Im arguing that the only use to which I've ever seen that kind of theory put is to denigrate animals in such a way as to justify their mistreatment. That is the reason why I'm opposed to it. — Pseudonym

Hmm. So you have adopted a moral position and you demand the science must find a way to support it?

I don't believe that is how it works.

I don't think we're going to make any progress here. We agree that human language is worlds away from other animals, you think that distance is so significant as to affect our thought process and requires a whole new language to describe its effects, I don't. — Pseudonym

Well I flatter myself that I go beyond the usual lumper vs splitter dichotomies. My aim is to be accurate about the continuities, and accurate about the discontinuities. And I don't operate with a preconceived notion of what the "right answers" ought to be.

As I say, this area was also my specialist subject about 30 years ago (while oddly enough, computer science was where I was focused just before that).

A Cray is not a souped up microcomputer. A vector processing architecture is very different from a scalar processing one. So bad analogy.

Likewise human language is different in being an articulate and syntactical code. It is capable of unlimited expression from limited means due to its infinite combinational possibilities.

Language in that sense exists in no other species. Fact.

But consciousness, if defined as the modeling relation itself is foundational and so could also be considered to be, in that sense, substantial. — Janus

But that is how I redefine "consciousness" - as a biosemiotic modelling relation. And then beyond that, I would agree with Peirce's project of total generalisation in the form of pan-semiotic physicalism. Even the universe arises from this kind of "mind-full" self-organising relation.

So I am happy to rewrite substance ontology in terms of a process metaphysics. My complaint here is that you still seem to be arguing from a substance metaphysics. I agree, it might only seem that way. We might be in strong agreement in the end.

But consciousness, if defined as the modeling relation itself is foundational and so could also be considered to be, in that sense, substantial. — Janus

That is confusing phrasing. Why would we want to treat consciousness or mindfulness or any "one thing" as fundamental? The modelling relation is irreducibly triadic. It is a process and so the substantial is what emerges in the end, at the limit. It still sounds like you want to make idealism come out right despite endorsing a modelling relations story.

I'm not saying Peirce argues for that (although it might be what he is alluding to with his notion of matter as "effete mind"). — Janus

So you do want to make idealism top dog here! :)

I think you are caught between two metaphysics and you still have to work through to reach a position that is actually self-consistent. That still seems the basic issue here.

If we count the modeling relation itself as being consciousness, then it would be in a restricted sense ( as individual consciousness) that the interpretant would be considered to represent consciousness. Taken that way then it would not be right to say the interpretant is fundamental. On the other hand if we think there is a God...then the sign relation would be like the holy trinity, where the interpretant is the father, the object is the son, and the sign is the holy spirit. — Janus

Again, you want to take a semiotic metaphysics - which is immanent, emergent and irreducibly triadic - and make it fit an idealist metaphysics which permits transcendence, foundationalism and absolute separability.

The interpretant is talked of as a third element - a habit of mind in the presence of a sign. Yet really, in being identified with Thirdness, we have to remember that Thirdness becomes the third that incorporates the other two - the Firstness that is the uncertainty of the world, the Secondness which is the crispness of a sign, a reaction. So Thirdness stands for the whole of the sign relation, and not just the third element of that relation - the interpretant.

So while Peircian semiotics sounds analytic - three separable parts in relation - it is actually synthetic or holistic. The three parts are irreducibly in a relation that has to involve all three. The relation itself is the three-cornered thing - or the hierarchical organisation.

Thus - even joking - God, son and holy spirit would have to be irreducibly related in a collaboratively causal fashion. So there could be no leftover notions of transcendence, foundationalism or separability to celebrate. That would have to be an explicit outcome of adopting a semiotic metaphysics here, not something that could be fudged for any lingering feel-good reasons.

I'm not sure we are really disagreeing so much as it being a matter of emphasis. — Janus

That's what I said. All these different bits of jargon - truth, belief, certainty, justification, etc - they are emphasising different aspects of a pragmatic modelling relation.

And the Peircean notion of that is anti-foundationalist in treating the whole kit and kaboodle as emergent - in a mutual, co-arising, fashion. So to the degree that you treat anything as foundational - like I-ness - we would have to disagree.

Consciousness is fundamental to all knowing. — Janus

No. Not unless here you are prepared to re-define consciousness - with all its embedded dualistic substance metaphysics - as the modelling relation itself. It is the modelling relation that is "fundamental" to all knowing.

Or in Peircean terms, it is the interpretant that is the most fundamental element of the sign relation. — Janus

Where does he argue for that?

I would say the "I-ness" is the fundamental fact upon which all other knowledge turns. It cannot be explained because it is the ground of all explanation. — Janus

So that is where we would differ then.

Of course our modeling of the world is inevitably dualistic in the sense that there are those two poles of explained and explainer, but there is a third element; the relation between the two poles: the explanation. So the unity of reality is really a trinity. — Janus

Well that is the semiotic position I take. And it serves to generalise this "I-ness" in a suitable fashion. The I-ness becomes as much a problem for physics as neuroscience. It becomes a generic issue of knowledge.

So again, there are two choices here. Either you take I-ness at face value - the face value it now has within our dualising culture which speaks of "consciousness" as some kind of ultimate substance. Or you instead step back to see this as the most general metaphysical issue of all - the dichotomy of the observer and the observable which has to be resolved in the pan-semiotic generality of a sign relation metaphysics.

You seem to be arguing for these two opposed approaches as if they were the same thing. One treats consciousness or experience as ineffably subjective - beyond inquiry. The other just gets on with building a meta-level objective theory - making it the subject of an inquiry.

