Bingo!

You have once again refused to elaborate on why some stories are useful and some are not. Is this impossible to explain? Or are all stories equally useful?

and I think ultimately impossible - set of questions to answer.

I think this total nescience is unwarranted. It is understood why sticking your hand in boiling water causes burns and pain for instance. You seem to be holding to the standard that one must understand everything in order to claim to understand anything.

I was just thinking of this the other day. It seems to me that there are many strong arguments and stories in support of the pro-choice position. However, I also find that people often stray away from these and justify abortion in terms that would seem to equally justify infanticide and euthanizing older relatives, or at least abandoning them.

Basically, arguments purely about individual utility or autonomy from responsibility tend to be bad ones. I am not sure the "privacy" framing is particularly useful either. Bodily autonomy, appeals to suffering, social utility, seem better, although pure social utility arguments seem to allow for infanticide and euthanizing the elderly or infirm as well.

And you will see that asbestos never did and never will cause any illness...

The idea is that "cause" is an informal, convenient shorthand for complicated events that with respect to the events themselves is almost or entirely irrelevant, a fiction

I see, so it was wrong for jurors to award damages against tobacco companies, pesticide manufacturers, etc. on account of their products causing diseases? I presume the answer is here "no" and I presume that you also wouldn't put asbestos or lead paint in your child's room.

Or another way: what exactly is a cause? I don't think there is any such thing as a cause - except, again of course, as convenient descriptive fiction

This is an abuse of the word "fiction." Children get real brain damage from lead paint.

But let's even allow your theory some room, you still have yet to explain why some fictions are "convenient" or "useful." Why is this?

Here is my position: it is useful to believe that smoking or asbestos will give you lung disease because these things do in fact cause lung disease. It is useful to believe that running in front of a train will kill you because being run over by a train causes death.

Cause," then, properly regarded, is like "truth." We can certainly talk about them, and usefully, but it's a big mistake to think they exist in themselves.

I am not sure what it would mean for truth to "exist in itself," as opposed to simply "existing?" Truth exists though no? Else your statement simply cannot be true.

And of course having such a flaw deep in the foundations of any belief system can have explosively destructive consequences.

Presumably not as destructive as actually believing things like "'sticking my hand or my child's hand in a fire will cause me to suffer burns' is a 'fiction.'" If one actually believed this, and wasn't using terms like "fiction" in an entirely equivocal way, it seems quite dangerous indeed, but then again no one actually acts as if they believe this sort of thing is true.

Causation and the natural world being "complicated," is not grounds for saying it doesn't exist either.

I have no issue with legal immigration, and I would be surprised if anyone on this forum does.

I have issues with it. Problems can be caused by legal immigration just as problems can be caused by internal migrations within a state.

There is an ideal level of migration, both for states, and also for potential migrants. Migrants impose congestion costs on each other, and as the share of migrants in an area increases assimilation tends to take longer and the risk of the emergence of isolated ghettos climbs up. They also tend to bid down each other's wages, undercut the ability of their workplaces to unionize, and bid up each other's rents. And finally, to the extent that they destabilize the world's largest economies and militaries they can actually have negative effects for other potential migrants who are unable to leave their states. There is also a crowding out effect such that economic migrants take the spots of future asylum seekers.

Then, probably the biggest issue is the effect on inequality. In America, most immigrants are from the developing world and come with low levels of education and low networth. Some are eventually very successful, but most tend to be low income at first and they tend to have lower incomes across their lifetimes. Of course, if you add millions of new citizens with lower earnings potential and a very low starting wealth you're necessarily going to increase inequality (particularly wealth inequality), at the very least in the short term (but likely for a generation or so). And if you add a lot of migrants to one region you will exacerbate the issue by bidding down wages in relevant fields those migrants tend to work in and driving up regional rents.

Very high levels of migration can also overwhelm local school districts, particularly because ESL and SPED students are much more expensive to educate properly (and immigrants tend to have a much higher rate of IEPs). Massachusetts, one of the best states at funding education, estimates SPED students cost about four times as much, and the English language learner supplement is about 40% of the entire tuition rate. Compressed poverty is also worse for educational outcomes, such that MA gives about 70% of total tuition in an additional supplement for the highest poverty districts. But migration tends to increase compressed poverty, at least in the short to medium term. MA does this better than most by using the income tax to redistribute aid to poorer districts, but it still has huge disparities, and there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that support for such redistribution can be hindered by high rates of migration (maybe people shouldn't shift their attitudes like this, but they do).

Which is all to say there are valid concerns about the ideal levels of migration. Political instability as Western Europe undergoes a demographic transformation that is more rapid than that seen in the Americas in the early modern period is another issue.

But these tend to get clouded over by:

A. Racist demagogues
B. The inverse, people claiming that any opposition to immigration is necessarily racist.

To complicate matters, the ideal level of migration for natives and immigrants already in a country is almost always going to be much lower than the ideal level for people who want to move to that country but haven't made it there yet. And ideal levels of migration will also vary by income level, with the poor benefiting least and the wealthy benefiting most from high levels of migration. There is a reason that immigration is a rare issue where the GOP dominated with independents and national polls (despite their vile rhetoric) and yet the GOP held zero votes on migration when they held the House, Senate, Court, and White House from 2017-2019—because policies that benefit the elite are very often put into place or kept in place regardless of popular opinion.


I made a thread on this a while back: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10332/pragmatism-and-the-ethics-of-migration

To say that causation (C) is direct or indirect or anything else is to tell a story. The story is never true, but it can be useful.

Why are some stories useful and other ones not useful? Seems to me that "stop drinking, it's the cause of your liver disease," is true in a way that "take this snake oil, it will cure your liver disease," or "stop taking hot showers, they are causing your liver disease," are not, no?


