So if you would stand by this claim, which at best could only be a misunderstanding, point to the post in which I supposedly argued such a nonsense.

My post:

On deflationary accounts, “all that can be significantly said about truth is exhausted by an account of the role of the expression ‘true’... in our [speech] or thought,” and we might add formal systems here. Thus, notions of truth are neither “metaphysically substantive nor explanatory.”

To which you replied:

So what's the problem? It's not as if deflationary accounts say that there are not truths.

Adding later:

For my part, talking off the top of my head, I agree with it, and add that deflation is pretty much the only description of truth generally, inflationary accounts only be of use in somewhat special cases

It's debatable if deflationary theories of truth "do not say there are no truths." They say that truth is just how we use the token "true" in speech and thought, as the post you quoted points out, so it was clear what was being discussed. And if one affirms that one selects logics and "ways of speaking" based on what is useful, it follows that truth will determined by usefulness.

Particularly, if we follow your stated approach, that there are no correct or incorrect logics, but rather they are selected for by usefulness alone. I asked in virtue of what would a logic be "useful." Your response was "whenever it had a use" and that anyone setting out a logic has a use for it. But this is obviously extremely permissive.

Now, I suppose that if one is committed to such a view "follows from" doesn't really carry much weight, but it does follow from this that truth depends on usefulness.

Hence, in your own words:

Now what this shows is that truth-preservation is a function of the interpretation. So yes, in your rough terms, truth and validity do depend on the system being used, since that system includes the interpretation...

If you generalize this to natural language scenarios then yes, I agree, there is no fact of the matter as to whether individual animals exist outside the context of human language. Like you say:

We can juxtapose two views, that either the dog is an whole regardless of language, or it is a whole in virtue of language. Then we can pretend that the one must be true, at the expense of the other...

Sheep are an "organic whole" only until they reach the abattoir. What counts as a whole depends on what you are doing.

This is your basic Latin Averroism redux: different fields have different, perhaps contradictory truths, or what is true (or affirmed true by "pretending") depends on what you are doing and what your goals are.

But you're not even consistent on this. If we are narrow-minded fundamentalists, we can at best "pretend" that individual insects exist as a fact of nature/biology, as opposed to being the result of what humans choose to "count" as an insect, yet we can also advance this position and claim "of course it is true that insects existed before humans." Well, is the contrary also equally true depending on what you are doing? It seems so.

Apparently, multiple contradictory statements can be affirmed as true, it just depends on what is useful. However, "truth does not depend on what is useful, who would argue that?" I suppose such a claim is also true whenever it is useful to affirm it.

Questions of mereology, mereological nihilism, ordinary/extraordinary objects, etc. are difficult. I suppose, "we can assert or deny any part/whole relation as true of false, or contradict ourselves, based on what is useful," is an approach, but it's hardly a serious one.

It's also pretty obvious how disastrous this is for moral reasoning.

:up:

That was going to be my comment. Also, God would not be "undecided."

Creare [creation] can never be used to indicate the generation of things from or by what is itself a contingent finite being.Creation is the “act” whereby a thing has being; generation is what determines it, at any instant(including the instant of first creation), as this-or-that. As the Nicene Creed makes clear, all things are created by God: whatever is, insofar as it is, “participates” in self-subsistent being, or it would not be. As Aquinas puts it, “a created thing is called created because it is a being, not because it is this being. . . God is the cause, not of some particular kind of being, but of the whole universal being.” On the other hand, the changing and ephemeral identities of things are governed by the processes of nature, and in this sense, almost everything is subject to generation and corruption.

One might say: insofar as the metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy things exist, they “depend” directly on the Empyrean; insofar as they exist as this-or-that, most things also depend on nature (particularly on the spheres, beginning from the Primo Mobile).23 All things are therefore created, and most of them are also made. This does not imply that some things (such as the spheres or angels) were created first and then “made” others. It only means that some things are ontologically dependent on others: there is a hierarchy of being in the order of nature (distinction), in which some things cannot exist as what they are unless a whole series of other things exist as what they are. These other things may be said to
be logically prior or “prior in nature,” but they are not “prior in duration” or in time: nothing stands between any thing and the ground of its being. It is in this sense that Aquinas says, “The corporeal forms that bodies had when first produced came immediately from God”; as he explains, this simply means that “in the first production of corporeal creatures no transmutation from potentiality to act can have taken place.” In other words, there was no becoming.

This in no way implies that at the moment of first creation the hierarchy of ontological dependence inherent in the distinction of being did not exist, or that in the first production of things God “had to do something special,” which “later” the spheres did. The moment of first creation is only conceptually, but not essentially, different from any other: the only difference is that before that moment there was nothing. Indeed, for Aquinas the created world could very well have always existed, with little consequence for the Christian understanding of creation; we only know that the world is not eternal because Scripture tells us so. The “act” of creation (the radical dependence of all things on the ground of their being at every instant they exist) logically implies, but must not be identified with, the hierarchical dependencies of determinate form within spatiotemporal being.24

Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - Introduction: Non-Duality and Self-Knowledge - pg. 119-120

The point, as I have said, is that that home (the Empyrean [God]) is nowhere at all. It does not exist in space or time; thus neither does the spatiotemporal world it “contains.” The Empyrean is the subject of all experience, it is what does the experiencing. As pure awareness or conscious being, its relation to creation, that is, to everything that can be described or talked about, may be metaphorically conceived in one of two ways: It may be imagined as an infinite reality containing the entire universe of every possible object of experience (this cosmological picture is the framework of the Paradiso) or it may be conceived as a point with no extension in either space or time, which projects the world of space and time around itself, as a light paints a halo onto mist. In the Primo Mobile, the ninth sphere, which is the nexus between the Empyrean and the world of multiplicity, between the subject of experience and every possible object of experience, Dante takes both these tacks.

pg. 6

:up:

This goes back almost 1,000 years earlier too, and was the orthodox position prior to schism between the Orthodox and Catholic churches (both still affirm it).

The idea that God the Father alone is uncreated and that the Son and Spirit are creatures or emanations was rejected. This shows up most notably in the Arian Heresy (there were other subordinationist heresies too though). The idea that there is just one God and that God merely appears in different modes, essentially different masks, were the various modalist heresies. The Nestorian Heresy is somewhat related too, but that deals with the Incarnations' natures.

This becomes definitive with the Council of Nicaea (325), but it is an issue in earlier councils and defended and fleshed out in later ones.

I will offer an explanatory example, although I will caution that it is not perfect. In the semiotic relation as conceived by St. Augustine (and which still underpins semiotics to this day) there are three things going on in any sign (and presumably in anything that means anything to anyone at all).

We have the knower, what is known, and the means by which knowing takes place (i.e., the "sign" vehicle or word/logos, although not all signs are linguistic obviously). In C.S. Peirce this is object/sign vehicle/interpretant. St. Augustine does a ton with these triads in De Trinitate, particularly how they show up in the human mind and experience. One can even see a sort of implicit mapping of:

Father - ground of being, what is known
Son/Logos - the means by which the ground is known, the mediator
Holy Spirit - that which knows, or "the knowledge" (this hypostatic abstraction in "Thirdness" shows up in Peirce too).

A key idea in semiotics, at least classically, is that the sign is irreducibly triadic. You cannot decompose it; if you do you will no longer be considering a sign. Each part is only what it is in virtue of being part of the whole.