I am just as absolutely certain that I am a linguistic being whose cognition is mediated by that fact, as I am that I see a blue sky. — Janus

So are you proposing that "absolute certainty" as a verifiable fact or not? Is your willingness to act in accordance with that belief the evidence required by the social construction involved?

There are two views in play here.

The naive realist just thinks linguistic framing can be stripped away to leave some kind of direct and unmediated phenomenology exposed, like the seabed after the tide has gone out. I am arguing - counter to that - that the best we can do is to ascend to a meta-linguistic frame in which there is now the self that is seen to have a linguistic framing wrapped around their raw animalistic consciousness.

This is why I would draw attention to the "I" that you mention as the being that is by turns, linguistic or experiential. This "I" that is suddenly so certain in an apparently direct and unmediated fashion.

Can you explain the presence of this "I-ness"? My explanation is that it is arises semiotically as part of the modelling relation. It is the necessary "other" to the construction of "the world". A naive realist, by contrast - as Banno continually demonstrates - just takes this "I" for granted. And so from there we wind up in all the confusions of Cartesian dualism and an idealist metaphysics of mind.

For example I am absolutely certain that I see a blue sky; belief simply doesn't enter into it. — Janus

This seems just like word play over definitions.

In my approach, it is all one process - a sign relation with the world, a modelling relation with the world. And so I don't really get this business of trying to chop things up into beliefs vs certainties vs whatevers. Sure we can emphasise different aspects of the whole process in our jargon, but it becomes word play to die in a ditch over unnecessarily disconnected definitions.

So here, is it your belief that the sky is blue? Is your certainty about what you will see if you check not the justification of this belief when propositionally framed?

To say belief simply doesn't enter into it is to make the point that when you are looking and seeing a blue sky, then there is a level at which you are modelling the world - the biological level of perception - which is clearly distinct from the linguistic level where you might be talking about the fact of this biological level of modelling.

Rightfully speaking, your belief would concern the fact that there is this "you", and it is experiencing certain qualia - namely a "sky" that is a certain general hue which you label "blue". But then - to sustain your point - you want to set all that linguistic framing aside and pretend there is only the naked experiencing of a blue sky with no doubt involved, and hence no belief either.

Which you should realise is a meta-cognitive position. It is the linguistic self imagining what it would be like to be a non-linguistic self, and then insisting in speech that it actually is just like that. You have adopted a model of the phenomenal self that you insist is the reality - despite knowing it to be a linguistically framed model of "raw feels with no believing involved".

As a form of denial, it is pretty elaborate.

if you studied the matter, you must at least be familiar with predator calls, which are entirely symbolic, — Pseudonym

Again, I'm not disputing that there are numerous borderline cases. And so the question then becomes, why a sudden and vast human difference?

It's an open question. I don't think that it has been adequately answered.

But we do know stuff like that the great apes can be taught vocabs of a few hundred words and yet vocab learning never "takes off" in the exponential fashion it does in infant Homo sapiens. And grammatical structure never becomes a natural habit in the easy and fluent fashion it does for all humans.

Likewise there was a fairly sudden transition to symbolic culture in Homo sapiens' history. The wearing of jewellery and the painting of caves. That picture has become muddied now that the evidence is shifting to credit Neanderthals with greater symbolic culture. But still, this is another pointer towards a genuine transition from a pre-abstract, pre-symbolic, pre-syntactic, animal condition to the full-blown, free and easy, human level of linguistic semiosis.

So what I am reacting against is the one note tone of your posts. You seem only concerned about minimising the scale of the evolutionary transition here. I agree that there is plenty of evidence of some continuity in regards to language use or symbolic thought. And indeed, animals are far closer than most people think once science looks in detail.

But then there is the other side to this debate - the fact that human language use and symbolic thought becomes as different as night and day. And that raises the question of exactly what explains the strength of this sharp difference? We need the further theory that accounts for that.

I'm happy to discuss the possible evolutionary mechanisms. But first we would have to move beyond the simplistic arguments based on there being an actual borderline where animals employ sign - and even employ it deceptively or counterfactually.

Yes, perhaps that surprises some. But then that use remains rooted in the here and now of an ecological context. Nothing has changed in a big way. It is only with humans that something explosive happens and sign becomes the tool of thought itself. We find ourselves in a different game.

Did you have an example of animal deception that involved abstract symbolism rather than indexical or iconic signs?

I am not arguing against borderline examples. I am setting out the nature of the difference.

Chimps of course get close to the use of private signs that are semi symbolic. One of de Waal’s chimps held out her hand clasped in the other as a begging motion. That is indexical going on symbolic in having a new element of ritual or repetition. But it didn’t catch on as a group symbol - syntactic structure with habitual meaning.

So again, I am familiar with the literature. Evolution of language was what I was studying about 35 years ago. If you have specific examples to discuss, bring them on.

Yes, I’m familiar with the literature thanks. My opinion is that you overstate your case.

Now you are talking about mental "objects" like feelings, intuitions, images, etc. You are conceptualising the mind as some kind of stage across which various kinds of actors come and go.

But does this really carve up the mind at its joints once you get into a systems-style understanding of neurocognition? Is there an imagery faculty, an intuition faculty, a feelings faculty, all making their individual contributions to the activity being witnessed in this theatre of conscious experience?

I think not. If our models of neurocognition can't rid us of this Cartesian theatre metaphor - this uber-representationalism - we have failed.