If not, should someone who fears lung disease stop smoking? If this would be "useful" why?

That is, C is a useful descriptive fiction that in the story itself is taken to be true. The mistake is to unreflectingly suppose that what is true in and for the story is true outside of and beyond that context.

Asbestos only causes disease within the context of a fiction? I suppose this is true or Roundup too; "our product only causes disease within a certain story context." Maybe Bayer should use this defense in court. Unfortunately, I don't see the jury buying it.

As J.S. Mill once said, "one must have made some significant advances in philosophy to believe it."

Surely it useful for partisans of Donald Trump to claim he won the popular vote "in a landslide) in all his elections. Are they just as right as the official tallies showing him losing by millions of votes?



lol, my thoughts exactly. Reading further, I'm still totally unclear about what is being said.

When the sun rises it heats the ground. The causal linkage here seems pretty direct. When the Mets give up a hit it certainly seems like this is caused by the Dodger's players' bats hitting the ball.

I agree. The everyday conceptual content of Earth (the concept), baseballs (the concept) and basketballs (the concept) are that they are round.

And why is this? Is it not because of what those things actually are? If not, why did this become the everyday concept?

How do you decide whether it's fit for task? Well I suppose you decide on a task by task basis.

Sure. So with the "raindrop" addition example, isn't the appropriateness of the system determined by the real properties of rain drops?

I am all on board with the idea that the tools will vary with the job, but it seems to me that to explain why some tools are better for some jobs than others requires including properties of "things in the world."

Even when we speak of "concepts," it seems to me that there is plenty of evidence to support the claim that our cognitive apparatus is shaped by natural selection, and this in turn means our thinking and our preferences, relate to "how the world is."

To put it succinctly, there are causes for our preferences and what we find useful. And I would also argue that these causes cannot all be traced exclusively to our minds/concepts, that our minds and concepts themselves have prior causes.

Seems to me that it remains unclear what "material logic" is

What about the summary here is unclear? https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/939603

There is indeed debate over what the proper object of study is here, sure. That's also true of mathematics though. To quote Andrew D. Irvine:

One of the most striking features of [modern] mathematics is the fact that we are much more certain about what mathematical knowledge we have than about what mathematical knowledge is knowledge of. Mathematical knowledge is generally accepted to be more certain than any other branch of knowledge; but unlike other scientific disciplines, the subject matter of mathematics remains controversial. In the sciences we may not be sure our theories are correct, but at least we know what it is we are studying.”

Me going through the maths there isn't an attempt to side with ↪Cheshire over @Banno, because being able to explore the conceptual content of the allegedly logically impossible should tell you that logical impossibility isn't all it's cracked up to be. You do have to ask "which logic and system?", and "what concept am I not formalising right?" or "what concept is making the weird shit I'm imagining weird?".

Fair enough. But is our preference for systems arbitrary? It seems very easy to have a system where "circle" can be "square." You can even make it axiomatic.

If the presupposition is that all systems are equal, our preferences for them arbitrary, then of course logical impossibility is pretty much meaningless.

But we don't pick systems arbitrarily. It's not the case that the Earth, baseballs, and basketballs are all just as triangular as they are spherical just because it is possible to define a system where this is so. To affirm that would be to default on the idea that any statement about the world having priority over any.

An overlap in interest maybe. His version is idiosyncratic though.

Good question.

Well, that's partly what material logic is concerned with. Semiotics, through Aquinas, John Poinsot, C.S. Perice, and John Deeley is one particularly developed area that has a lot of overlap with this question (Sausser-inspired and post-modern semiotics largely considers the question unanswerable/meaningless and so ignores it though).

My question, though, is do you think the possibilities of our universe are limited by what appears inconceivable to us?

To us? No. What is inconceivable to one man might be properly conceivable to another. I don't think toddlers can fathom many things adults can for instance. But can something exist that is inconceivable and unintelligible in an unqualified sense? I am not sure what that would mean. Something lacking not only in any possible explanation, but in any quiddity/whatness? Something that both is and is not in an unqualified sense?

Eric Perl raises the related question of: "what is meant by 'being' if 'being' is not to refer to what is apprehended by or 'given' to thought?" I think it's a good one.

Ironically, the positing of unintelligible noumena seems to have had the strange historical effect of resurrecting Protagoras' old doctrine that "man is the measure of all (meaningful/intelligible) things." I disagree with this; man is rather the proper measure of men, horse of horses, etc.

I think this is about competent language use. Russell's paradox isn't about language use. It's not nonsensical.

Actually, I will correct what I said above, is this just about competent language use? Does the fact that it doesn't make sense to speak about something "moving greenly," "economic recessions being pink," or "plants being prime," only have to do with the rules of competent language use and not with what those things actually are?

To be sure, the proximate issue might be competent language use, but is language itself arbitrary or a brute fact such that it isn't the way it is due to other causes? It seems to me that it is improper to speak of recessions being pink because they aren't the sort of thing that has color.

I think this is about competent language use. Russell's paradox isn't about language use. It's not nonsensical.

Sure, that was just an example on the relevance of content to meaningful predication. But Russell's paradox is about stipulated sign systems, "languages," no?

I guess I'm just not sure what you're asking? Of course paradoxes exist, Russell's paradox is one of them. You can observe it. But it exists in a stipulated sign system. Ditto for the Liar's Paradox. I mean, consider the common instantiated version of Russell's paradox. In this version the solution is simple, it simply is not true that "every man in the village either shaves himself or (exclusive or) is shaved by the barber." Either the barber doesn't shave or he is shaved by both (or maybe someone else shaves him). The paradox does not imply actual occasions of things that both do and do not do something in an unqualified way (although I will grant that the possibility of error and falsity itself are mysterious in a way).