Is this a good analogy for God as classically conceived? Perhaps not if we aren't very careful, but there are useful similarities. The sign is all three components; there is just one substance here. Each part is what it is in virtue of being a sign. Likewise, each person (hypostasis) of the Trinity, Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, is God essentially, and the Trinity is not decomposable into discrete "parts of God." Nevertheless, we can speak of each person individually, and their differences, just as we can speak of each part of the sign and its relations, while still affirming that they are one thing, and that each is defined in terms of being one thing. This is as opposed to three separable things making up a whole that is the sum of its parts. (This is also how St. Thomas sees cause and effect BTW, a cause is a cause in virtue of having effects, but it is ontologically prior as in Avicenna).

In his commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, St. Thomas introduces an act of the intellect called separation. Separation lets us consider things apart that are never actually apart, for instance a man without flesh and bones, things without their per se accidents, etc. Theology is concerned with things without motion and which are separable and abstract (for the substance of God lacks both matter and motion).

The difference crops up in the fact that each hypostasis is said to be "fully God" or to possess the "fullness of God." How to understand this? Well, each shares in an undivided (and undividable, because infinite) omnipotence, etc. God is said to have one will. St. Thomas follows St. John of Damascus here: "operation of the will is consequent upon [the entity's] nature" and God has one nature. God's will and intellect are the same as God's essence, and not divided.

"But," you might ask, "what about 'not my will but yours (Luke 22:42)?" Well, the Incarnation, the fullness of the Son/Logos dwelling in flesh, involves two natures (human and divine), and so two wills. This is spiritually important because it points to the deification of man through this mediation, Christ as the "firstborn among many brothers and sisters," (Romans 8:29) who shall be "conformed to the image of his Son" and "glorified." As St. Athanasius puts it: "God became man that man might become God" (St. Thomas affirms this with his: "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."

The monotheletist heresy, anathematized at the Third Council of Constantinople, rejects the "two wills." Anyhow, interesting tidbit, this is represented in the making of the Sign of the Cross. It is done with three fingers for the three hypostases, and two (ring finger and pinky) tucked in for the two natures in Christ. You will often see old art with Saints holding up their hands in this manner. There is also a different hand signal for priests blessings, thumb to ringfinger.

Exactly. This is why I see it as easily the most disastrous of his plans. The Feds also benefit from a great deal of prestige. People want to work there. They get to recruit from top schools the way big consulting or law firms do, despite paying a fraction of the pay. They are going to lose that.

You can already see how politicization is affecting the state's access to talent in the plunge in military recruitment. If you had told me that the GOP would begin feuding with the military and security services back in 2015 I'd never believe it. It's a case where there really doesn't seem to be any larger trends, just the pettiness of one man.

I also think having a small, fully professional military becomes particularly dangerous when you start heavily politicizing the state. I would rather they return to conscription and citizen soldiers than have a small politicized class dominating defense. One need only look to our nation's police unions to see how that ends. If police unions had the power (e.g. they were also in the military), I think we'd very easily be like the Roman Empire, with security forces demanding massive donatives and overthrowing who ever challenged their impunity or wouldn't pay up.

Already with the fairly limited level of power you see then openly heckling mayors and sheriffs, essentially heckling their commander-in-chief, and being given direct orders from them and replying: "fuck you, 15% raises and we'll talk," or even sometimes "do what we want or we aren't following orders and doing the job we're paid for anymore." But some militaries ARE like that. It's what happens when you let them degenerate.

So yes, it was a lot of things, but simply stating that it was government run banks makes a dubious argument as if the crisis would/could have been avoided without Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae, which btw officially aren't banks in the normal definition. Yet they are worth mentioning. also.

Yes, certainly. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I brought them up to point out that Obama had very limited options when it came to dealing with the crisis and the idea that bailing out the banks makes him some sort of plutocrat seems off to me. His options were to allow a catastrophic banking sector collapse, or, maybe, the nationalize much of the banking sector. He almost certainly couldn't get legislative approval for the latter though. And at any rate, he DID essentially nationalize two absolutely gigantic banks (granted, they were already quasi-public in a loose way).

The plan was to stop the crisis. The fact that Dodd-Frank and other legislative packages lacked the teeth they might have had has to do with the opposition party blocking more serious reform more than any lack of will from the Administration.

I am aware of him because I've read a number of articles put out by the Lonergan Institute. However, I didn't even know what the group was named for until yesterday when I was looking at one of the detailed summaries of one of D.C. Schindler's books and decided to check. The coincidence must be a sign that I should check him out.

Sounds up my alley. I am fairly familiar with St. Thomas, although approaches to St. Thomas are pretty varied. Those I am most familiar with tend to emphasize his connection to the earlier Augustinian tradition, similarities to St. Bonaventure, Dante's fusion of St. Thomas, more strictly Augustinian voices, and Islamic "Neo-Platonists," and the continuities from Aristotle as received by late-antiquity through Plotinus, Porphyry, etc. I have read other takes that tend to focus on different areas (or rarely, even set up St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas as opposite poles, opponents even). I don't think I have encountered "transcendental Thomism," in any depth before though.

It was a lot of things, a real witches brew. The derivatives were a major issue, but it was the entire structure of the US housing and lending market that led to the explosion of derivatives in the first place. You can add in the rating agencies too. But part of the reason that the ratings agencies, pension funds, etc. didn't worry as much as they should have is the idea of the implicit state backing for loans made by the parastatals.

Any private enterprise who behaved in the same way would disappear in a heartbeat.

Well, Musk hasn't totally destroyed Twitter yet. He has been blocked from these sorts of antics at his bigger money makers. Just as well, more time to fake video game accomplishments and binge ketamine in between eliminating federal departments and getting into Twitter fights. All in a good days work on the road to being the first trillionaire.

Nor Banno, for that matter.

At least not while being aware of it.

However, you did spend an entire thread arguing that "truth" didn't make sense outside of satisfaction, while also arguing that there is no correct logic, but that logics should be selected for based on usefulness.

That truth depends on what is useful is a consequence of such a position (although perhaps only if it is useful :rofl: ). If truth is always truth in terms of satisfaction vis-á-vis some system (indeed you ridiculed the notion of anything being "actually true") and the criteria by which a system is selected is usefulness, then truth depends on usefulness. Actually, you were quite incredulous at the idea of a correct logic, that truth wouldn't be defined in terms of useful ways of speaking.

For example, if truth is just satisfaction, and if one selects between holding to or not holding to the principle of noncontradiction based on usefulness, then what is true or false depends on a selection grounded in usefulness. How could it be otherwise?

No, but they aren't unrelated. The inscrutability of reference implies that extension is equally inscrutable. There is no "fact of the matter." But on the view that "what an insect is," is just how the token "insect" is used, this also means there is no fact of the matter about what an insect is. And this wouldn't just apply to universals either, but concrete particulars.

That is unless you want to say that "the rake in this room" can uniquely specify a set with one element via extension, and we can know this, but we also cannot uniquely specify what "the rake in this room refers to." Or "insects" uniquely specifies a set with discrete elements, but the same word cannot refer uniquely to insects as a group or to individual insects.

This is strange and is going to have a host of bizarre consequences, especially if what defines extension in the first place is just how we use a word (particularly because different people understand and use the same terms in different ways, and the same people understand and use the same words in different ways in different contexts). For one, the unique set specified by a term will be unknowable, so it will be a set that exists in virtue of what? As an abstract object detached from human knowledge, but which is defined by aggregate human word usage?

I am familiar with the argument. I wasn't sure if you were given that remark, since the idea seems to be that the word "rabbit" corresponds to a unique set of all (and only) rabbits.

