You're far too good a rhetorician not to recognize the difference in tone between my version and yours . But it's not worth squabbling over

Sure, but you're objecting to the tone, not the content. But the tone is intentional because I am trying to show a problem here, which is that your standard seems to presume that people always know when they are being "reasonable" or are arguing in good/bad faith. I think it's obvious that they don't though. For example, all the scientists working for cigarette companies or Big Oil probably don't all sit down to their work and think "time to go do some bad faith science to get paid," (although I am sure some do). They will claim they are thoughtful and operating within a practice, and some of them will believe this. So too for political bias in the sciences. And that's why you need concrete standards and principles to point to, and not just:

If you engage in a practice consistently and thoughtfully, you know reasonableness in that practice when you see it, usually

But in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have done it because it's resulted in you not responding to any of the substantive points, e.g., conflicts over jurisdiction between different subject matter areas, the issue of "pseudosciences" (which are still practices with committed adherents), political bias in disciplines, or my most basic point, which is that, by your own standards, your own epistemology can "correctly" rejected.

Count T, I just don't know how many different ways I can try to say it. If you, or anyone, puts forward a position within some practice, and I know you and respect you, I'm going to assume that you do so with far better reasons than "bare personal preference." If people went around declaring their "bare personal preferences" with others in the practice, in short order no one would talk to them. Hasn't that been your experience as well, in whatever projects you've engaged in over the years? This is the "absolute-or-arbitrary" bogeyman again.

Exactly my point, so then it isn't the case that it's just...

One person's "incredibly vague" is another person's "good enough to be going on with." And of course this applies at the level of disciplines as well -- lots of variance in how much precision is needed for a given subject.

..but rather there are some standards by which opinions are to be taken seriously or not, and it is not merely that "one person's "incredibly vague" is another's 'good enough'."

I mean, consider the context here. I said: "I think the epistemic standards you've laid out are too vague, here is why," (the prized dissection). Can you see how a response of: "well one person's 'vague' is another's "good enough,"' simply renders the position impervious by default?

Likewise, I simply can't imagine a serious scholar or thinker saying, "How could I possibly be wrong?" Rather, the usual attitude is, "This is how it seems to me. Profs X and Y have said similar things, Profs V and W offer some counter-evidence, and draw different conclusions. OK, here's why I think X, Y, and me are in the right on this. Let's discuss." I know you think that out of such a discussion we would get a clear, criteria-based, permanent answer -- and I don't deny this sometimes happens, but not often. And yet, mirabile dictu, some tentative consensus may be reached, and the practice goes on.

Sure, and this would be a fine rebuttal to me if I had claimed that your narrative doesn't have anything to do with how good discourse might progress. But I didn't say that. I didn't say it got nothing right. I said it wasn't tight enough to define good discourse on its own.

So, from the top, consider this:

One of your premises is that there are no standards that will apply across all areas of knowledge (or presumably a wide area like "all of science"). We cannot point to criteria or principles that will determine valid criteria across different areas. Is that fair?

Yet many (if not most) epistemologists think that they make valid claims about all of human knowledge, i.e. claims that apply to other disciplines and not just epistemology and epistemologists themselves. Many (if not most) philosophers of science think that they make valid claims about the whole of the sciences, and each science in particular, not just "philosophy of science." They think they have justifiable criteria for deciding issues of jurisdiction, or overlapping areas of authority. They think they have ways to identify science and pseudoscience. Not all of them do, but many do. These are professional philosophers acting in a practice who are thoughtful about their conclusions.

Thus, they hit all your criteria for producing a correct narrative. Yet many of them embrace a position that contradicts your own. They do think they have some principles or criteria that apply across either all human discourse or at least the sciences, or at least formal argument.

Hence, we seemingly have a "correct narrative" that contradicts your own. I don't see how your response cannot be self-refuting if it can allow that it is sometimes correct to reject it.