What would be an example of a paradox in nature? To be sure, we call all sorts of natural phenomena "paradoxes," e.g. the Fermi paradox, the level of plankton in the Arctic given the amount of sun it gets, etc., but these seem like they could be resolved completely unparadoxically if we just knew more.

The only thing I can think of would be a case where something both is and is-not in an unqualified way, and no I don't think such a thing can exist (...and not exist :rofl: )

Anyhow, Kant's distinction is an interesting one, but it's guided by his metaphysics and epistemology. If we want to speak of why the mind is the way it is in terms of evolution, neuroscience, physics, etc., we are already leaving Kant behind.

For some, this is a bridge to far. Personally, I think the natural sciences, the study of phenomena, tell us about things other than phenomenal awareness (e.g. "the sun is made up largely of hydrogen gas," is not just about our phenomenal awareness, but expressing something true about the sun). And if this is true, then we can speak of the relationship between logic and being as opposed to just logic and experience or the necessary prerequisites of experience.

We don't tend to talk about form and matter the same way today, so I would just thinking of it as the study of "content" in the "form versus content" distinction.(The term "subject matter," comes from this same distinction. The matter is the information in a subject or discipline, as opposed to the subject's formal definition, which defines which matter falls underneath it).

This could obviously include a discussion of psychology and the "laws of thought," and, depending on one's epistemic commitments, maybe it ends there. However, for most realists/naturalists it will also extend to things in the world (e.g. the real leaf we predicate "green" of).

For example, we can say "red" or "angry" of the number "4," in ways that are entirely correct vis-á-vis form. Yet obviously such talk is nonsensical because if one considers the content of: "the number four is angry and red," it is clear that the subject is not of the sort that it can possibly possess these predicates (obviously, this implies we are speaking of the number, not some drawing of 4 in a children's book, which might indeed be angry and red).

This distinction gets trickier when we get into analogous predication, which formal logic tends to ignore because it has proven difficult to formalize. Nonetheless, we cannot totally ignore it, because we use it in natural language and the sciences constantly.

For instance, economic recessions are an empirical phenomena that are studied by the sciences. But when we predicate "double dip" of recessions we obviously don't do so in the same way that we would say a road has a "double dip." Likewise, branching processes in population genetics don't "branch out" the way tree branches and veins do, although the use here is not totally equivocal either. It seems to me that analagous predication has to involve material logic to the extent that the content defines the sort of analogy we are speaking of.

As much as I dislike GPT, it does a fine job on the basics here.

Material logic is a branch of logic that focuses on the content and meaning of propositions and arguments, rather than just their form or structure. Unlike formal logic, which deals with the correctness of the reasoning process based on the form of the argument (independent of the content), material logic is concerned with the truth and validity of the subject matter itself.

In material logic, the emphasis is on:

Substance of the terms: It examines whether the terms used in a proposition accurately reflect the reality or essence of the concepts being discussed.

Truth of propositions: It deals with whether the statements made in the arguments are true or false based on the subject matter.

Validity of reasoning: While formal logic assesses validity based on the form, material logic looks at whether the reasoning process is valid when considering the actual subject of the argument.

In essence, material logic is more concerned with the actual content and how it corresponds to reality, whereas formal logic deals with abstract structures and patterns of reasoning

I'd put it that the question which asks about the relationship between logic and being is no longer doing pure logic

Sure, if by "pure" we mean "ignoring the content and purpose of logic." But even nihilists and deflationists don't totally ignore content and the use case of logic. If you do this, you just have the study of completely arbitrary systems, and there are infinitely many such systems and no way to vet which are worth investigating. To say that some systems are "useful" is to already make an appeal to something outside the bare formalism of the systems themselves. "Pure logic" as you describe it could never get off the ground because it would be the study of an infinite multitude of systems with absolutely no grounds for organizing said study.

One might push back on Aristotle's categories sure, but science certainly uses categories. The exact categories are less important than the derived insights about the organization of the sciences. And the organization of the sciences follows Artistotle's prescription that delineations should be based on per se predication (intrinsic) as opposed to per accidens down to this day.

This is why we have chemistry as the study of all chemicals, regardless of time, place, etc. and biology as the study of all living things as opposed to, say: "the study of life on the island of Jamaica on Tuesdays," and "the study of chemical reactions inside the bodies of cats or inside quartz crystals, occuring between the hours of 6:00am and 11:00pm," as distinct fields of inquiry. Certain sorts of predication (certain categories) are not useful for dividing the sciences or organizing investigations of phenomena (but note that all are equally empirical).

Of course, there have been challenges to this. The Nazis had "Jewish physics" versus "Aryan physics." The Soviets had "capitalist genetics" and "socialist genetics," for a time. There are occasionally appeals to feminist forms of various sciences. But I think the concept that the ethnicity, race, sex, etc. of the scientist, or the place and time of the investigation, is (generally) accidental to the thing studied and thus not a good way to organize the sciences remains an extremely strong one.

That said, if all categories are entirely arbitrary, the result of infinitely malleable social conventions, without relation to being, then what is the case against organizing a "socialist feminist biology" and a "biology for winter months," etc ?

They certainly wouldn't be useful, but that simply leads to the question "why aren't they useful?" I can't think of a simpler answer than that some predicates are accidental and thus poor ways to organize inquiry.

The historical fact that "formal logic" is not called such because it is being set over and against "informal logic," but rather because the term refers to the study of the form of arguments as abstracted from their contents (matter) seems pretty relevant to understanding what formal logic actually is. If you think the difference is "formal versus informal" it seems easier to make the mistake of thinking that the study of form is simply all there is to logic (or that there is no debate to be had on this issue.)

