of Aristotle's "prime matter", or physics' "quantum foam", also go to this issue.
What I am saying is that get your dichotomous terms properly formed and you are already unlocking the deeper thing that lies beneath. And that alignment is what I sought in opposing youthful cleverness to experienced wisdom. From these social descriptors we could descend to the deeper level of the biological symmetry-breaking that is attention~habit.
So if you are unconvinced, it is because you haven't got a sufficient mastery of the logic involved. You have the habit of antimonies rather than dichotomies. You get as far as the antisymmetric distinction and don't continue on to the fully asymmetric one.
What is the true other of religion? Is it science? And is science in reply the true other of religion? Or is this a lazy effort at defining a dichotomy that needs to reach the rigour of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive"?
For a start, religion serves two general social functions. It should encode a "good" way to live. And it is meant to supply the authoritative narrative of why that way is the truth. So it encodes pragmatic wisdom. And it encodes a founding creation myth.
Science now aims to do both those things too. But it is largely stunted by its reductionist metaphysics. My systems science approach is waging its own holy war against that.
So religion~science is also not a proper dichotomy. As a distinction, neither term fully excludes its other, nor completely exhausts the field of possibilities.
You get nearer the truth of the situation with a distinction between faith-based and evidence-based. Or better yet – more Peircean – between the willingness to assert belief and the willingness to risk doubt.
Pragmatism boils down to just that fruitful balance. Jumping to some abductive hypothesis, drawing up its necessary deductions – its particular predictions – and then doubting the hypothesis as hard as possible by testing it with observation. Discovering whether there can be inductive confirmation.
Rationality in a nutshell. But grounded as the balancing act that pragmatism stands for. Neither all faith, nor all data, but the judicious blend of the two.