So, now, what are the options? As far as I can see:

A. "Yes, my standards allow for my own standards to be "correctly" refuted and contradicted, but that's no problem?"

Or:

B. "No, those particular philosophers are incorrect, and I am correct."

If it's B, then you need some additional criteria for why they are incorrect. But, by definition, you will be introducing new criteria for "epistemology generally" or for "philosophy of science generally," and I'm not sure if that wouldn't also contradict your previous position, unless you want to say that: "there are standards for epistemology, but these don't actually apply for other disciplines that involve questions of knowledge but only to epistemology," or that there are "standards for philosophy of science, but these don't actually apply for individual sciences, but only to philosophy of science itself." But if you take that route, then you are still saying that those epistemologists and philosophers of science are incorrect despite holding thoughtful positions developed within a practice, that have (or at least at times have had) relative consensus.

That seems problematic to me.





In what post did I advance this "argument?"

My point was about the standards allowing for self-refutation, and seemingly allowing for contradictions. Indeed, if the principle of non-contradiction cannot be specified as a general epistemic principle then it seems obvious that contradiction is allowed. I didn't claim to identify a contradiction, merely the fact that denying PNC means denying PNC. Presumably, it follows that if one denies the PNC, one is allowing contradictions, particularly when it is very easy to generate examples using those criteria where thoughtful people operating within a practice will contradict one another.

Whose the knower? An individual man, or mankind? It seems to me that the natural numbers must be prior to individuals, since they are already around and known by others before we are born.

Now, if mankind is the only species with the capacity for intellectual knowledge, I think there might be a sense in which the natural numbers could be said to be posterior to man, but they also seem obviously prior in another sense.

The sense in which the natural numbers are prior lies in the fact that there were discrete organisms, organic wholes with a principle of unity, long before man existed. There were many tyrannosaurs, trees, fish, etc. There were beings, plural. And so multitude exists there. But if man is the first "physical being" to be capable of abstracting the principle of multitude and notions of unity as measure (unit), then there is a sense in which natural numbers first exist in the mode of the (finite) intellect with this abstraction. So the existence of this abstraction is dependent on man and posterior to him. It has to exist in the intellect, and man has to first be and have an intellect for anything to exist in it.

So I would say both, but with a distinction of modes.

That's probably confusing so let me try an easier example. We have the idea of "humanity." We would not say "Socrates is a humanity." Humanity is the form of man abstracted from any determinate matter. Socrates can be a man, and he can possess humanity, but he cannot be a humanity.

Likewise, we can think of tyrannosaurusity. Yet such an abstraction only exists in beings with intellects, and if only man has an intellect, obviously he will be the first to have accomplished this abstraction. That said, obviously there has to be a tyrannosaurus for this.

Similarly, if one considers God or any sort of First Principle/Prime Mover, these principles are going to be prior there too.

For some reason, I thought you are a skeptic about emergence.

Jaegwon Kim has a series of monographs that are widely considered devastating for the idea of strong emergence given certain presuppositions (roughly a supervenience substance metaphysics where things just are what they are made of, e.g. things as ensembles of particles). This doesn't make me skeptical of emergence though, quite the opposite, it makes me skeptical of the metaphysics that seems to imply that emergence is impossible.

However, I think the whole idea of "emergence" is only required because of that general metaphysical approach. So I guess I am "skeptical" in that sense. In the broader sense of things operating on different scales and levels, I'm all on board.

What I do object to is when people present an accounts of physicalist theory of mind that simply ignore the Hard Problem with an appeal to emergence that is thin. In those cases, it seems like an ad hoc way to avoid the largest objection.

:up:

Right, we're in agreement with

"Substances primarily possess being, therefore people primarily possess truth." I don't think that follows, but to be fair, the sentences which follow upon this one iron out the difficulty a bit. What seems to follow is rather, "...therefore, substances are the primary object of truth." That people possess truth has to do with their intellectual nature.

@Wayfarer pointed out this too. I agree that it's the wrong way to put it. That's what I should have written, "sentences lack intellects," and the meaning of given sound waves, written symbols, etc. is wholly accidental and dependent on human beings. I have made a similar argument in the past that people (substance) not individual acts (not substance) primarily possess freedom, and I probably just recreated it on autopilot since it is quite similar.

This doesn't really address the old school analytic idea of propositions as abstract objects (which few seem to claim these days anyhow), but I think it applies to that as well, since that view assumes truth can be coherent outside any intellect. I would like to say though that the "set of all true propositions" is ens rationis, a hypothetical being of thought, the idea that "if I knew everything I could write it all down if I had an infinite list." It would take a while to unpack, but I think this is based on a deficient notion of truth, which maybe answers @Banno's question about Great Lists.