This is the second time you've pulled out charts in this ridiculous way. The first was when you were telling others that "Russell had widely been seen as dispensing with causes in the sciences." Professional philosophers widely disagree with this sentiment, even partisans of Russsell. That time I shared multiple literature reviews by Neo-Russellians who themselves admit that Russell's premise that scientists don't speak of causes is false as of the 70s, false today, and likely false when Russell made the claim (although Russell bought himself some wiggle room by making an ambiguous appeal to an undefined set of "advanced sciences.") You produced a word count chart as a counter to well cited reviews in the field... Asking GPT would probably be more profitable, and I have a pretty low opinion of that as well.


You might consider that perhaps your interlocutors have some level of expertise on what they speak and that word searches are neither good arguments nor good ways of informing yourself about philosophy.

I assure you, I am not trying to trick you here. This is simply a fact, and in arguing against it I assure you that you look every bit as silly as the folks who disagree with you on the basics of classical logic and refuse to change their minds on it. Material logic is about as relevant to the history of logic as "eidos" or "form" in metaphysics. Perhaps those also fare poorly on word searches, but they are hardly esoteric.

I am not surprised that people fail to use the term, since the distinction is more apt to be phrased in terms of "form and content" today because "matter" had gained new connotations from physics. Yet clearly the subject area comes up all the time. Scientists regularly mention "the logic of thermodynamics," the "logic of natural selection," etc., and this is clearly not looking at form divorced from content.

How could this not be relevant to logical nihilism? If the form is abstracted from its contents, that's obviously going to be a much different basis for logic than if it's "form all the way down."

:up:

I want disagreeing BTW, just chiming in.

A thought came to mind about Kant's (still useful) way of breaking up the world. Logic is a way of recognizing rules. This is how information is parsed out. Scientific principles regard distilling correlations to a point of being able to distill rules (of the empirical). The two logics are different- one has to do with language pattern, and one has to do with empirical patterns. However, they are both intertwined, as the rules of logic seem embedded in language, something that comes prior to the empirical correlation-distillation that takes place in the cultural practice of scientific research.

Well, in terms of priority, it would seem that perception is prior to speech, both in evolutionary terms and in the development of the individual. But then we would do well to remember Aristotle's dictum that "what is best known to us," are the concrete particulars (the "Many") whereas what is "best known in itself" are the generating principles/principles of unity (the "One"). Prima facie, it seems that the intelligibility of being must be prior to knowledge in the order of being/becoming, while the reverse is true in the order of becoming.

A paradox is not the type of thing that has a location.

Indeed, although the paradoxes I find most interesting are paradoxes that might be said to have many instantiations, e.g. the sorties paradox, the ship of Theseus, the problem of the many. The issue here seems to lie in predication, and so it's more obvious that there has to be a metaphysical side to the investigation. Now, this is also true of Russell's paradox, since we're talking about proper predication of group membership, but I feel the issue tends to get muddled due to the degree of abstraction involved and the difficulty when it is simply assumed that, because groups can be arbitrarily stipulated, group membership is properly thought of as arbitrary. The issue at stake that the genus and species of the logician are not those of the philosopher and scientist, the latter deal with generating principles "at work" in a multitude in the world, the former with merely the possible forms of predication.

You see a similar split in the application of information theory to the sciences. What is the proper distribution to use in determining the information content of a message? This is an issue that cannot be solved by looking at the formalism is isolation.



Thanks. I should probably add that it's obvious that tackling formalism alone can be very useful. The idea that there is "nothing but formalism" is the problem. I think you can trace these problems back pretty far, to the confusion mentioned above above about the species and genus proper to the philosopher/scientist versus the logician. In the late-medieval period, these two got combined and species and genus were turned into logical constructs of a sort, which in turn fostered all sorts of arguments for a thorough-going nominalism. But if you take nominalism far enough, then of course logic is going to reduce to formalism. Frege's idea of an "empty subject," where predication has nothing to do with what is being predicated of is a step in this direction.



"Material logic," is not an esoteric term, it was part of all logic curricula for over two thousand years. The form/matter distinction is where we get the term "formal logic" from. It's a going concern for some 20th century philosophers who are less convinced about the reduction of logic to form (e.g Peirce and through him Deeley.) The term is less in vouge now, probably because of the hylomorphic distinction it implies, but obviously the relation between human discourse, the discourse of the soul, and this discourse of being is still something people talk about all the time.

Of course "logic has advanced since Aristotle," nothing I said suggested otherwise. However, I wouldn't take it as a badge of honor to be entirely ignorant of the basics of logic prior to the 20th century on account of this fact.

As for the other comments, I was just pointing out the assumptions that seemed implicit in the opening post. Logical nihilism and a deflationism vis-á-vis truth and a denial of causes certainly seem to go together as a package deal much of the time. I've don't think I've ever seen logical nihilism not paired with deflation; who would be a counter example here?

Perhaps, with the caveat that how one approaches paradoxes depends on how one views logic in the first place. If we follow the peripatetic axiom that "nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses," my question is "where are the paradoxes in the senses or out in the world?" I have never experienced anything both be and not be without qualification, only stipulated sign systems that declare that "if something is true it is false," and stuff of that sort.

Griffiths and Paseau's isomorphic invariance accounts of "true logics" seems like a step in the right direction, but still seems likely to founder on the equivalence of logic with formalisms.

Deflationists are often quick to point out that they are just talking about "games" and "ways of speaking," lest they step on the toes of the dominant naturalist paradigm and common sense, but they seem to invariably want to start making philosophical/scientific claims based on the study of completely abstracted formalism eventually. It's all just talk of "systems" until it isn't, e.g. "truth cannot be relational because in classical logic it only takes one argument (adicity)."

At present, it seems it is headed towards a recreation of the "Dot Com Bubble." Now, that doesn't mean it won't change things later on. The internet obviously did eventually change the way we do all sorts of things. But that won't stop the massive market correction that seems to be headed our way.