I agree, doubt is inherent within belief because we know that we are never beyond the possibility of mistake. But I think that what separates belief from similar mental content which is not belief, is the conviction that there is a low possibility of mistake. This conviction is tied up with temporal extension such that a longer period of time without mistake reinforces the conviction. — Metaphysician Undercover

So isn't this just pragmatism? You are now thinking of a belief as a proposition - a hypothesis that, if true, would have expectable consequences. You are breaking down the three-part method for forming a reasonable and justified belief - abduction, deduction, inductive confirmation - into its components and labelling the first bit, the leap to a hypothesis that makes predictions, as "the belief". And that separates it from "the justification".

Fair enough. And that goes to the disembodied way that linguistically-scaffolded humans can learn to speak about how they think. We can learn the trick of understanding "a state of believing" to devolve into these three essential steps. That is how we can objectify "what we believe", and the extent to which "it is justified", even to ourselves. We can point to the hypothesis, its expectable consequences, and the degree that our predictions are not false.

So all I say is that animals can't of course speak objectively in a way that clearly separates a belief from its justification. But the basic psychological structure is the same in that the brain is naturally wired up to work like that - to form general expectancies, to then make particular predictions, and then finally to revisit habits of belief when error correction becomes needed.

Checking further, there is this attempt at a pantheistic reading of Peirce....

ARTHUR W. BURKS - PEIRCE'S EVOLUTIONARY PRAGMATIC IDEALISM
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/43816/11229_2004_Article_BF00413590.pdf?sequence=1

Peirce, as a pantheist, thought God and the cosmos constituted one substance. To introduce his views we will trace the philosophic theme that runs through all four stages of his thought: the cosmos is an infinite semiotic goal-directed evolutionary process that converges on the good and the real....

...Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism was a radically new form of pantheism. He replaced the theist's idea of a "one-shot" creation of the world by the gradual creation of the world through the evolutionary process of Tychism-Synechism-Agapism. He thought of cosmic evolution as a divine learning process. Chance, continuity, and cosmic purposes are all aspects of God, and we humans are parts of this infinite evolutionary divine system. ...

...When asked "Do you believe this Supreme Being to have been the creator of the universe?" he answered "Not so much to have been as to be now creating the universe",...

...Peirce's evolutionary pragmatic idealism is an evolutionary form of pantheism that operates in the opposite direction from emanationism and Spinozism. Whereas the latter theologies proceed from the highest level (God) on down through successively lower levels, Peirce's cosmic evolutionism begins at the simplest level of a random chaos of feelings and gradually improves under the guidance of final causality toward an infinite limit of perfection. Thus Peirce's pantheism is emanationism "turned upside down"...

Presumably she will not think 'they may or may not be there' but she will become just a tad more wary. — Janus

Like I replied to MU, do you think that beliefs can only speak of absolute certainties? If they are Bayesian expectations concerning probabilities then they are more accurate if they capture something true about the inherent uncertainties of life.

This again highlights a fundamental difference in metaphysical outlook. If you take a constraints-based view of ontology, like Peirce, then reality is inherently spontaneous or uncertain. It only become regular and predictable to the degree that unpredictability is regulated by habits, laws or past history.

So the argument is the world itself is inherently unpredictable (as quantum mechanics demonstrates at a fundamental physical level). And brains evolved to be Bayesian reasoning devices as that is the probabilistic logic - the constraints-based approach - which reflects the way the world itself works.

So the problem would be in believing "belief" to be deficient to the degree that it fails to speak with absolute definiteness about a world that is absolutely definite - the familiar position Banno takes in his naive realism.

Instead, we are in the contrary position where the world is inherently probabilistic and any entity seeking autonomous being through a modelling relation with that world would be wise to mirror the constraints-based probabilistic structure of that world. We wouldn't want to be doing information processing like an input-crunching computer, for instance.

So a gazelle would take a Bayesian approach - one that is "selfish" in terms of including its own needs in terms of a risk/reward assessment of waterhole safety.

If the lions are always there, but it is the only place to drink, then that is a problem that is going to have to be solved somehow - as the alternative is simply two different ways of dying.

The smartest thing to do is then to approach the waterhole in as wary a fashion as possible. If the gazelle had enough brains, it might be able to work out the best time is when the lions are just eating one of its friends. The sight of a pride of lions chowing down and occupied might become the basis of a new belief about when to approach a waterhole.

A counter example to uncertainty leading to wariness is the kind of behaviour that animals show when the world seems to present no recognised threat.

Check out lions in a zoo. It is damn near impossible to get them to notice you as a visitor standing outside the cage. Likewise in the wild where the presence of a human does not signal any kind of traditional threat - the story of the dodo.

The way the brain works, we don't even notice the world that doesn't matter. The fridge in the kitchen hums the whole time and we don't ever hear it. The hum may as well not exist. But when the hum suddenly stops - your power goes out perhaps - then suddenly that is a significant fact showing you did have some kind of running expectation about the noise being there after all.

So our beliefs have to be able to be accurately tuned to the way the world really is. And the way the world is can range from the continuous to the intermittent, from the possible to the certain, from the vague to the definite.

Propositional belief would seem to be a special class of belief in that context - belief that is somehow either absolutely right or wrong, and not merely constrained in its ambiguities or uncertainties. That is certainly how naive realists would go about it. But Pragmatism would say the world actually is probabilistic and so an accurate description of it would be accurate in terms of the objective ambiguity or uncertainty it can attach to any truth value.

And anticipation seems to have doubt inherent within it, so it doesn't seem to be consistent with belief either. — Metaphysician Undercover

So beliefs can't be weak and strong? Beliefs aren't by nature probabilistic and so held with various degrees of conviction? There is some "degree of doubt" that is inherent for good reason. It helps to know that we don't know as well as to be sure that we do know.

it would be better not to say that animals and pre-linguistic humans believe but that they associate and expect. — Janus

I agree that homing in on expectation makes the right distinction in that it then stresses the future-facing nature of a habit of belief.