As I've said in the past, I tend to see ratio and intellectus as more closely intertwined. My thought is that inferential movement itself presupposes intellection insofar as one must see that the inference is appropriate and justified, even though seeing the validity of an inference is not a matter of ratiocination. So simplifying, if we have an argument with two premises, two intermediate inferences, and a conclusion, we have at minimum five "acts" of intellection, rather than three.

Agreed, or at the very least it is on reliant for intellectus for understanding the principles by which validity is understood, particularly the first principles.

Aristotle's distinction between the simple apprehension of wholes (whose opposite is ignorance) and of judgement (whose opposite of falsehood) is interesting here. I'd want to associate the former more with intellectus, but I see your point that it also seems to be present within judgement.

The point here is not to gain precision over each quantitative "act" of intellection, but rather to note that there is a constant dance between stable understanding and moving ratiocination; between movement and rest. It is also crucial to understand that "formalistic" mindsets understand the manner and principles of rational movement, but not of intellection. This is precisely why they cannot move beyond "axiomatic" thinking, and why they cannot easily integrate their abstract formalizations into everyday life.

That's a good point.

Sort of a common problem in these responses, the critique is invalid because if it was valid some sort of rigid, infallible epistemology would have to follow, and a rigid epistemology of infallibility is wrong, hence the critique is wrong.

But I don't think I'm being unreasonable. If you throw @J's epistemic position into Chat GPT it identifies all the same issues I did, plus some others (although these seem ancillary to me). I don't think it is biased towards "foundationalism" or "infallibility" (of course, I don't think I am either). It's not that these issues couldn't be ironed out, and indeed I think there is some truth to the explanation, particularly vis-a-vis the way justification works in practice (which is not to say, ideally).

Yet even an appeal to internal consistency requires some sort of standard. If we take the same approach to logic, we end up with the validity of arguments varying on a case-by-case basis as well. That consistency, avoiding self-refutation, or coherence is a worthy standard itself presumably varies case by case.

Where do you see your preference for dissection playing in here?

We do. By talking. Sometimes negotations fail, though.

Right, many of histories most bitter wars are ideological, so clearly debate can collapse into power relations. My concern about epistemic standards that are too loose is that they basically just fast forward us towards the collapse into power relations.

Talking is effective for different reasons, right? You have your old ethos, logos, and pathos, different sorts of appeals. But isn't a "good argument" one that tends towards truth, not one that tends towards conversion and agreement? If it was the latter, then it would seem that we are always dealing with mere power relations. That is, of course , the thesis of some philosophers though.

I am not sure if we have "succeeded" if we have successfully talked others into accepting our own false opinions though.

Further, some of these debates are highly consequential. Consider the current debate over vaccines in the US. Or consider the example of a sui generis "socialist genetics" that led to famines that killed thousands, if not millions. The stakes in some debates are very high, and so I'm not sure "we talk and maybe we agree and maybe we don't" works in principle. That at least, isn't how things are often done in the wider world, again because stakes are often high.

A question here might be: "can people be taught to better evaluate claims?" If they can't, then philosophy is pretty useless, or at least general epistemology is. If they can be taught, then presumably there are principles for evaluating claims and narratives that are more general.

We rely on authority to settle a lot of these issues, e.g. doctors carry special weight in the vaccine debate. But obviously there is an issue of proper authority. Doctors don't have authority on vaccines just because they claim it, or because it is yielded to them, else there is never "improper authority" in cases where people recognize authority. The idea of a "proper authority" that is distinct from whoever just so happens to hold authority seems to me to require an additional standard, and probably one that is general in its principles since we must adjudicate proper authority across disparate spheres.

That's a fantastic quote. I'll probably reuse it. It gets at a common mistake which is that if something is always filtered through something else (e.g. human nature, "instinct," is always filtered through habit and culture) then it cannot be prior to what it is always filtered through. Perhaps this is a side effect of the tendency towards thinking of causes exclusively in terms of temporal ordering. At any rate, it misses that, in order for human culture to exist, humans have to exist. This doesn't entail that any humans ever exist without culture. It merely entails that, because humans are one thing, and not any other, this will always shape human culture.