The 900% rise in NVIDIA stock since 2023 being a prime example.

I haven't given Russell's paradox two much thought, at least as it respects logic as a whole. I think Wittgenstein gets something right in his early work re the necessary conditions for intelligibility and meaningful speech about the world. Whereas I take his later work to be useful in terms of rejecting a narrow view of truth and language that had become prominent in analytic philosophy in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein never undertook a study of earlier philosophy, and so we don't get to see how he might have engaged with other views of truth and intelligibility, which is a shame because it could have been quite interesting.

IMO, early analytic philosophy has unfortunately become a sort of popular strawman for continental philosophy and pro-deflation analytics.

Although MP's statement is, in my opinion, a necessary corrective, I still think it falls short. I would say that I am a person. I am conscious and bodily to be sure, but I am not a mind or a body, and I don't have a body.

While we're at it, I am not a soul, and I am not my brain. I am a whole, conscious, physical unit.

Fair point. We are our consciousnesses, and we do not experience consciousness without a body (at least in this life). We are not "just brains," although many writers try to frame things in this way. Brains never produce experiences without bodies. We could imagine some sort of incredibly advanced sci-fi situation where our brains might be transferred into some sort of synthetic body and "go on experiencing," but this is:

A. To elevate potency over act in our analysis, such that we trying to define things in nature in terms of science-fiction technology bordering on magic, rather than how things actually are; and

B. Still supposing that some other system essentially mimics what our body does for us.

Thus, it's still the case that brains don't produce experiences without bodies (synthetic or otherwise).

Nor do bodies produce experiences without an environment. There are no truly isolated systems, and a human body could not produce experiences if it existed in one. Even something like human body suspended in a vacuum in a heatless environment is going to produce a corpse, not an experiencing person.

Nor is the environment irrelevant. A human body will produce no experiences in most of the environments that exist in the cosmos or on Earth. Were a healthy body teleported onto the surface of a star, the bottom of the ocean, the surfaces of most of the planets we know of, inside the Earth's core or mantel, etc. experience would cease essentially instantly.

Consciousness is produced by brains in bodies in a select range of environments. You need all of these, not just a body. And you need a body where activity is in a very narrow range, since there are far, far more ways for the body to be arranged such that it is dead or unconscious than alive.

Hence, being a person, or any organism, is a continuous activity to preserve form. As Sachs translates Aristotle's entelecheia, "being-at-work-staying-itself."



It depends on the level of specificity you want in an answer. Corpses are human bodies, no? Do corpses have minds or experiences? It would appear not. So, the one can exist without the other.

Likewise, it is at least conceivable that one's consciousness could exist outside the body, or be transferred to other bodies. Personally, I think that conceivability is a very weak standard for possibility, since we can often conceive the impossible as possible due to not understanding what we are talking about, but at the very least the two don't seem as essentially linked as say, a triangle and its lines.

---
Anyhow, I think the better arguments for the existence of incorporeal souls' existence outside the body tend to rely on a very particular metaphysics, and presenting them in a coherent manner is going to require extremely large detours into concepts like vertical reality, the nature of being/God, Logos/logoi, etc. But when people try to copy these arguments into the context of prevailing contemporary metaphysical assumptions I think they almost always fall incredibly flat, and I don't think they can be justified as part of a philosophy of nature.

The framing in the OP seems to lean towards the idea that "logic" is "formal logic." Thus, we speak of "languages," "systems," and "games" and difficulties within or between formalisms as problems for "logic."

I would just chime in that many people who oppose logical nihilism (and many, but not all forms of pluralism), would rather say that material logic has priority over formal logic in some important respects. Formal logic is about "ways of speaking," but logic is not about "ways of speaking" tout court.

There is the "discourse of language" which is constrained by the "discourse of the mind." As Aristotle says in the Posterior Analytics, we might very well say "square circle," or "x both is and is not, in precisely the same way, without respect to time," but we cannot think it true. But there is also the "discourse of being," the matter of logical statements. These must have form to be intelligible, but their form-"whatness/quiddity"- is not necessarily going to be found solely in the stipulated signs developed for communicating that form (e.g., an embrace of tripartite Augustinian/Scholastic/Piercean semiotics will entail a sort of realism here, where objects are relevant to the sign relation and signs not arbitrary).

Anyhow, to the extent that logical nihilism will tend to imply that things have no causes, that there is no metaphysical truth, etc. I think it's open to the criticism that:
A. This seems demonstrably false on all the evidence of sense experience, the natural sciences, etc.;
B. No one actually has the courage of their convictions on this matter and really acts as if causes and truth are "just games," and;
C. This makes the world inherently unintelligible and philosophy pointless.

Plus, to the extent that someone still tries to justify logic on "pragmatic" grounds it seems to be the case that any "pragmatic" standards bottom out in arbitrariness, there being no truth about what is truly a better standard or what truly ranks higher on any given standard. Hence appeals to the "usefulness of certain games," are unsupportable.

About 2 million Germans were murdered in reprisal genocides across Eastern Europe towards the end of and immediately following WWII. Perhaps 3 million. Over 10 million were expropriated and displaced. Mass killings and rapes are extremely well documented here.

Previously Germans were settled throughout the eastern half of Europe; they virtually don't exist there anymore.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%931950)

Obviously the Red Army is the key culprit in terms of allowing its soldiers to loot and rape on foreign lands with almost absolute impunity, particularly in Germany and the Balkans, but partisans and civilians took part in this too.

West Germany put the figure at 14.6 million of which only 6.8% were new arrivals moved east during the war into the Third Reich's conquests.

Eros leads the way upwards, as Plato says in the Symposium:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

Agape sends mercy downwards. Eros and agape move up and down the Great Chain of Being, uniting being in love.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's De Diligendo Deo and sermons on the Song of Songs come to mind. Or St. Francis' classic Canticle of the Sun, which finds agape coming down and eros going up in all things, the sun, the clouds, even death.