So the animal mind is embodied in its ecological setting - carried along in an ever-unfolding present. And that means it is always in a state of expectation about what might happen next. Surprises reveal that its belief system needs updating.

And then symbolically displaced or abstracted human thought can lift itself out of this relentless flow of the present. We can form expectations that transcend their ties to the immediacy of our actual time and place. They can become propositional beliefs in that they are disconnected from our material state of being - the here and now of what we have to do to navigate our immediate physical circumstance - and now exist in the realm of the purely imaginary.

They are statements that can be shared with other selves, other minds. And statements that can relate even to ourselves in "other circumstances" - alternative realities.

I am really just arguing for the usefulness of distinctions between different kinds of believing in pre-linguistic and linguistic contexts. — Janus

A distinction would be useful. But making a sharp distinction is also really difficult as the linguistically structured human mind never actually abandons its non-linguistic animal roots. It just builds new floors on the old foundations.

So I sympathise with the project. It is one that I share. But you are coming up against the problem that animals are just animals, then humans are linguistically-structured - yet still, linguistically-structured animals.

It is like asking if animals have memories. Sure they do. But they have recognition memories and not recollective or autobiographical memories. They have memories that are ecologically embedded in the here and now - and so support recognition - rather than memories which are displaced in time and place via a socially-constructed notion of "being a self with a personal narrative."

So belief is more usefully the generic term - an umbrella term like memory. Then we would want to make a distinction that gets at a reliable experimental difference. I focus on recognition vs recollection as cogsci experiments reveal the vastly different "capacities" involved. We can recognise a truly vast variety of once seen slides. But we can only recall a dozen at best - and usually the first and last of a sequence of some thousands.

I haven't really thought about "belief" in that cogsci light. But there ought to be some similarly striking way to get at the difference between the "pure animal" form of the capacity and its "linguistically-structured human extra".

Anyway, my point is that most people just speak past the critical animal vs human mental difference. So we do need a distinction that picks out the difference. But then that distinction has to arise out of a scientific model of the situation. And that is the approach I try to follow.

if you happen to have a public link, kindly share. — Dzung

Actually the quote I was thinking of was misleading as it wasn't connected to his evolutionary cosmology but to the more mundane thing of how his Christian contemporaries view his "scandalous affair". Buddhism wouldn't be so judgemental.

I can't help thinking that the mother of Christianity, Buddhism, is superior to our own religion. (NEM III/2 p. 872)

So it was more that Eastern metaphysics was in the air in his time as something exotic, but not really studied.

Here is a more direct reference in terms of his evolutionary cosmology where he talks about its roots...

... tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialized and partially deadened mind. I may mention, for the benefit of those who are curious in studying mental biographies, that I was born and reared in the neighborhood of Concord - I mean in Cambridge - at the time when Emerson, Hedge, and their friends were disseminating the ideas that they had caught from Schelling, and Schelling from Plotinus, from Boehm, or from God knows what minds stricken with the monstrous mysticism of the East. [6.102]

Being aware of no symmetry from Peirce, I think if we still need to linger on it, we may want to analyze Synechism, not only Tychism. — Dzung

Yeah, I don't think Peirce said much about symmetry and symmetry-breaking principles. It was implicit rather than explicit at best.

Peirce had a Victorian level understanding of phase transitions and other physical manifestations of symmetry breaking. Group theory and its fundamentality in physics was a 20th century thing, after all.

It is symbolic language which enables abstraction — Janus

Yep, @Pseudonym is only talking about indexical or iconic semiosis here in regard to animal communication. Symbols are a whole different thing. Syntactical mechanism - an epistemic cut - displaces the meanings from the world being referenced.

Abstraction speaks to this step from the physically embodied situation - the emotional hoot and holler, or the friendly wag of the tail - to a second-order story where there is now a "self" in control of the "information".

If a dog could feign a happy tail wag in order to fool another dog so as to achieve some other purpose, then we would have the start of a symbolic or abstract level of semiosis.

But just wagging a tail out of engrained biological habit is merely an indexical level of sign. It indicates a mood that other dogs can reliably interpret. The dog does not have the self-hood that might mean this tail-wagging could conceal a further counterfactual surprise.

Are you suggesting that animals might imagine alternative scenarios? — Janus

No. I would agree they need linguistic structure to flesh out alternatives to that degree - scenarios in which they themselves feature as actors.

My point is that I wouldn't die in a ditch trying to defend some overly specific defintion of "belief". It is a generic kind of word.

So if an animal shows clear signs of being surprised, confused, taken aback, having to think again, then that is good enough for me to show that there was prior to that some reasonable inductive expectation in place in their mind.

And from the point of psychological theory, that way of processing the world is of fundamental importance. Animal neurobiology is set up just like the scientific method. By forming habits of anticipation, we can then ignore the world as much as possible and so insert "ourselves" into the equation as actors with freedoms.

This flips the usual Kantian representational view, or correspondence theories of truth, on their head. So it is important to emphasise this aspect of belief in animal cognition as it then confirms a Peircean continuity of nature when it comes to basic epistemic method. Brains already reason like scientists are meant to.

Cheryl Misak summed it up nicely in Truth and the End of Inquiry...

"It is important to remember that the constraint on belief imposed by experience is a negative one. The world affects our beliefs not by our finding out positive things about it, but rather, by providing recalcitrant or surprising things which upset an expectation produced by a belief. The role which the world plays is not one of providing something for our beliefs to correspond to, but rather, one of letting us know when we have a belief that conflicts with it."