Likewise, the realities faced by all living things, the demand to maintain homeostasis and form in the face of entropy, etc. are more general principles that will effect all cultures, human, or any other intelligent species.

More general principles explain more things, but less determinantly. So human nature explains all human cultures, but it is less definite then how cultures shape us. And thus, it can easily seem like "culture all the way down," because culture drives the particular specific details we take notice of, yet these are always against a particular background of biology, physics, etc.

There was a very long running debate over whether terms signify concepts in the mind (Aristotle) or whether they signify things (through a triadic semiotic relationship, Augustine). I've always been partial to Augustine here, but I can see the impetus in the other direction as well, and language plays a crucial role in either case.

So:

Logic then applies to statements we make with those abstractions, not directly to the world itself. Insofar those statements are about the world, maybe you could say it's also about the world indirectly.

I think in either case you're right, it's about the world in at least some way. It's mediated, so "indirect." I'm not sure if anything is ever truly unmediated; that's another question. Logic and language only ceases to be "about the world," if the terms/concepts cease to be determinantly related to the world in any way. So, even on the view that signification is of concepts (usually universals), this isn't overly problematic because universals come to us from things via the senses. It becomes a difficulty only when that linkage is somehow severed.

Here, I don't really mind the Kantian interjection that what we say about things is always "things as we know them." That's fair. Surely we are not speaking about things as we don't know them. Where it gets dicey is in the idea that there is no determinant linkage between things and what is known, in which case, it doesn't even seem like the knowledge can be "of" the things.

The point isn't that our existing criteria are everywhere universal, certain, and immutable. It's that they have to be criteria. But I think this framing of "absolute criteria" is a red herring. My critique of these standards is from the lens of epistemology, and surely epistemology has some standards. If I reject J's standards, it does not seem that, by his standards, it would be possible to reject my rejection. Perhaps we would both be right, but that's exactly the problem in my view.

Second, are you suggesting that epistemology is wholly sui generis for each subject matter? Something like the hermetically sealed magisterium or Latin Averroism?

If not, then then obviously there is something the same vis-á-vis all epistemic situations. If they are sui generis, then you have all the problems of the hermetically sealed magisterium, i.e. that it allows for contradictions, and that what actually constitutes a "hermetically sealed magisterium" will vary according to each discipline, such that some disciplines will make claims on others, but those disciplines will reject those claims and declare themselves sui generis and hermetically sealed. And indeed, there is no reason this shouldn't trickle down to the level of individuals.

If each discipline is allowed to have its own definition of its reach, criterion, and subject matter, we can hardly object to the fact that, historically, and I would imagine even today, most epistemologists think what they are saying applies to all knowledge claims and all instances of warrant. It takes the whole of human knowing as its subject matter.


To give an example: is it valid to have a distinct "feminist epistemology?" What about a French or White epistemology? Can there be an Aryan physics with its own standards as set against Jewish physics? Or a capitalist genetics as set against a Marxist genetics?

Those are all real world examples justified by professional philosophers within a practice. Some were extremely consequential; the differing genetics led to famines that killed large numbers of people. But they were unique standards for a particular problem set developed within a practice by thoughtful people.

So where exactly is the error in those cases? Or was there one?

And I think the counter, the demand for universality, permanence, certainty -- which will attack even what I'm saying here, "Are criteria always and everywhere like this? Then you're contradicting yourself!" -- should just be ignored as juvenile. This is not how serious people think. It's like lecturing Jerome Powell after taking Econ 101.

If one knows one is giving the appearance of contradicting oneself then wouldn't it make sense to explain why the distinction is not truly contradictory, or why contradiction is not a problem? I'm not sure if a preemptive ad hominem amounts to much there.

Criteria obviously do vary by subject matter. And so does specificity and certainty. I don't think anyone has argued that they don't. But in virtue of what is this variation appropriate? Presumably, it isn't "anything goes." That's the question. What settles epistemic disputes? What determines when a field is a pseudoscience? Saying: "well standards vary by subject matter" doesn't address the issue that people disagree about standards and what constitutes unique subject matter. It's a non-non-sequitur

How is it uncharitable? I copied and pasted the phrases. I get that we don't always "know it when we see it," but we sometimes do. (Yet such a claim seems hard to challenge whenever it is made). What would you change?