You think Quine thought only foreign languages were inscrutable?

Now you're saying that a bikini isn't self-organizing. I find this obvious at first glance, but it becomes less obvious when I look at divisibility: A bikini is already divided to begin with, in a physical sense, and is only a whole on a social background. Other clothes follow this pattern: shoes, socks, gloves... the bikini stands out by not being symmetric. So we sell pantys and bras seperately, but we sell bikinis as a unit?

Artifacts are an interesting case because they are organized around a purpose, it's just that their purpose is extrinsic to them. The goals and purposes attached to them is not essential to what they are, rather their form is a function of their intended use. They can be very complex (e.g. a self-driving car), and could conceivably be designed so as to try to maintain or replicate their own form in the ways organisms do (although this goes into the realm of sci-fiction), but they lack the intrinsic goal-directedness of organisms.

Now, something like a synthetic lifeform would be an interesting case here, since it would be the product of goals and intentions, but also have its own intrinsic goals and intentions. However, I don't think such a thing is actually all that novel. We have bred domesticated organisms in this manner for millennia and people are obviously (more or less) intentional about who they chose to have children with. Eugenics wasn't a wholly sui generis innovation either.

I'm thinking it might be useful to think in terms of system-integration, here, too: while we may be self-organising in terms of being an organism, we're not self-organising in terms of society, so we're not necessarily self-organising in the subsystem that includes bikinis. But that we're self-organising as organisms is part of the way society self-organises. So a bikini is only a bikini within the context of a self-organising system (such as society) that also includes us.

:up:

Somewhere, St. Thomas says "all the efforts of the human mind cannot exhaust the essence of a single fly." Things are not only always changing, but they can always come to exist in new contexts. This is as true of things as words. Robert Sokolowski says something similar about never being able to "fully grasp" the intelligibility of things, but of course we can grasp them more or less well. So, the establishment of substances (things) in metaphysics isn't, in my view, about offering something like an exhaustive account (impossible) or some sort of unique lookup variable or set, but avoiding the slide into "everything is context all the way down," viz. "either there are no things, or else an infinite number of different things superimposed over any thing."

Societies and other human organizations are self-organizing to some degree. They can also become more intentional about how they develop themselves. Data collection, analytic departments, etc. are in some sense the "sense organs" of a state or corporation. Yet states and corporations presumably don't have experiences, goals, their own desires, etc. So they are an important sort of thing in the world, but their being is parasitic on people.

I don't think it's any surprise that we see a slide towards "there are no things," in the modern period. The successes of mathematical physics have led to attempts to do philosophy without taking any account of the phenomenological aspects of being, essentially pumping all the subjectivity out of an account of the world. This occludes the obvious existence of individuals in terms of ourselves.

In other words, reference needs to be inscrutable on the organism level, as organisms aren't made to operate on higher organisational levels.

I wasn't sure exactly how to take this. My position given earlier in the thread is that elimination arguments from underdetermination are not good arguments. Showing that something is underdetermined doesn't demonstrate that there is "no fact of the matter." Such arguments don't just affect reference, they work just as well vis-á-vis the validity of induction, all scientific knowledge, all historical knowledge, etc. Are we to also maintain that there are "no facts of the matter" because these are underdetermined? That seems like an absurd conclusion to me. For example, that there is not "no fact of the matter" about who won the last World Series simply because all of my (or anyone else's) observations might be consistent with there not having really been a World Series last year. The focus on reference obscures how widely virtually the same argument can apply.

I don't think even merely skeptical arguments from underdetermination account for much. They amount to "you cannot know whatever you can imagine yourself to be wrong about." But we can imagine that we are wrong about anything.

And there maybe some kind of analysis for this regarding how systems or things nest within each other in a statistically meaningful way, like the human use of bikinis as opposed to sme other properties / lack of properties in a flout. Ofcourse this is all just complete speculation whether this kind of analysis can even coherently be done in this kind of framework at all. I also suspect you could probably get some unintuitive results, but I guess it just reflects how my attitudes and inclinations would want to approach this kind of issue ideally.

:up:

The "nesting" is indeed interesting. You have subatomic particles in atoms, atoms in molecules, molecules in organelles, organelles in cells, cells in organs, organs is bodies, bodies in communities, communities in ecosystems, etc. From an information theoretic perspective, you can see this in the way you can measure a message but also measure the substrate it is encoded in. Terrance Deacon has some interesting stuff on the relationship between physical entropy and Shannon entropy.

I think metaphysics always has to be from the purview of what we perceive, so notions independent of that don't mean much. I think the most generic, fundamental way we can talk about the universe is that it has structure - we just want tomake our organization if these structures coherent from our perspectives in a way that is informative to us, while acknowledging all the caveats.

Indeed, and presumably there is a causal explanation that can be had for the phenomenological experiences of beings (plural), even if it is imperfect. Sometimes explanations of these sorts seem to err by only looking "inside the brain," though. However, no perceptions (or consciousness) occurs in a vacuum and all the evidence suggests the properties of the objects we perceive is constitutive of perception (e.g. leaves look green because of their composition, not just because of how our eyes work, but the interaction of the two, which is how Aristotle saw things).

So, to return to signs, C.S. Peirce and John of St. Thomas had it that the causality proper to signs was to make us have one thought rather than any other. "Fish," makes us think of fish, dark clouds and low pressure cause us to think of rain. This could probably be explained in other frameworks though. Obviously, it is dependent on learning, although I don't think it can be reduced to just correlation, since there is a phenomenological component.

The idea behind P3 is that eliminativism is more parsimonious than its metaphysical rivals (conservatism and permissivism). Its ontology has fewer elements.

An ontology with just one thing (or nothing!) would be more parsimonious. But this seems to me to be in the vein of the eliminitivist who wants to get rid of consciousness because it messes with their models. If you're ontology doesn't describe what there actually is, what good is it for it to be parsimonious?



So "insect" unproblematically refers to the set of all insects? But then "gavagai" can just refer to the set of all rabbits. And "the rake in this room" just defines a set with one element. Hardly inscrutable.

At least until we get to the solution of defining the set where: "insects are just whatever we want to call insects." "We" collectively of course, because if meaning has anything to do with a speaker's intentions we will have Humpty Dumptyism, yet if we multiply the problem it vanishes.

And also "insects existed before anyone was around to want to call anything by any name," even though what an insect is remains entirely dependent on how humans use the token "insect" at present.

I think this might also be problematic. If "what a thing is" depends on what we decide to count it as, then at one point in the past, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide were the same thing, being indistinguishable. Then we distinguished them, and they became two different things, but in a sort of retro causal action, it also became the case that they were always two distinct substances. Or perhaps the same words just refer to different sets depending on current usage?

If that's the case though, then even "what counts as a set" is always subject to revision. If mathematics changes, then what will have been a "set" will also change, since what things are is what we decide to count them as. And in this case, I don't see how it won't be the case that every proposition isn't subject to having its truth value change. After all, the "things are what we want to count them as" solution implies that when the use of "insect" changes, what insects are changes. But this entails that what is actually true of insects, sets, extension, reference, etc. is also subject to change. Not only will it be subject to change, but the change in truth values will reach backwards in time. For instance, if we decide to count giraffes as insects, they will have always been insects.

That seems problematic to me. It's Humpty Dumpty just scaled up. Now, you might say "but we wouldn't ever call giraffes insects." And I'd agree, because language admits of causal explanations, which you've tended to denigrate in the past. But, IMO, that's what is at the heart of all scientific explanations, a grasp of causes and principles.