Is there such a sharp distinction between syntax and semantics? — Banno

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Apparently.

Propositional' I would say means formulated as 'I believe that'; this way a belief is given a definite form. — Janus

Yes. I agree that language puts it out into a social space where there is then the further fact of the “I” that is doing the asserting.

But still, the guts of the issue for me is that a belief has this counterfactual structure.

the point at issue seems to be whether such believings are propositional — Janus

Well propositional just means that a belief can be asserted in a way that makes it true or false.

So if we leave out the asserting bit - which is where you definitely need linguistic structure - then we can see some degree of continuity between animals and humans in terms of holding beliefs open to falsification.

The animal has the semantics, if not the syntax. And that is where I would draw the sharp line.

The proposition could not be expressed in some timeless and placeless fashion. The belief is embodied. But I wouldn't deny the animal a semantic state that is counterfactual in nature.

If an animal looks surprised or puzzled, did it have a prelinguistic belief?

Surely a belief would be positively held if it can be revealed as an expectation which can be positively contradicted. That seems evidence enough it is held in a counterfactual fashion.

I would like to start with an inquiry on the above statement: specifically is it Peircean or not? I haven't found anywhere Peirce expressed atheism or the like. Or maybe I didn't follow you correctly. — Dzung

It is notoriously difficult to agree what Peirce actually believed about god or divinity. But he himself stressed he certainly did not follow any kind of orthodox view.

And my point there was that he definitely did not argue for an external creator with some mission in mind for mankind. Instead, he identified the divine with the vague ground of being - the Firstness of pure unformed potential. And so the Comos is a state of logical regularity that evolved into being in a purely self-creating fashion with no purpose in mind except to be "increasingly reasonable" in its lawfulness and organisation.

He did say he was more Buddhist on this score. :)

Poor old SX. :yawn:

Your criticism is correct, but your tone is way over the top.

Poor old Wayfarer. He has his views and he promotes them pretty politely. He doesn’t deserve your shrill tirade.

Metaphysical systems can themselves be read as attempts to flatten experience with 'magic' words. — foo

We have a tendency to exaggerate the importance of our own discoveries and to mistake our opinions for facts. ... In this context, it makes perfect sense that science would be built around the measurement of public and non-controversal entities. — foo

Hah. This level of commonsense is going to kill the thread. Kudos. :)

To be actualized from what? You presuppose the existence of what is being actualized here. I think to be actual is to exist in one manner, namely, in reality, whereas to be potential is to exist in another manner, namely, in the mind or nature of a thing. — Thorongil

Well, we could say they exist in different manners or that they are real in different manners. That still leaves us with the issue of how they are both the same in some sense, but also sharply different. It is the metaphysical distinctions we are trying to draw out which matter.

I think it is just less confusing to talk about potential being and actual being. And I would call both real in that they are ontically distinct yet related - nicely opposed in a mutual dialectical fashion. You really need both to make sense of being.

But then to exist seems to relate to actuality - to being that is definite, concrete, part of the here and now. Potentiality is about what does not yet exist right here and now in concrete fashion, but which might exist at some future place and time. To the degree a potential exists in the here and now, it is a vagueness, an indeterminancy, an Apeiron. It is the opposite of the concrete when it comes to existing.

So there are problems in saying that the potential simply does not exist, and that it is thus not real. That is going too far. It leads to a metaphysics where something must come from nothing - the familiar problem of a metaphysics of being.

But a potential whose existence is vague, unmaterialised, unformed, can be the proper opposite of the kind of existence which is concrete and here and now - a substantial existence. A vague potential is effectively a "nothingness" right at this moment. Or better yet, an "everythingness", as no possibilities have yet been concretely eliminated. And so it can be both real - present as unformed and unmaterialised - and yet completely lack the concrete actuality which denotes "existence".

The same way of thinking can apply to that other standard metaphysical distinction - this time between the concrete and the abstract. An advantage of a triadic Peircean metaphysics is of course that it includes this as well.

So universals or generalities can be considered to be real even when they are abstract objects. Or more accurately for a Peircean process metaphysics, when they are mathematical-strength finalities or necessities. They too "exist" - just not in the concrete here and now fashion of the actual. They exist as ultimate or ideal limits on form.

Again, the terminology gets pushed and pulled about by the underlying metaphysical positions being taken. But Aristotle did do a good job at establishing the basic jargon - missing out only the one crucial dichotomy really, that of the vague~crisp.

So a Peircean metaphysics makes a triad of the potential, the actual, and the necessary.

You have actual concrete substantial existence arising in the middle as the emergently definite and individuated in terms of a time and place.

Then there is the vague potential which is unexpressed possibility. And indeed, unsuppressed possibility. Nothing has yet happened to limit it.

Then there is formal necessity waiting to limit it. The possible becomes the actual by becoming substantially formed in terms of latent regularities. Possibility contains everything, but not everything can be actualised as many of those possibilities would conflict and cancel. You can be a circle, or a square, but not a square circle.

So the term "real" would span all three fundamental categories of being. But "exist" would be reserved for what seems obviously the most developed state of being - the concrete actuality of substantial being where a free potential has been most fully constrained or determined.