One person's "incredibly vague" is another person's "good enough to be going on with." And of course this applies at the level of disciplines as well -- lots of variance in how much precision is needed for a given subject.

Sure, that's exactly my point. This is an appeal to bare personal preference. My argument is specific enough for me, how could it possibly be wrong?

If you want to say that my interpretation that "your standard is so vague that 'anything goes,'" is invalid, in virtue of what is it invalid? I've approached it thoughtfully, others agree with me, and I approached it within a practice. Indeed, there seems to be consensus among those who share my practice that this is so. What else more is there to say? What's the objection?

Maybe your standard implies "anything goes" for some philosophies and epistemologies and not others? So we're both right... and both wrong. But that we're both right and wrong would seem to demonstrate exactly my point.

Further, there is the issue that people frequently disagree about what constitutes proper fields of discourse and real distinctions in subject matter (e.g. "Jewish physics"). Presumably there is a higher level discipline, philosophy of science and epistemology, for adjudicating these disputes. But if that's the case, then there would be higher level criteria vis-á-vis lower level criteria and standards of proper warrant that applies across disparate fields. The criterion for determining that "Aryan physics" is not a valid field with its own unique criteria has to come from outside Aryan physics itself, because according to Aryan physics, it is a valid discipline, and the larger realm of physics (called by them "Jewish physics") has no authority over it.

Bingo! Logic is about language, not about the world itself.

Human logic is clearly not physical causality. However, logic isn't "about" anything but language? So:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore Socrates is a mortal.

Is about the words "man" and "Socrates" and not ever about men and Socrates? Wouldn't this lead to a thoroughgoing anti-realism and an inability of language to signify anything but language, such that books on botany are about words and interpretations and never about plants (only "plants")?

. I want to clarify: I’m not saying there is nothing at all prior to interpretation—certainly not “nothing” in a nihilistic sense. What I’m pointing to is something more like undifferentiated givenness—not sheer formless flux, but not determinately articulated being either. It’s not a thing or set of things waiting to be picked out, but a field of potential meaning that only becomes structured in relation to a subject (something like Peirce's 'firstness'). That's why I said 'neither existent nor non-existent', which is what I take the expression 'beyond being' to mean - beyond the flux of coming-to-be and passing away.

Right, so is this "undifferentiated giveness" first in the order of being or in the order of our experience? It seems obvious that it comes first in our particular experience, yet the ontological priority of something wholly undifferentiated would seem to cause problems in terms of what follows from what is truly undifferentiated as a cause (which would seem to be, nothing, or nothing in particular). There is also Hegel's point about sheer, indeterminate being collapsing into nothing to consider as well.

One way to look at this would be to distinguish between "all finite experience" and "our particular experience." If all the finite experiences of all organisms is what "makes things the concrete way they are," (maybe something somewhat akin to "consciousness causes collapse") then, for those born in a world already teeming with life, in the midst of civilizations, the world would be in a sense "already divided." The collective experiences of all that have comes before us have already accomplished this.

This at least makes more sense to me, although I still see problems. Yet I often get the impression that the opposite is meant, and that this move is made because the order of our experience is conflated with the order of being (perhaps because bracketing has made phenomenology "first philosophy" by default). This would be the idea that there is no squirrel or owl prior to our knowing it as such, that our knowing makes it what it is. But this would be a sort of denial of other beings as prior, relatively self-governing, self-determining, organic wholes that are relatively intelligible in themselves. Plus, if this applies to animals at the level of individual human experiencers, I don't know why it wouldn't apply to other people. And so we would all live in our own self constituted worlds.

I think the difficulty here is finding a ground for per se predication versus per accidens, so that "what things are" is not determined by seemingly accidental relations vis-á-vis what we think or say of them.

I think, and you will know this subject better than I, that Eriugena's Periphysion articulates this far better than I could. From the SEP entry:

Right, but Eriugena is proceeding by affirmation and negation (like Plotinus and Dionysius), using analogous predication. He is not simply denying that God is, full stop. God cannot be the First Principle, First Cause, and ground of being if God is not prior to creatures (and we could say the same of any true infinite re the finite). And if creatures do not have a prior cause or ground, we have the question of why they are one way and not any other, but also have to affirm that they are truly subsistent being. Yet their essence would not appear to indicate their existence, so how are they subsistent except as a "brute fact," a spontaneous, self-constitututing move from potential to actuality.