Fannie and Freddie. Together they hold $7.5 trillion in assets (student loans being another $1.7 trillion, putting these close to all of Wall St. combined, including their foreign holdings). These were created by Congress. They were relatively independent, but that's true of the Fed too. The split with Ginnie Mae only quasiprivatized them, since they were (now quite obviously) still implicitly backed by the state, and they also had Congress passing laws that only applied to them, a sort of hands-on regulation rather than regulation of a wider market. They have now long been directly administered by Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Sallie Mae is instructive here because its spin-off was more than an extension of independence. Sallie won't make the loans DOE does.

This reminds me of a book of D.C. Schindler's I really liked. It seems to me that a major problem of modernity is not only that consciousness is assumed to be simply a representation of reality, but one where the relationship between reality and appearance is more or less arbitrary. Reality does not entail consciousness; it and its contents are accidental and contingent.

And so, since we can never "step outside conscious," we can never step into reality. Yet this ignores the great reminder that Hegel offers, that the Absolute must contain both reality and appearance.

Schindler's book focuses on the Doctrine of Transcendentals, particularly our relation to Beauty. It's probably one of the more accessible works on this topic.

Schindler first diagnoses why our modern condition is so poisonous. “[E]ncountering reality is a basic part of the meaning of human existence.” And, moreover, “there is something fundamentally good about this encounter with the world.” “Modern culture,” however, “is largely a conspiracy to protect us from the real.” Our “encounter” with reality, with everyday life, is increasingly mediated by technology, buffered by layers and layers of devices, screens, “social” media, and various other contrivances. Schindler writes that “the energies of the modern world are largely devoted to keeping reality at bay, monitoring any encounter with what is genuinely other than ourselves, and protecting us from possible consequences, intended or otherwise.”

In response to this, Schindler proposes his creative retrieval of the transcendentals. In the transcendentals—beauty, goodness, and truth—man participates in and, in a real sense, “becomes what he knows.” Schindler maintains that rejecting the notion that the cosmos is true, good, and beautiful, “in its very being,” we are actually committing a gravely dehumanizing move. We are cutting ourselves off from the ability to experience reality at its deepest level. This means that the study and understanding of the transcendentals is not some abstraction, disconnected from everyday life. Rather, a proper understanding of the transcendentals allows one the deepest and most concrete access to the real...

Beauty

Schindler first tackles the transcendental of beauty. This is contrary to the order most frequently employed by the tradition. There are both philosophical and practical reasons for this, however. With respect to the latter, Schindler notes that if “our primary . . . access to reality comes through the windows or doors of our senses” this means that the “way we interpret beauty bears in a literally foundational way on our relationship to reality simply.”

Schindler rejects the notion that beauty is just in the eye of the beholder, that is has no connection to objective reality. Rather, “beauty is an encounter between the human soul and reality, which takes place in the ‘meeting ground,’ so to speak, of appearance.” And beauty is a privileged ground of encounter because it “involves our spirit and so our sense of transcendence, our sense of being elevated to something beyond ourselves—and at the very same time it appeals to our flesh, and so our most basic, natural instincts and drives.” By placing beauty first, one establishes the proper conditions for the “flourishing” of goodness and truth.

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2019/05/08/the-intelligibility-of-reality-and-the-priority-to-love/

Anyhow, the second part of the book focuses on the idea that love is primarily oriented towards Beauty, not Goodness (recalling Plato's Symposium and St. Augustine's ascent via eros). Thus, love is not simply a desire, but in some sense prior to desire, and this agrees with the Patristics who saw man's fallen state as essentially derived from the misattribution and disorder of love. But, due to Beauty standing at the intersection of Goodness and Truth, it also means that love relates to will and intellect, not just will.

Such a view certainly makes more sense of Dante's Virgil, a stand-in for human reason who spends most of his time instructing the Pilgrim on "what and how to love," often through rational insights.

I suppose another way to look at it is the classical semiotic triad. There, the tripartite relation is irreducible. The sign vehicle/logos is what joins the thing known and the knower in a sort of nuptial union (a gestalt), making them one. The modern view tends towards the sign vehicle being an impenetrable barrier between knower and known, and then in the post-modern tradition the object of knowledge simply vanishes because it cannot be known and there is just sign vehicle floating free, constituting reality.

Or a longer, in-depth review: https://lonergan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/LoveModernpredicamentSummary.pdf

Ah, so see, countries should accept Gazan refugees! And they should be able to rely upon all the other services that Syrian, Afghan, etc. refugees can. Glad we agree.

Claiming that "Isreal is engaged in genocide" does not help the case for "no one should be allowed to leave Gaza or aided in doing so.". It's a perverse logic that says "aiding people who flee a genocide is abetting genocide."

But of course, I know the Hamas apologist logic here. "No, they cannot be allowed to seek shelter, because their deaths will be a boon to Hamas' political ends, as will their misery, and the cover they provide is a military necessity."

BTW, here is a story on people giving their life savings to get smuggled out of Gaza.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/jan/08/palestinians-flee-gaza-rafah-egypt-border-bribes-to-brokers

You can also find plenty of video of people pleading to leave. Apparently though, it would have been immoral not to keep them corralled in an active war zone.

You're claiming people have a moral obligation to pen women and children in with people attempting to genocide them. I don't see how that stops ethnic cleansing from working. Essentially, you are relying solely on the restraint of the people engaged in ethnic cleansing to fix the situation for you, since you won't let people remove themselves from the situation.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus The fully eliminative response (not van Inwagen's almost fully eliminative response) is that you and I do not exist. You are just a collection of atoms arranged Count-wise, I'm just a collection of atoms arranged Sandwich-wise. The collection of atoms arranged Count-wise collectively experience all of the things that you said. If there's n atoms, it would not be parsimonious to say that there is one more thing (i.e., n+1), such that the thing in question is you. And the same goes for me.

Right, it works something like:

P1: If things exist, they must be properly defined/delineated in exactly this sort of way (insert rigid, unworkable definition, often made in terms of "unique particle ensembles" or bundle metaphysics).
P2: This sort of definition/delineation doesn't work.
C: Therefore, we don't exist.

If the conclusion is absurd and clearly false, and an argument is valid, then the obvious conclusion is that at least one premise is wrong. P2 can be shown pretty convincingly. P1 seems immediately dubious. Yet so much philosophy doesn't work this way. Perhaps this is due to the incentives for novelty and provocation in order to drive citations. Instead, the absurd conclusion gets affirmed.

The whole "things are not but clouds of atoms" and "particles are fundamental" line has become far less popular in physics and philosophy of physics, yet I have not seen this shake down to philosophy yet. It would be more in line with popular trends in physics to say something like: "the universal fields are in flux cat-wise." But then, the recognition that things cannot be defined in terms of a supervenience relation, in terms of "particle ensembles," etc., would seem to suggest a move towards process metaphysics, not "no things exist." The problems the eliminitivst points out are noteworthy, but they reach the absurd conclusion because they are unwilling to challenge their presuppositions about what an adequate solution must look like.

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts.
2) If so, then: if bikinis exist, then fouts exist.
3) Bikinis exist.
4) So, fouts exist.

Eliminativists can resist this argument by denying the third premise: bikinis do not exist. Conservatives would reject the first premise: there is indeed an ontologically significant difference between bikinis and fouts. But that difference can't have anything to do with the question about scattered objects, because bikinis are scattered objects just as much as fouts are. Instead, the difference must be that bikinis are artifacts while fouts are presumably natural objects. In that sense, there were creative intentions involved in the making of the bikini, but no creative intentions were involved in the creation of fouts.