I can see you just want your usual argument, and to get it started you must misrepresent what I say, and so force me to spend the next 100 posts trying to correct you. I suppose we could do that. :)

But you adhere to process metaphysics, — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep.

so you do not even recognize that any objects have real existence — Metaphysician Undercover

It's more complex. Simple physical "objects" like rivers, stars and mountains are highly contextual. As individuated objects, they do depend on a context that individuates them. But complex objects, like a cat or a chair, can be organismic. A cat is formed by the genetic information it contains and so reflects the constraints or a particular evolutionary history. A chair is formed by cultural information - shaped by a human purpose, and furthermore is designed to be resistant to natural erosive or entropic forces. A chair is as context-independent as we humans can make it. We choose materials we know are going to last.

Thus a wave on the ocean exists in a highly contextual sense. A chair is at the other end of the spectrum in being the least wedded to a natural context. People who want to endorse an object oriented ontology will naturally think of chairs rather than waves when wanting to argue their case for the existence of objects.

Boundaries are vague to you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I said the opposite really. Boundaries are the definite limits that emerge to regulate vagueness or indeterminacy.

There is no such thing as unity in your metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, that is the opposite of what I always say. The unity may have an irreducible triadic structure. But then that triadic structure is thus a single unity by definition. It is the relation the three aspects have which allows us to speak of their holism as being a thing.

Your claims to holism are the hollow claims of pragmatism, which renders the object completely subjective. — Metaphysician Undercover

My pragmatism would instead say that the holism of a sign relation approach - ie: a triadic semiotic - is about the whole of that relation. So it shows how our notion of "an object" would arise as the best way to mediate between the subjective and objective aspects of being - if here you are meaning to talk of the duality of mind and world.

You seek to do the logically impossible... — Metaphysician Undercover

So why is it logically impossible?

You might want to argue that based on some particular metaphysical premise. But then you know that I have my own view about the lack of holistic coherence in your usual metaphysical approach.

If you reject holism, you reject holism. But can you give a good reason for rejecting holism yet?

I, in reply, agree with reductionism - but only as far as is sensible. And a Peircean approach says that holism can only be reduced to a triadic or hierarchical relation. Dualism is too simple. Monadism is even worse.

And I think that is because, for a long period, up until recently, the idea of there being 'different perspectives' was rejected. Nominalism and scientific realism tends towards the view that something either exists, or it doesn't; there isn't a scale along which things can exist 'in a different manner'. But the idea of a 'dialectical' understanding has been revived through process philosophy, Peirce's semiotics, and the like. — Wayfarer

Hmm. But I am then concerned to make the further distinction that is only now coming through in the past century of science and physics.

So it is not just that there are different points of view on the same thing - that figure/ground shift you describe where the mountain, or whatever, is first seen as an existent object, then appreciated as a contextual feature (a wave in the earth's crust generated by plate tectonics), and then finally seen as the wholeness of these two opposing views.

The even larger story is that any possible view is going to see the same general thing simply by virtue of it being "a view". So this is the fractal or scale-free story. Anything viewed on any scale will resolve into a view where at the same scale as the observer, there are a bunch of individuated entities. And then in one direction, those entities shrink in size until they effectively become a continuous blur. And in the other direction, the entification gets so large that it completely fills our entire view and becomes again a constant backdrop as we can no longer see the edges of the thing.

So there is a flip-flopping dichotomy where we can - in Gestalt fashion - switch views to see the individuated in terms of an object that exists and a context that is doing the individuating. And then there is the hierarchical development of that duality so that it is an asymmetry expressed over all possible scales of being. That dichotomy of the individuated vs the contextual is being spread over all scales, from the smallest to the largest, in such a way that it is always present for an observer.

But while it can be clearly seen at scales sufficiently close to the observer, at scales much smaller or larger than the observer, it again changes apparent character. The dichotomy fuzzes into a steady blur as it becomes something very small to us, and then expands to fill our entire view to create a generality or constancy as it becomes something very large to us.

So yes, it is pretty complicated. :)

The dialectical is the step that leads towards the hierarchical. The dialectical is the fact of a symmetry-breaking - the emergence of a figure~ground distinction or individuation. The hierarchical is then that symmetry-breaking becoming fully expressed over all possible scales of being. It accounts for the limits that then emerge to "ground" that being for an observer.

Eventually, things become either too small or too large to be part of the "world of process". Just purely due to the distances involved, they become a constancy of sub-microscopic fluctuations or the constancy of macroscopic changes too large to be encompassed by our experience. The macroscopic - as in the laws of nature as they impinge on us - may as well be fixed, God-given and eternal.

It is this shift - from same-scale dialectics to scale-free hierarchical organisation - which is the key for a pan-semiotic understanding of nature, I would say.

I don't think they are real by definition, but they certainly exist, just as impossible things don't and can't exist. — Thorongil

I guess to my ear the term "exists" means to be actualised. To be present and individuated in terms of matter, time and place. Existence is the concrete fact of being. So my interest is in how you can understand that normal definition in terms of a holistic or process metaphysics where any such actuality or individuation is a passing feature in a more general flow.

In this view, existence becomes emergent or a kind of illusion - a state of persistence due to some context of constraints. And possibility is the fundamental wellspring of being. Existence becomes not the conversion of a possibility into an actuality, but a constraint on the generality or vagueness of a potential such as to leave behind something highly individuated. A wealth of possibilities gets suppressed to produce actuality, rather than some concrete possibility getting converted into a state of substantial being.

To say of a thing that it becomes is to say that it changes over and within time, while to say of a thing that it is is to say that it exists immutably either eternally or outside of time. To use my example, the chair as concept is, while the chair as percept becomes. A concept doesn't exist in time, but physical objects like chairs do. — Thorongil

Yep. That would be where we differ in that you take a theist and Platonist route here?