Or St. Augustine's conversation with his mother in the Confessions:


The conversation led us towards the conclusion that the pleasure of the bodily sense, however delightful in the radiant light of this physical world, is seen by comparison with the life of eternity to not even be worth consideration. Our minds were lifted up by an ardent affection towards eternal being itself. Step by step we climbed beyond all corporeal objects and the heaven itself, where sun, moon, and stars shed light on the earth. We ascended even further by internal reflection and dialogue and wonder at your works, and we entered into our own minds. We moved up beyond them so as to attain to the region of inexhaustible abundance where you feed Israel eternally with truth for food. There life is the wisdom by which all creatures come into being, both things which were and which will be. But wisdom itself is not brought into being but is as it was and always will be. Furthermore, in this wisdom there is no past and future, but only being, since it is eternal… And while we talked and panted after it, we touched it in some small degree by a moment of concentration of the heart. And we sighed and left behind us the ‘firstfruits of the Spirit bound to that higher world, as we returned to the noise of our human speech where a sentence has both a beginning and an ending (ix.10.24).

An artefact such as a letter opener has an essence before it exists, for a human being must have conceived it before it came into existence, and this conception is the essence or nature of the thing. It behaves (passively) in a determined manner in accordance with its nature; whereas

Since there is no God, there is no one to conceive humanity before it exists, thus the human being has no nature before he (I write as sexistly as Sartre) exists. Therefore, he is free to do has he chooses.

Anyhow, this is interesting because it seems to imply that a thing must be given its telos from some external source. However, in the Physics, Aristotle calls in the idea of things possessing a telos and "nature" specifically to explain motion and the sense in which humans, animals, and plants are self-moving, working to accomplish the maintenance of their form (Sach's translation of what is normally translated as "actuality," "being-at-work-staying-itself" is useful here).

That is, the artefact would be a special case. In nature, a thing's essence or telos is internal to "what it is."

And I guess the problem I see here is in having "freedom" sit prior to form. It seems to me that people are only capable of self-determination because they are people. Rocks lack a capacity for self-determination and self-government. Plants have some, but less than people. Fetuses have less freedom than toddlers, who are less self-determining than competent, healthy adults.

Or to think about it another way, something that is "self-organizing," is still a specific sort of organization.

Now, I am aware that Sartre is using the term "essence" differently, but the question of animals does seem particularly relevant because how do we explain why livestock are not capable of human freedom? Well, the most obvious way I can think of would be to appeal to the idea that they differ from man by nature, according to what they are. Now we could try to avoid essence and instead appeal to the idea that man exists "for-itself" (pour-soi), but this just seems to circle back around to the same question, since we would then have to ask "why does man exist in this way and poultry does not?" IIRC the relevant term here is "mode of existence," but then this starts to look a lot like essence or "essential nature" if it is called upon to explain the relative capacity for self-determination for different substances.

This is supposing that "chickens and cows destined for the slaughterhouse are acting in bad faith," is off the table :rofl:

Agreed. I've moved this to the Lounge due to lack of substantial philosophical content. It seems like just a list of headlines of people saying silly things, although one where the selection shows no little amount of sectarian bias as well.

Honestly, it strikes me like exactly the sort of thing I see on Q Anon sites, except that there the selection would simply target a different group of people.

I never thought of it, but plants and animals do seem to present a wrinkle here.

IIRC, didn't Sartre himself walk back this position later?

Could you perhaps unpack what you mean by potency/potential in this context?

Well, I wrote and lost a long reply to this, but to keep things short, I would say the denial of potentialities related to form are most important. E.g. a toddler potentially can speak Spanish, a rock can not. A rock would need to undergo substantial change, becoming something different from a rock (something with the potential to speak Spanish) in order to speak Spanish.

But I wouldn't want to limit the question to this. There is also Aristotle's ideas of space and time being potentially infinitely divisible but not actually so, which seems to have application for contemporary conversations about finitism in physics (or the application of intuitionist mathematics to physics, which at first glance seems more in line with Aristotle).

But Plotinus' "One" is pure potency rather than pure act. This is the principal metaphysical difference between Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism.

Correct, stoic-inspired omnipotence. But the One wouldn't have a strictly Aristotlean potency, since this would entail mutability, change, and parts. I probably should have phrased that better; point being lack of mutability is not a privation.

Or maybe we would say "beyond act and potency," (as all discursive reason) but we can apophaticaly negate "mutable" of the One. Luckily, in English we have "power" and "potency" to (sort of) distinguish what Eriugena terms "nothing through excellence," (pure, immutable power beyond any defining actuality) and the nothing of prime matter (a "nothing on account of privation"). Or at least, translators seem to use "power" more for Plotinus, which I think works better.

Because 'cloud' is a familar cognitive trope. But do clouds possess form at all?

In the older sense of eidos, yes. Clouds are intelligible and sensible. If they lacked form they couldn't be experienced as clouds.

(That question is anticipated in the Parmenides, when Socrates asks if there are forms for hair, dirt and mud.)

Yes, it's a problem crying out for clarification. Aristotle has the distinction between "things that exist by, [i.e. according to their], nature"—beings which possess a telos—and things that exist "from causes." But I don't think Aristotle's distinction gets at the full scope of the problem here. Plato's forms, at least if taken in terms of some "two worlds Platonism," where forms exist subsitently and not in relation with one another, is also problematic because things are not wholly intelligible in isolation, e.g. "redness" as set off from "color" and all the other colors. For example, you can't really explain what a "tree" is without reference to the air, the sun, the soil, water, etc. Forms are not intelligible in isolation.