The artifact/natural object distinction seems like it might act as a kind of red herring here. I do agree that it is a relevant distinction, but is it relevant in virtue of something more fundamental?

Consider that some diffuse, incorporeal things do seem to exist. Are hurricanes real? Weather systems? Economies? States? Economic recessions? I think information theory gives us some good tools for thinking about how something like a market, a meme, or a recession might exist.

My take is that the difficulty arises from an inability to question presuppositions about what an adequate response can even look like. This is aided by a tendency for people to only look for solutions that they have prexisting tools to formalize. But this is not how formalism often advances. Often, we develop the concepts first, then look for a way to formalize it.

Artifacts are (for the most part) not self-organizing. A bikini isn't. A bikini is a lot like a rock. It isn't even like a star or storm, which at least have "life cycles" and act to sustain themselves. A rock is fairly arbitrary. It isn't entirely arbitrary, but obviously we can blast a cliff with dynamite and form very many rocks, pretty much at random. This is not how storms work, or stars, or life.

Hence, I would point to the research on dissipative systems, complexity studies, systems biology, etc., since these explain how we get self-organizing, self-determining systems that are arranged into wholes with proper parts. In living things, parts are unified in goal-directed pursuits. What makes a cat a cat then is primarily its being alive, and its being a specific sort of living thing, not its being comprised of some unique particle ensemble or fitting the rigid criteria of some bundle of properties.

Even if it was openly declared ethnic cleansing, your position would still be abhorrent. "Oh hey, watch out, that invading army wants to engage in mass slaughter and rape. Nope, I cannot let you cross the border to flee. That would be genocide."

It's patently ridiculous. Caging people in with ethnic cleansers to "prevent ethnic cleansing," genius.

Well, they certainly were far from the only issue. There were however issues with them, hence the long running conservatorship and major reforms.

Student loans are an even more obvious example. Basically, the system is set up so that people are never turned down for loans, loans which are essentially impossible to discharge mind you. The result is a huge injection of liquidity into the market, which in turn has been at least one of the factors that have led higher education costs to soar ever higher even as more and more of the people actually teaching are poorly paid adjuncts.

It's not unlike how all the mortgage interest deduction does in the long run is drive up home prices while also increasing wealth inequality between renters and owners.

You're not talking about 'the possibility of refugee status'. What you're talking about is opening the border and letting Gazans leave 'voluntarily' at the end of a rifle barrel, then call them refugees to disguise the fact that what is actually happening is ethnic cleansing.

No I'm not. I am talking about them being able to leave if they want. They are currently not allowed to leave if they want. Hamas demands that they not be allowed to leave if they want.

Egypt will not even let people in temporarily to transit to other countries. Gaza is not the only major urban war to produce essentially no refugees because "no one wants to leave." That assertion is ridiculous on many levels, not least because force was used to keep people in.

Even if Israel had started the war, even if they had started it as a naked act of conquest, Egypt would not be justified in sealing off any escape route and telling women and children "sorry, we can't let you flee the active combat zone, that would be genocide you see."

In order to even offer the possibility of refugee status you have to prove people want it?

I can point to millennia of human history. When a city is under siege, when it is under modern bombardment, most civilians flee. This happens everywhere. This is what happened in Northern Gaza despite Hamas' pleas and efforts to trap people in. Why did no one flee Gaza? Because they couldn't. Because they had the IDF on one side and the Egyptian military on the other.

If no one wants to leave Gaza, why does Egypt need walls and a heavy military presence all around the border? If no one wants to leave, in what sense is it a prison?

I mean, if you give people the option to leave and they don't take it, fine. Locking them in and then saying "prove they even want to leave (but also, no, they absolutely cannot)."

Ridiculous.

Palestinians did leave, in vast numbers, when they were allowed to (e.g. Jordan and Lebanon). Living your entire life as a pawn in someone else's military aspirations isn't everyone's goal.

↪Count Timothy von Icarus First you'd have to prove that the Gazans actually want to leave. The closest thing they have to a representative body is Hamas, and Hamas clearly isn't leaving voluntarily. If there were to ever be a representative body that is open to the idea, negotiations would have to follow, mutually agreed-upon terms, etc.

Until that happens, this is ethnic cleansing, and for Egypt or Jordan to open their borders to "take in refugees" would amount to nothing less than complicity in Israel's crimes against humanity

Hamas isn't close to a representative body. They didn't even win a majority of the vote in the one election they participated in held two decades ago. They seized power by force and have kept it by force.

By this logic, Assad should have had the say over whether Syrians could leave Syria. Was it "genocide" when Turkey and the EU allowed Syrians to enter? Likewise, Hitler would have the final say over whether Jews were allowed to leave Germany? And it was genocide when the US or UK accepted Jews?

This is frankly, ridiculous reasoning. Allowing refugees refuge in your country is not genocide.

Also, consider how bizarre Hamas' position is. Gaza is an open air prison. They claim to be fighting for the prisoners. A key demand in their negotiations is that no one be allowed to leave the prison.

It's Trump's, so I wouldn't put a goal of forcibly deporting people past him, but why exactly is it bad, unthinkable genocide to allow Gazans to leave Gaza? Why is migration the solution to so many other wars (if people prefer to leave), and indeed "countries have a duty to take refugees," but it is instead "genocide" if Gazans are given the option for resettlement? It certainly isn't in virtue of what is best for Gazans.

Because I imagine many do want to leave. It seems obvious that many would have left Gaza if Egypt hadn't used its military to make sure they couldn't flee. It seems obvious that they wouldn't necessarily be eager to return.

Gaza is in ruins. Hamas was deeply unpopular before the war. Hamas took power in a violent coup and has ruled through depression, torture, and disappearances ever since. They started the war, with it's fairly obvious consequences for Gaza's residents, planning entirely in secret. Then, after provoking what was sure to be a massive response, they largely fled to hide rather than attempting to defend the Strip and its people: "not my problem." They even compounded the problem by, at least in some cases, using civilians and critical infrastructure/aid as a screen.

Since they were able to shepherd their strength by largely refusing to fight in the war they started, it seems they will maintain an iron grip on power. Shouldn't people be allowed to leave if they want.

I get why Hamas hates the plan. It's the same calculus that led them to try to stop people from fleeing combat areas. But forcing people to stay, blocking aid for resettlement and keeping them out by force, in the name of long term political aims, is incredibly cynical.

I think this becomes obvious in any other situation. Consider:

"Europe should not let in any Syrian refugees or give those who attempt to flee Syria any aid. Indeed, we should pen them in by force because if they leave Assad will get what he wants ."

"No one should take the Arab world's Jews as refugees because doing so would help the Arabs ethically cleanse Jews from across the region, where they have lived for thousands of years." Now here, the native population in question was entirely cleansed, whereas it seems very unlikely that all Gazans would leave. These communities are all gone. Was it in those people's best interest to have had foreign powers block their flight or deny them refugee status, to park soldiers at the border to keep them in?

Or consider: "We mustn't let ethnic minorities flee Afghanistan because it will be giving the Taliban what they want." Or "Germans must stay in Eastern Europe and face the pogroms because if they all flee there won't be Germans in Eastern Europe." Well, 10-14 million Germans were ethnically clenesed, but it's far from obvious that being forced to stay was the better solution.

Particularly abhorrent is the idea that members of the Palestinian diaspora who have successfully fled would want others "locked in" because they have to "defend the land."