So I would take the Peircean position where to exist is to be actual and individuated. But to be real includes all three things of the contingent, the actual, and the necessary. So pure potential is real in that it is causal - it represents spontaneity. And then constraints are also real even if emergent in their regulative presence. Ultimately constraints express the necessity of mathematical-strength form. The laws are a necessary generality - which is why they seem timeless and Platonic, even though they can only be real via a process of material emergence.

Having said that, the emergent habits of nature would be both real and seen to exist if we could see the Cosmos unfolding in time and space as itself an individuated object. So "to exist" is tied to a point of view.

This is made explicit in natural philosophy approaches like Stan Salthe's hierarchy theory. For us, sitting at a particular scale of cosmic being, we can look down towards the very small and it eventually moves so fast that it merges into a constant (quantum) blur. Likewise we can look up to the very largest scales and things start to change so slowly that they apparently cease to change - much like a mountain range.

Anyway, the point so far as the thread is concerned is that terms shift their meanings to try to express their motivating metaphysics. And there are at least three metaphysics in play here.

The standard reductionist one which circles around nominalist and monistic views - brute existence. The Platonic one that leads to a hard dualism or frank idealism. And then a process metaphysics which is triadic or hierarchical in terms of what it considers real, and therefore which treats existence as being an issue of what causes localised habits of persistence within a backdrop of a generalised flow.

What if we returned to the pre-nineteenth century label of 'Natural Philosopher' for people that Do science, and left 'Scientist' for those that worship it. — andrewk

Scientists who work at the systems science end of things - who take an Aristotelean and holistic view - do self-consciously call themselves natural philosophers.

For example, Stan Salthe:

Natural Philosophy (or the philosophy of nature), is a developmental view of evolutionary processes, from cosmic evolution to organic (biological) and cultural evolution (see "Natural Philosophy: Developmental Systems in the Thermodynamic Perspective" [here]), now including, e.g., MEP (see "The Natural Philosophy of Ecology" [here]). Its antecedents lie in the Nineteenth Century -- with Comte, Goethe, Peirce, Schelling, Spencer, etc. It is a perspective that constructs a science-based story of where we came from and what we are doing here (see text, Becoming, Being and Passing). It is sometimes known as General Evolution, and encompasses cosmic, organic and cultural evolutions. Its goal is an intelligible creation myth (using "myth", not as a pejorative term, but as it is used in ethnography).

http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/

So this is a holist vs a reductionist distinction, from the working scientist point of view.

It seems like one result of your distinction would be that something could be real and not exist or could be and not exist, which is surely absurd. Am I wrong? I want to say that the statement "the chair is" is equivalent to saying that "the chair exists." — Thorongil

But are possibilities real? Do possibilities exist? How do you answer there?

They seem real in that they are there, just not yet substantially expressed. They don't exist as being, but do we need to stretch "exist" to include the post-hoc fact of a potential to become?

And was a possibility is substantially expressed, it no longer exists. Being is the end of becoming. (Or is it the birth of fresh becomings and so no more than all part of the real flow?)

I think the point is that people jump to familiar positions on what is a far more complex issue. The terminology speaks for a metaphysical point of view. So you can't actually examine the definitions to find the proper answers. The terminology is instead attempting to stabilise some particular metaphysical view ... which itself ought to be the thing in play.

It is commonly acknowledged, for instance, there there might be a being of fiction no less than a being of the social or the material, and that for the most part questions of being are relatively unrealted to questions of existence. — StreetlightX

So are possible beings then beings that exist? Or simply beings that could exist?

Does the possible itself exist? And is it real if it doesn't? In what sense does the possible have being?

And does the impossible exist if it is the concrete limit to what could in fact exist? Do the limits on existence count as part of existence?

I think it is obvious that all these are questions that relate to "existence" as an ontological qualifier. It is not wrong to want to systematise our use of these terms in a way that can make our ontological commitments clear.

Louis Lane believe superman can fly but does not believe that Clarke Kent can fly, despite clark and Superman being the very same individual. — Banno

A belief is a habit of interpretation. It reads reality in terms of confirming signs.

If an individual wears his underpants over his trousers, it is inductively more likely that he is a superhero with superpowers. The belief is some established Baysesian model. How you wear your underpants is a sign by which the reality can be predicted.

Of course beliefs aren't infallible. Which is why evolution builds in both a psychological propensity for habit formation and for sudden disbelief or questioning when some chosen sign starts to seem unreliable. The surprise of a mismatch - Clark Kent is noticed to have shifted location at a speed which had to be superhuman - can spark the search for a better habit of interpretation. How he rocks his duds ceases to be a signifier.

The belief that Clark and Superman are the "very same individual" is of course just a further habit of interpretation - an inductive inference open to falsification.

Whether the belief is "true" or not falls out of the picture as some kind of transcendental pipedream. In making belief dependent on "a sign", the believing mind is separating itself from the world to build its own functional relation with that world.

The world presses in with all its myriad messy variety. The mind's job is to reduce that clutter to some set of sharp symbolic responses. To what category can an experience be assigned in terms of some yes/no definite question?

A cat is a cat until something clicks because the world we are reading in terms of a set of predictable features is throwing up too many surprises. This "cat" is rather bulky, bushy tailed, with a bumbling gait and a black mask across its eyes. Hey, it's a "racoon". (Well it isn't. It's the advance force of an invading alien armada as we are next about to learn. Etc.)

So a belief is a habitual way to read the world in terms of a set of signs. It is a theory that is held "true" while it holds up functionally in terms of the acts of measurement which it legitimates. As long as the signs are seen, the interpretation is held to be justified.