Aristotle doesn't do much with this second problem but it is addressed in later thinkers, St. Maximus the Confessor being a prime example of an advanced synthesis that is able to distinguish between the unity that contains all ideas/forms (the Logos) and their dynamic instantiation in the created world. Hence, even "number," "hardness," etc. are dynamic in precisely that they only exist instantiated in created things, but exist according to their "logoi," which is ideas "at work" in the world. The idea of species as all being differentiated expressions of a unifying genus progressing towards the unity/whole and goal of the genus would then be a further working out of this idea.

For the pre-moderns, obviously forms could have 'eternal reality in the mind of God' but that is generally not an option for modern philosophy, but we could plausibly say that the idea of forms arose from an intuitive grasp of this co-dependency.

It's not an option for good reasons or out of bias? "Thou shalt not explain ideas in terms of the transcedent or absolute," yet one can apparently offer up explanations of anything, and indeed everything, that bottom out in brute facts, "it just is," and "for no reason at all." And things even seem to be allowed to bottom out as brute facts isolated in the sui generis powers of finite minds, such that the mind "just is," the source of all sorts of things in the world, including Goodness, Truth, and Beauty.

IDK, this strikes me not so much as contemporary philosophy being opposed to positing God as part of an explanation as contemporary philosophy wanting to make man take the place of God. (But of course, a voluntarist God, whose freedom is defined in terms of power and potency.)

In any case, the fact that forms are artefacts of the cognitive system, does not undermine their objective (or would that be transjective) reality. It doesn't say that they're solely the product of the mind, but that they arise in the relationship between observer and observed. Biological phenomenology such as enactivism sees such cognitive artifacts as co-arising as a consequence of the interaction between organism and environment.

I don't see how enactivism would require that forms are "artefacts of the cognitive system." This sounds like something leaning more towards representationalism, forms as "constructed intelligible likenesses," that must be created "in the mind" to be experienced. But of course, if things are already likenesses of themselves and if we're talking about an enactivist perspective, there is no need for having there be secondary likenesses "constructed for the mind." E.g., the idea of the cognitive/sensory system as a lens we "look through," as opposed to producing images we "look at."

Perception arises in the relationship between observer and observed. It seems another step to say that form would arise from this interaction, since it would imply that the world is unintelligible and without causes before the human mind steps to the plate and declares "let there be light! Or form, or anything at all." And of course, we can never get behind this act of the mind to explain it in terms of causes, for all causes and intelligibility start with the mind.

Like I said, this strikes me as not that different from approaches that invoke the divine, except man is fills the role of God.

The non-living world subsists in itself as configurative phenomena.

What does this mean? Are there non-configurative phenomena as a constant?

Matter ‘comes to matter’ within intra-actively changing agential configurations.

"Agent" as the term is used in chemistry, e.g anything affecting change, or "agent" as the term is often used in the social sciences, as an entity that makes intentional decisions/choices?

We're able to impose form on it by way of analysis of the chemical composition, spectroscopic analysis, etc. But in another sense, there are vast clouds of interstellar matter that are formless.

Which brings to mind the Pinter analysis - that form is precisely what is brought to bear by cognition so as to navigate the environment.

If the mind is imposing a form on "clouds of interstellar matter," that lack it, why does it impose one form over any other? Why would this imposed form be helpful if it doesn't have to do with something that exists in the "cloud of matter?" And then what causes this imposition of form?

For my part, it seems like the causes must be traced, at least in part, to the things, in which case things can be said to poses form.

But we imagine that if we had eyes small enough, we would see particles down there. It's not really formless, is it?

I suppose it depends on how we use the term "form." In Artistotle, and the classical metaphysical tradition more generally, the form is responsible for all of a thing's "whatness," quiddity. Without eidos, form, there is nothing to say about a thing. And there is a strong phenomenological thread ancient and medieval thought, so this would also amount to saying that formless matter cannot be experienced as anything (cannot be a noema in Husserl's terminology, a target of intentionally.) Prime matter, matter without form is only known as speculative abstraction.

St. Gregory of Nyssa takes this up in "On the Making of Man." Apparently, a common argument at the time was to say that matter must be coeternal with God (a view based on the Timaeus) because God, as pure act, would lack the properties of matter (which must come from somewhere). But as St. Gregory points out, having removed all form, all whatness, from matter, one is left with nothing, no attributes at all—so there is nothing to "lack" in a "lack of potency." (This is also how Aristotle's Prime Mover(s) or Plotinus' One cannot be said to suffer from any privation through being pure act).

So all observed matter would have some form, but not all things would be beings (i.e., having a telos, an internally organizing principle). Clay, rocks, etc. are just bundles of external causes. Statues, being artifacts, have their forms determined by the minds of men.

Now, if form is rather something created by/imposed by the mind, it almost seems to counterintuitively dislodge the phenomenological side of the understanding of eidos, since now the whatness of things is no longer essential to what they are but is rather something produced in one corner of the world, for some perceiving subject.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

Agensis - First Analect of Men :cool:

E.g., If you can trust the appearances of your experience to tell you that you exist with a brain which cognizes objects that are outside of it (and that this is true in reality as it is in-itself: not appearance); then this contradicts the notion that you cannot know the things-in-themselves and that you can only know appearances.

Well, it helps to pull apart popular "uses of Kant" and Kant's actual philosophy here. Kant doesn't speak of brains, neuroscience, genetics, etc. when making his case. Nor is he by any means the originator of the idea that our sensory system, the particularly human way of reasoning, etc. shape how we experience the world. This is in ancient and medieval thought, and the way Kant is often invoked today is often more in line with the ancients/medievals and British empiricists than Kant himself.

Kant's arguments are based on "what must be necessary for thought to exist as such."