So, if anything we might quantify over is possibly necessary then everything is necessary?

Floridi has a demonstration to the effect that any (mathematically describable) universe must have at least one bit (some binary difference across a dimension) to be distinguishable from nothing. But this would imply that a bit is necessary in every universe (or at least possibly necessary).

I am not sure if one can draw any serious metaphysical conclusions from such axioms. It does the work of Plantinga's modal argument for him.

I mean, the other options were to allow for a catastrophic domino effect of bank failures along the lines of the Great Depression or to nationalize the banks. But at least part of the 2008 financial crisis was due to the perverse incentives faced by massive government run banks, and America's student loan crisis shows how these sorts of problems are not easily dealt with. At any rate, he would need Congress to nationalize the banks, and probably a majority of the Court, and he could count on neither for a solution that radical. TARP and the extraordinary actions of the Fed actually began under Bush at any rate.

The plan was to save the banks quick to forestall collapse, then, when there was time to think carefully, introduce a raft of new legislation to prevent such problems in the future. Unfortunately, Ted Kennedy died and the GOP took the House in the mid-terms and so the final regulatory bill that came out was drastically reduced in scope from what might have been ideal. It was still a very major reform though.

Not bailing out the banks would be the more consequential equivalent of dealing with waste at USAID by just shutting down the entire agency in a day. As soon as he moved to suspend TARP and ordered the Fed to stop buying securities, the markets would have gone back into freefall and unemployment would start soaring again. It would have been incredibly dumb; I don't even think Trump would do it.

Well, this is written for the New Yorker's audience, but I am pretty sure conservatives would take this in the opposite direction. Here you have a bunch of unelected officials shoveling out US taxpayer money to foreigners. They know the democratically elected head of state doesn't want them to keep doing this, and thus that they have no real mandate to do it. They no doubt know that their work is not very popular with the American public. But they scramble to get as much cash out the door as possible. The recalcitrance!

On the other hand, I think it's fair to say that the officials are the only ones in this situation who actually realize the consequences that will follow from halting the funding. Indeed, they might very well know that at least some funding cuts/delays will run directly counter to Trump's goals on foreign policy and migration. Trump (and his lieutenant Musk) and the voters have the weight of democratic opinion and legitimacy, but are largely acting from ignorance.



Other countries tend to be squeamish about security aid, so a lot of US aid is essentially covering that side of it so that the Europeans can "keep their hands clean." No doubt, one could complain about the destination of such aid, or the way it is sometimes shaped to benefit defense contractors, but it certainly is important. There are plenty of cases to demonstrate that, without proper security/military infrastructure, billions of aid just ends up being wasted, either destroyed or looted. Of course, you can also waste billion in security aid. Case in point: the ANA routing on contact with the enemy, or the SAA doing the same after years of substantial Russian and Iranian support.




Thanks, we here take great pride in our ability to have constructed such a Kafkaesque system.

Sorry. If I'm to be candid, the post looks to be hand-waving

If that's all you got from that long post then you're either debating in bad faith or it simply is beyond your ability to grasp or my ability to explain. If I wanted to be "hand-waving" I would simply say that species essences share a "family resemblance," and refused to elaborate.

I haven't. I pointed to what makes organisms and life distinct. If you have an objection to the idea that life is goal directed and that life forms can be more or less self-organizing, or self-determing, feel free to make it. Some people do deny these things, they claim they are entirely illusory. If you have an objection to the idea that lifeforms come in different types, feel free to make it.

You seem to be hung up on: "if the word 'essence' or 'nature' is employed anywhere it must mean something like rigid metaphysical superglue."

Isn't that a bit petty? Ok, adult insects have six legs. I've already pointed to this short coming, and how it doesn't seem to help those who think in terms of essence.

How is it petty? Yes, you did point out these problems vis-á-vis your misunderstanding of essences. Now you are ignoring them when you try to explain extension. You seem to think referring to extension this way is unproblematic, but that it would be problematic for whatever you suppose and "essence" must be." Why? If we can grab distinct sets with discrete members with our words, what's the problem with what you seem to think "essence" refers to in the first place?

Anyhow, you're still leaving out the ant missing a leg and letting in non-insects. The ant with a birth defect is out, the rare human born with extra limbs is in. Etc. This method of defining extension won't do, not least because word's referents change with context.

Your own attempt to explain extension is just the old "metaphysical superglue."

If I investigate textbooks which academic departments use to teach science -- there is absolutely nothing in there about Jesus or God.

Indeed, but there also likely won't be any reference to the date the Declaration of Independence was signed, who the victors of the World Wars were, or who the Roman Emperors were. Nor in any scientific journal will you find a peer reviewed double blind trial that confirms that Napoleon won the Battle of Austerlitz, or that he and Hannibal crossed the Alps, nor information about who won the last World Series or who the current mayor of New York is, etc.

Hence, "scientific justification" of that sort has some pretty severe limits. We have good reason to be much more confident in who won the World Series than most of what is published in scientific journals as well.

People do make arguments based on the natural sciences for the existence of God though, teleological arguments, etc.

Is "being" the key term then? I'm not finding anything and AI is presenting gobbledygook.

Lots of people thing mathematical objects are necessary entities, so this seems problematic for a system if it includes them too.

I'm suggesting that this is as much a question of word use as it is of entomology.

This is to make language into first philosophy. Here is why I would disagree with such a move. It is easier to see with the example something like an ant rather than some hypothetical creature born of sci-fi technology, so let's take the ant.

1. Being is causally prior to being known. An ant can neither be known nor observed unless it exists (granted a hypothetical entity might be known before it is generated through its principles).

2. What we choose to call things is not essential to them. That the token "insect" is applied to ant is accidental; it does not make an ant what it is.

3. Things' existence is causally related to the development and evolution of language. Why does every language refer to different species? Because they are an obvious and important facet of the world. A good explanation accounts for and goes in the direction of causation, it explains why something is the case, not just that it is the case.

Consider seasons. If the Earth didn't experience seasons, names for seasons wouldn't be ubiquitous. Perhaps, if our languages evolved on a planet without discernible seasons we might eventually identify a planet that had them and develop a technical term, but it wouldn't be the sort of thing every language needs.

The extension of a predicate is the list of individuals to whom it applies. In your example, the set of animals having six legs is an insect, and it's not correct to say of something without six legs, that it is an insect. That is, the set of animals that have six legs and the set of animals to which the word "insect" applies are the vey same. they are extensionally equivalent. (Part fo the problem here is the one mentioned much earlier, where it remains unclear what you think an essence is, especially in extensional terms).

Yes, this is what I refered to earlier as "Excel spreadsheet metaphysics." A term "retrieves" a set or table; something like a SQL query. I don't think it will do. For one, that definition would exclude caterpillars, larva, etc. Likewise, if we tear the leg off an ant, does it cease to be an insect? Clearly not. The problem here is that animals are constantly changing all the time, at both the individual and species level, and such a rigid definition seems doomed to leave out important distinctions.

It seems like the demand for "metaphysical super glue" mentioned before. "This term glues on to this specific set."

Definitions solely in terms of genetics are likewise insufficient. A flout would always be an equal pair of fox and trout, so if would have an identifiable enough genome associated with it, but a flout isn't a real organism. Test tube meat exists, and it is, genetically, "cow," but a slab of meat is not a cow. I think has brought up some of the other relevant difficulties in such an approach.