But the relation is an indirect one. The signs that confirm our state of belief are part of our psychology, not part of the world in some brute physicalist sense. They are informational not material, phenomenal not noumenal, in being answers to our potential questions.

Hey, that's fine. I don't take things personally. It's all about the cut and thrust of ideas. But thanks for saying that.

So to 'exist' is to be 'this as distinct from that', to have an identity. — Wayfarer

Yep. So to exist is to be substantial. Yet to be substantial is to be individuated. And so the question become how does individuation come to be. And then what would its "other" - the unindividuated - look like.

This leads you from an ontology of things to a metaphysics of processes. Being is a state of individuation which has a reason to persist.

The question is then whether this reason for individuation to persist is immanent or transcendent. Does it emerge as the limit of a process, or is it in some sense imposed from outside?

Mathematical form comes into view as the answer that seems to serve both camps there. :)

It is hard to find in that description events that take the inductive form. So again I suggest that induction is a post hoc account. As such I do not agree that it takes a centra place in science. — Banno

So does that account instead describe deduction as being central to the development of the thinking involved? I think not.

Newton's theory of universal gravitation has of course become a classic test case for philosophy of science. Newton himself rejected a simple hypothetico-deductive model in favour of "the Newtonian style" which endorsed an abductive approach able to take the leap from complex particulars to simple generalities.

Inference to the best explanation involves a back and forth where the world as it is seen, and the laws that might explain that, swim into view together as the two halves a modelling relation. So the particular is extrapolated to discover some general - motivated by the reasonable metaphysical principle that lawful simplicity underlies all the messy real world complexity. And then the truth of that generality is checked against what it then predicts. It is tested by whether it seems to predict the particulars that were used to predict it.

So abduction is a mix of the inductive and deductive - but at a still vague level. All it needs is the start of what feels like it is going to become a good fit. Things are starting to snap together. A pattern is beginning to emerge.

You can try to formalise abduction as an if-then habit of thought. It is a species of induction in attempting the "invalid" thing of going from the particular to the general. And it is also "invalid" in that it accepts vagueness as a suitable grounding. Nothing actually has to be crisply or definitely stated at the beginning. That is instead the desired destination. Meanwhile a loose fit is good enough if it is a fit that seems to be growing tighter as work is done to clarify the direction being revealed.

Anyway, it is if-then reasoning. If this general rule were the case, these kinds of particular results would not look surprising. These kinds of particular results do exist. Therefore the general rule is probably the case. And historians show that this is the way Newton moved in his reasoning to develop a mathematically-definite theory.

So all reasoning involves this two-way interaction. We need to go from the particular to the general, and from the general to the particular, in as secure a way as possible. Obviously, deduction is more secure than induction because it introduces no new semantics. But then the cost of that is that deduction can introduce no new semantics.

Then the sense that this is a real jump, not some gradual change, is explained by the complex world of messy particulars being the state of broken symmetry in nature. And what we are trying to recover - as the trick that makes scientific models work - is the deeper symmetry that got broke.

We have a smashed up lot of glass bits on the floor. And a lot of bits are probably missing. We theb want to know whether it was once a glass vase or a glass dish, or whatever.

So the move from the particular to the general is seeking a hidden symmetry that is believed to lurk behind a messy complexity. We can't see that symmetry directly as a further thing to observe - symmetry-breakings tend to be thermally irreversible and so the past is gone. But we can imagine it mathematically. We can recover it as a mathematical idea.

Any amount of observables can't add up inductively to reveal the hidden whole. What's broke is broke when it comes to our available view of reality. But we can leap imaginatively to the kind of symmetry that could be broken to yield the kind of fragments we see all around.

So reasoning itself is an irreducible coupling of the inductive and deductive directions of thought. And then abduction goes to the fact that this self-organising loop has to start off as a seed and then grow into full and definite flower.

Abduction has both flavours of thought coupled together - as it must to be capable of growth towards a definite understanding. But it is that possibly successful thought still in its tentative stage - one where a loose fit is still acceptable. We are in a state of mind where we are allowing ourselves to be guided by some general principles - like that simple symmetries lie behind every messy and complex broken symmetry - and then looking backwards retroductively to see what generalisation can in fact predict the particulars we seem to identify as being suggestive or significant.

The peculiarity of an elliptical orbit could be explained if it were composed of an inertial straightline motion coupled to a centripetal accelerative force. The inertia is a symmetry, so falls out of the story. You now just have to account for the symmetry breaking which is the centripetal force exerted by a planetary body.

But why should only planets have gravity? Right, let's again find the symmetry. All masses attract. It is not something special but something which is the same for all. The symmetry of the force is broken only by the accident of the locally differing quantities of mass involved. There is the universal principle - the further inductive leap of imagination - needed to get a proper theory going.

And so a sharp picture of this thing called gravity swims into theoretical view. Eventually we can crank out predictions and begin to support the theory's newly acquired, strictly deductive, form with a sufficient weight of inductive confirmation.

Induction and deduction are initially entwined so closely as an if-then inference to the best explanation that the lines are blurred. The mind abductively has to juggle both at once in loose fashion.

But the goal - as a scientist - is to arrive at a clean separation between a theory and its truth. In the end, you want the deductive bit to stand alone as some mathematical grammar that encodes a symmetry and its symmetry breaking. And then the inductive bit becomes the evidence that supports that theoretical structure in terms of the observables that are close enough to whatever was predicted not to count as an unwanted surprise.

If one grants abduction and induction, then their place can only be in justifying belief, not in finding truth. Unless one follows apokrisis in rejecting truth altogether. — Banno

Don’t be such a sook. If you agree with Janus, you agree with me. Get over it.