To be honest, it's sort of a mystery to me why Kant's name is invoked alongside appeals to neuroscience, genetics, etc. People could as well point to Aristotle or Aquinas on the idea that "everything is received in the manner of the receiver." Kant's line actually differs significantly from how his name is often invoked, and this is why the "paradox" shows up—it's the result of mixing Kant's conclusions with empiricist arguments about the way perception is shaped by biology, physics, etc.

Now, the other thing you get at is that Kant does seem to dogmatically assume that perceptions are of objects. That's Hegel's big charge, worked out in the Logic. Hegel agrees that perceptions are of objects, but he thinks that starting out by presupposing this is how Kant ends up with the noumenal and his dualism problem.

..and recognize that we can have some degree of incomplete knowledge of things-in-themselves?

Exactly. Representationalism might be challenged on other grounds, Occam's Razor (if things are already likenesses of themselves why are we positing additional likenesses?), an infinite regress of Cartesian theaters, a rejection of substance dualism leading us to question the need to posit mental representations, the greater parsimony of enactivism theories, etc. but it does not presuppose total ignorance of the "the world outside perception." Kant's stronger theses about knowledge of the "noumenal" don't need to go along with representationalism.

You can certainly frame the issue in terms of harm. You can also frame it in terms of freedom, since misinformation can at times act as a clear limit on freedom.

For instance, "knowing how to do," things is generally a precondition for being "free to do them." For example, I cannot fix my car if I have no idea how to address whatever issues it is having. One is not free to address their obesity if they have absolutely no idea as to the causes and solutions to the problem, etc

The internet is an exceptional tool for enhancing our freedom in this respect. For instance, it's pretty easy to find videos showing you how to fix all manner of issues on all varieties of automobile. Diet information is another matter. On the one hand, it's fairly easy to discover effective ways to deal with obesity; on the other, there is also a lot of bad advice on this front, as well as many products that purport to address this issue, but are effectively useless or even counterproductive.

Ignorance is a limit of freedom.


Here, it's worth considering the production of misinformation directly. Sometimes it is the result of ignorance. Sometimes people have a vested interest in not allowing people access to this sort of freedom, and so they intentionally generate misinformation to "muddy the waters" and decrease the "signal to noise ratio," vis-á-vis some issue. We might consider here how auto manufacturers have often ended up on court over claims that they intentionally make their vehicles difficult to repair, requiring specialized, patented tools, etc. in order to be able to charge more to repair them. It's not hard to see how mechanics and dealerships would have an incentive to produce bad information on how to fix our vehicles (if they could get away with it), since someone using such information will eventually get frustrated, break their vehicle further, etc. and eventually end up going to a mechanic to pay for repairs, and perhaps even more expensive repairs since they have done more harm than good in their attempts to fix the problem based on misinformation.

So, there is an important sense in which the freedom to be ignorant or to consume false beliefs is not freedom. We tend to miss this in the modern context because freedom is so often defined in terms of potency, the ability to "choose anything," and act is essentially ignored. As if we are giving up the "freedom to be tricked into addressing problems in ways that won't solve them," if we only have access to good information. But of course, a fire hose of misinformation makes it so that we are no longer free to actually solve those problems in an effective manner, because we cannot distinguish truth from falsehood.

Of course, dealing with misinformation is made all the more difficult by modern assumptions about who is best able to sort through it. Should the doctor deal with information about health? Probably. But don't doctors have a vested interest in manipulating access to some sorts of information? Indeed, hasn't the American Medical Association been engaged in all sorts of rent seeking behavior to restrict access to healthcare in order to boost their membership's income?

Hence there is an issue where the specialist who is in the best position to vet knowledge vis-á-vis some subject is also generally the person who stands to benefit most from constricting access to some knowledge. This is why ethics is always going to be important. There is a reason why Plato had the leader of the ideal city be the one who is lost focused on the good of the whole.

However, the solution here is clearly not to say "all adults with a pulse are actually equally well positioned to vet all manner of information." Nor does "let's hold a popularity contest and whoever wins the popularity contest gets to pick who they want to monitor and deal with misinformation," seem like a particularly good solution.

Well, I have had some ideas about how we might better select leaders, but I don't think they're likely to be implemented any time soon.

Why hamstring? If matter has or coexists with form, matter has or coexists with information. What is the problem?

Ha, I am now seeing that the way I wrote that is extremely unclear. Of course matter has form in hylomorphism!

What I meant to say was that in modern, particularly early modern, thought form is packaged intrinsically with matter into fundamental "building blocks"—atomism, reductionism, smallism—"wholes are the sum of their parts." There is no "prime matter," as an abstraction, sheer potency, but rather matter as actual bits of stuff with definite form and definite/actual attributes (eliminating potency).

On such a view, the form of composite objects is just reducible to arrangements of various building blocks. The relationality and processual elements of the information theoretic view get lost. Things "are what they are made of," a view which loses sight of how information is defined by context.

If you maintain this sort of thinking you end up with "stuff made out of 1s and 0s," the sort of thing the original digital physics was taken over the coals for.

Ah, ok. I thought the entirety of your post had gone over my head. Not German by the way lol. Seems like something like convergent evolution, or even just "chance" would explain similar symbols being used in disparate parts of the world, but speculating about antediluvian, continent-spanning gnostic societies does seem like more fun. Lumeria and Atlantis are probably the common denominator.

To Josh's point, the eye has evolved independently around 50 times

How is this to the point re the environment or the physics of subatomic particles as culture or normativity?

Well, the concept of potential is used all the time in practical matters, e.g. the counterfactual analysis that makes up a great bulk of the work done in the sciences, engineering problems, "potential energy," potential growth in economics, attracting "potential mates" in biology, etc.

It's really more in the realm of metaphysics or something like the amorphous "metaphysics of science" that the prohibition on talking about potentialities seems to hold.