"Essences," as employed for most of history, are not lookup variables in this way. Organisms are quintessentially beings instead of mere heaps (existing according to a nature, not solely as a bundle of external causes) because they are self-organizing, self-governing, and most of all, goal-directed. The parts of an organism are proper parts of a proper whole because they are unified in terms of a goal that is intrinsic to the organism. This is the idea of "function" and teleonomy in biology. The parts of a flout or rock are not organized in this way.

And perhaps, , this is also a way of finding a via media between permissivism and eliminativism. The most obvious discrete wholes we experience are ourselves and other people. We have our own thoughts and sensations, not other peoples. There is a clear plurality of experiencers, but also a unity to our own individual consciousness (although obviously we can be psychologically more or less unified).

So this is one obvious difference. A human being is a locus of sensation, purposes, thought, etc. A hout—a discontinuous half-human, half-trout composite—is not. A human (or fox, or trout) has parts with specific functions that are oriented towards the whole in a goal-directed manner. The flout does not. The flout does not act to sustain itself, reproduce itself, aid its community, etc. in a unified manner.

If organisms are beings (plural) then it is also quite obvious that there are different types of such beings, and that these types can be more or less unified and self-determining in their pursuit of goals, and more or less self-aware as respects their goals (which in turn allows them to become more unified in pursuing a goal by mobilizing all possible resources vis-á-vis their ends). A cockroach, for instance, is only so self-determining. It pursues ends, but it cannot learn in the manner of a dog, or reflect on its ends like a man.

Essences are called in first and foremost to explain change, and how it is that things can be more or less self-determining and a source of changes/cause.

From the biological example, you can work backwards towards things that are more or less unified/divisible. A volume of gas or water is very easily divided. A water molecule less so. But they're all subject to flux. Process philosophy gets that right. Even subatomic particles appear to have a begining and end, and we might conceive of them as being primarily stabilities in process, not things.

However, you cannot have a good ontology that has just one thing, a universal process, and that's why the delineation of proper beings is so important, it's a via media between the extreme multiplicity of atomism (viz. everything is just clouds of particles) and an all encompassing bigism (viz. "there is just one thing). Grounding beings is also what allows for per se predication. Whereas if all predication is accidental, then things do fundamentally change when they are called something else, thought of differently, etc., because they are just bundles of relations. This is why I think a lot of the more extreme nominalist, co-constitutionalists, etc. are in fact correct, given we accept their premises, when they say things like "the Moon didn't exist until someone was there to speak of it," or that sort of thing.

For consistency god must have created the world of necessity. In modal logic (S5) if there is a necessary being then everything in every possible world is necessary. That is, god does not make choices.Whatever god does he is compelled to do out of necessity. The alternative, of course , is that there are no necessary beings.

If anything is necessary, then everything is necessary?

Doesn't matter, the arguments have been stated in the OP, by yours truly, if no one else. As such, they can be accepted or rejected, on whichever grounds you choose.

Hmm, well I think P1 would be the potential issue. Is "Jesus" referring to the Son/Logos or the Incarnation? It does not seem that the Incarnation should be necessary. Likewise, God's essence would not be defined by God's immanent acts.

I'd deny P1, sure. But the denial of P2 is a live option. Perhaps the Bible and the traditions don't say that Jesus is God, at least not literally. Perhaps only metaphorically. But this would be to my point on literalism: things can't be metaphors all the way down.

Well, you could hair split here. Some traditions don't say that. Yet the big ones emphatically do.

The Nicene Creed section on the Son reads:

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;
through him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
he suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and his kingdom will have no end.

Yet morphology can be a useful way to classify species. Biological species are very complex, and they are always changing at the individual, community, and species level, so we should not be surprised if there are many useful, correct ways to classify them. But what they are, their existence, does not seem like it should depend on our classifications. Otherwise, they would undergo a fundamental change whenever we reclassified them (although note that, if all predication is per accidens, then what something is does change when we speak of it differently; mapping the coastline changes what it is, reclassifying animals might cause fish to vanish from history, etc.)




:up: Ok, that sounds way more plausible. Although it does not seem that evolution is always very gradual (e.g. proposed cases of observed speciation). There is evidence for rapid evolution due to bottlenecks, fertile hybrid offspring reproducing in the wild, etc., and the whole EES controversy. It's an open question how larger shifts in anatomy (e.g. hands to wings, hands to fins, fins to hands, etc.) evolve, because the intermediary stages do not seem like they should be particularly adaptive, which would suggest, if not genetic "jumps" (obviously still perhaps over many generations), then at least phenotypical ones. One way this has been proposed to work is through "inactive" DNA functioning as a sort of "search for solutions" without the penalties of altering phenotype. Such changes can then be "activated" by a mutation (or epigenetically), allowing for a shift that is actually immediately adaptive.

But either way, I don't see how this is particularly problematic for species unless we are committed to some sort of rigid definition of species, viz. the "metaphysical superglue" approach or "Excel spreadsheet metaphysics." Individual organisms are always changing, and species populations are in constant flux. So, biological species are not the type of thing for which a "spreadsheet metaphysics" is appropriate (neither is life/living). Yet neither is the argument: "Either species are defined rigidly in this way, or they don't exist," a good one. It's a false dichotomy.

Consider an analogy from motion. A ball cannot roll from one room to another without at some point being partway in-between each room. We can divide this motion an infinite number of times (at least potentially), and so we will never find the "exact moment" when the ball crosses the threshold, when it starts to be in the doorway, or when it passes halfway into the other room. Yet there is also absolutely no difficulty in predicating "in the room" or "out of the room" of the ball most of the time. Motion and change occur over intervals. That we don't have "the one moment" where the ball crosses between rooms does not entail that it is not in either room, or that there can be no rooms, just as gradual evolution need not entail that there are no biological species.

Processes can be more or less stable. We can think of an entire ancestral line as a process. For some species, such as the cockroach, the process has been in a fairly stable equilibrium for an extremely long time, perhaps 100-300 million years.

Note too that if one does not exclude a phenomenological element from the consideration of what things are, a cat can simply never become a dog, a hippo, a dinosaur, etc. Even if evolution took a genetic lineage upon such a path of convergent evolution, the phenomenological experience of seeing, feeling, hearing, etc. a cat will remain distinct for all species that are not indistinguishably similar to cats. Yet if two species are indistinguishable, even upon close inspection with instruments, then in virtue of what could they even be said to be "two species?"



Through the study of insects. Just as "fish" was refined by a study of aquatic lifeforms. As we come to know things better, we might change our scientific classifications. This doesn't change what the things are. Our ancestors obviously experienced fish. The sign vehicle is not identical with the thing signified.

Who is a Christian who makes such an argument? The Trinity is usually said to be a revealed truth, and I don't think I've ever seen anyone claim that Jesus being God is anything but a revealed truth (i.e. not something demonstrable from reason of from general evidence).

So, the argument would instead be something like:
P1: The Bible and traditions of the Church and its saints are revealed truth.
P2: The Bible and the traditions say Jesus is God.
C: Therefore, Jesus is God.

Straightforward enough. P2 is clearly true, so people who disagree will almost always disagree with P1.

That's completely ridiculous. The US government doesn't even have a health service, and barely an education service. And the resolution of the problem is anyway completely automatic, and built into the financial system. If the government overspends, inflation balances the books by effectively reducing everyone's wealth and earnings. That regime is then liable to be removed at the next election.

This is factually incorrect. The US has government provided healthcare for senior citizens and the poor. These are extremely large programs, particuarly because seniors consume a very disproportunate share of all healthcare. To Frank's point, US government spending on healthcare alone is higher than the OECD average per capita. Obviously, the system is horrendously dysfunctional in that we have higher government outlays, and then a huge private outlay on top of this, while still having fairly poor health outcomes. Yet it certainly isn't for lack of spending money and racking up debt.

In the US, K-12 education is handled at the local level. The US spends more per student than every OECD nation except for Switzerland. Federal spending is low because the feds mostly just do regulations and grant awards such as IDEA (for special ed), Title I (for low income), etc. The education system is comparatively much better than the healthcare system, and some US states top the world (e.g. Massachusetts is top three for all PISA categories), whereas others preform quite poorly.

But again, to Frank's point, it's not lack of spending that would be the problem here.

Is the problem not enough democracy, or too much?

No cabinet member wins an election for their post, nor are they generally named until after the election. Historically, it's the appointees who have won elections (generally senators and representatives) who tend to be, at least on paper, the least qualified to run their departments. When someone gets chosen who isn't a politician, it's actually been the rule that they tend to be the ones that are more likely to be career civil servants or otherwise experts in their department's purview. Whereas politicians are often tapped as a political favor, or simply because they are popular.

Donald Trump won the most votes in the most recent election. He won pretty decisively; his party also took over the House and Senate. Right now, a generic Republican is polling 8+ points ahead of the Democrats. Polls also indicate that the average American views the Democratic party more unfavorably on average. Trump himself has a significantly higher approval rating than Congress or President Biden when he left (although he is benefiting from the usual start of term boost).

If President Trump and many of his appointees are terrible picks for leadership (I think they absolutely are), it hardly seems that the problem here is lack of democracy. In terms of what Musk has done, Trump was very up front about wanting to gut foreign aid. People voted knowing that; it wasn't a secret. And, while it is bad policy, gutting foreign aid is broadly popular and has been for some time. So again, this is in line with democratic preferences, not against it.

There is certainly a greater democratic mandate for gutting foreign aid than Biden's massive expansion of immigration. He also used executive power alone for that. It's a deeply unpopular policy position. While people generally disagree about how much to decrease migration, actually increasing it polls worse nationally than Harris did in rural Southern counties. It isn't remotely popular. But Biden's expansion wasn't minor either. It was held up by COVID and court cases, but once it got going net migration ended up significantly higher across his one term (really more like half a term due to COVID) than it was during the entirety of the Bush II or Obama administrations. Adding 10.4 million residents is a much more drastic policy shift than rolling up a $40B budget into another department and reducing it, by any measure, and this was done without any legislative input. DEI expansion is a similar case, and polling suggests ending it is more popular than sustaining it.

For better or worse, the President has an extremely wide latitude for policy decisions, one that has only grown as Congress's disfunction has led to a long series of Presidents getting away with major policy changes by simply instructing federal departments to not enforce existing laws. Yet if anything, this is also more democratic, because turnout for Presidential elections is much higher and Congress is extremely far from proportional representation, not to mention gerrymandering, the filibuster, etc.

Easily the most disastrous Trump proposal is to make virtually all federal employees political appointees. Yet this is advocated for precisely because it is "more democratic." "Get rid of unelected government officials and make the state responsive to the electorate!"

Of course, a strong, independent bureaucracy is generally seen as one of the three or four core pillars of a successful modern state. Yet this is in large part precisely because popular policies are often bad policies, and the independent bureaucracy has a better idea about how to effectively manage their sector of the state and economy.

So, I'm not sure if the problem with a populist demagogue is a dearth of democracy. People knew who Trump was and what he planned to do and they voted for him. Obviously, the Democrats own abject failure to run a good campaign/candidate was part of their problem. However, a big part of Trump's win was because people were positively motivated for him.

And there is no such thing as a fish.

If you have to affirm nonsense like "fish don't exist," it's a knock against your philosophy. Fish would have existed in Melville's day as both a commonly recognized type of animal and a scientific designation. So were there fish then, but then when the technical way of speaking changed fish vanished from existence, not even just in the present and future, but even from the past? This is akin to claims that "fire changed" when phlogiston theory was abandoned.

This is what happens when you collapse the distinction between sign and referent, and make words the primary object of knowledge (philosophy of language as essentially first philosophy).

Sticking to the example, which isn't a great one, insects have six legs. Now will we count that as a bit of ontology, in that having six legs is a special feature of insects, or will we count it as a bit of language use, as in it's not correct to say of something without six legs, that it is an insect? [/I]

It's not correct for insects at all times. Consider the caterpillar. Which is not to say that I don't think that we can unambiguously delineate insects, we clearly can (although there might be ambiguities in classification in edge cases). However, the basic rules for word application known to all competent speakers of a language often do not accomplish this delineation particularly well. That's why science has specialized terminology.

Which makes sense. Entomologists do not study insects and refine their intentions towards them by studying how the word "insect" is used in normal language. Physicists do not primarily study physics by observing how that fields terms are used by the average English language speaker. To say "you can identify what an insect is by looking at everyday language," is getting things backwards. Often, a term is created in the sciences and only later enters everyday usage, and often everyday usage diverges from proper scientific usage.

How are these questions distinct?

One is about what makes a certain type of being what it is. The other is about word use. They only collapse if one supposes a sort of metaphysical super glue that binds term and thing, or supposes that the objects of our knowledge are words and not natural phenomena.

Extensionally, they are identical.

No they aren't. Didn't you just agree that signification must be contextual, holophrastic, etc.?

If someone says "get this insect away from me," while pointing at their ex-spouse, they are clearly referring to their spouse. In the sentence, "I can't wait to watch the Insects play their set tonight," the word probably refers to a band. If you're an employee at a garden store and your boss tells you to "sweep all the insects out of the storage shed," they do not mean for you to carefully sort through the animals in there and spare the arachnids and centipedes.

I'd maintain that words are primarily a means of knowing, not what we know. So we don't find out what an insect is primarily by looking at word usage. Yet even if we took that approach, we would do well to focus on the usage of biologists whilst doing biology. But how is the usage of scientific terms developed? Not primarily by investigating how a term is already used, but by investigating the phenomena the word is being used to signify.

But it's the thing signified by the scientific term that existed before man existed, not "whatever the term can apply to." I hope you can see the problem here. Insects can't have existed before man and be defined by however "insect" is used in normal language, because the term is used in various ways in different contexts in normal language. This would mean that some things would be both insect and not-insect. Nor can they be defined by "however science currently defines 'insect,'" since this would imply that whenever a scientific term is refined the being of past entities is also thereby changed.

Aside from being convoluted, and implying that propositions about the past flip their truth values, it also gets the direction of causality completely backwards. Scientific terms are developed as a means of knowing and mastering natural phenomena. The natural phenomena exist first. The observation of them determines word use. They do not become what they are in virtue of being spoken of in a certain way.

How could that, ipsum esse subsitens, be a good interpretation of Psalm 139?

It's seen as supporting the thesis that God is always everywhere, all at once, and so not a thing within space and time.

Fossil record doesn't say much. Whatever fossils we have of anything are a miniscule fraction of individuals that have existed.

This seems like an argument from ignorance. I know of no reputable biologist who claims that there have actually been very many hominid-like families throughout the history of Earth, just "lost to time." There are just the fairly recent hominids. And the same are true for many families.

What's the idea here. "A man like species could have walked the Earth with the dinosaurs, or any time since, but we just don't know about it." But not only this, but it's "very likely." I don't think so.

The idea that very many families of hominid-like animals have evolved many times is highly unlikely for a number of reasons.