Universals—or forms—exist, or rather, are real, not as actual entities, but as structured possibilities. As Kelley Ross puts it, they "exist where possibilities exist," and we encounter them not only in the future, but also in what he calls the "imperfect aspect"—that is, in things that are still unfolding, in process, not yet completed. This is key: the world we engage with is not made of finished essences, but of meaningful potentials that become actualised or manifested through living beings.

Isn't this to identify form with potency instead of actuality? Except, it's a "structured potency," and so already limited and determinant. But that's the same as saying they are a prior actuality, but that they also exist with potency (which must be true for all changing beings). However, it seems to me that the "structure" here just is the form, the actuality, and that we might want to avoid lumping it in with the potency. The actuality determines the potency.

So, I am not sure if there is anything objectionable there except that it seems like a confusing way to formulate the idea that beings are act and potency and that prior actuality does not fully determine them, that they have the potential to change (else they would be pure act, right?).

But that prior structure does set limits. Does a cat have the potential to become a frog? I would say no. An act of sorcery that accomplished this would simply be replacing one thing with a other. So there is an essential limit on what things are, else everything is potentially everything else. And I think those limits on what a thing can be are just what is meant by "substantial form." No doubt, we could break a cat down into its matter and make it into a frog. That's different though. That isn't a potential of the cat because the cat ceases to be. Another way to put this is that generation and corruption really occur because there really are beings as organic wholes.

Yet I don't know what it means for an essence to be "unfinished." To be sure, we have the "staying-at-work-being-itself" of physical beings, their struggle to maintain their form and achieve the good/perfections related to that form. Since forms exist only where they are instantiated, this means there is no such thing as a completed form, except perhaps as a principle in the absolute unity of the transcendent One as a sort of "idea." And yet there has to be something determinant there for final causation to have any purchase.

But the idea that essences are a sort of project is tricky. I think there is a sense that this is true, from an evolutionary perspective and the unfolding of history. Yet I don't think this is true if it is an attempt to deny final causality and any telos (which seems to deny the goal directedness of life and the role of aims in giving beings, wholes, unity). I think resistance to essences is often based on a misunderstanding of them as "Platonic forms" or calcified logical entities, but also a psychological aversion to telos due to a misguided understanding of freedom primarily in terms of potency/power, the capacity to "choose anything."

Actually, I think Chat-GPT is a good demonstration of this because it has been fed so many papers. Ask it about contemporary philosophy that denies essence, and you get a straightforward narrative of why essences are problematic, as is final causality, and often something that seems to potentially deny the possibility of per se predication. But ask it then how essences were understood by the figures being critiqued, and it suddenly switches gears to give a very different narrative. I would imagine, this is due to pulling from different sources.

I'm not changing the subject. I explained why my judgement is completely sound according to @J's criteria of being thoughtful and grounded in practice, and I know soundness when I see it, and this is a sound conclusion.

How can you dismiss my thoughtful conclusion as invalid? That seems like it would be the authoritarian demand that your standards trump everyone else's. But I've been at least as thoughtful and involved in practice as you have, and so that's nonsense. At best, and at worst, we must both be right. And so this amorphous, weak standard clearly must clearly "let in everything" as I conclude it does, and "not let in everything" as you conclude it does. Both are equally valid conclusions, since both can be arrived at by thoughtful individuals engaged in practice, according to the standard adopted for this particular question. To deny this would seem to require a reversal: the claim that there are criterion for selecting criterion. Yet if they aren't both valid conclusions, in virtue of what is one wrong and why isn't this standard authoritarian?

So I can hardly be wrong here. Indeed, that we are both right, that the standard does and doesn't let everything in, only further strengthens my conclusion.

There is something prior to or outside of any cognition of it, but it is not really ‘something’ until it is (re)cognised by a subject. (This is what I take the in-itself to mean - something is, but as it has no determinate form or features, then it can’t be understood as any kind of existent or ‘thing’).

Hm, I don't think I'm misunderstanding then. This is very different from how Wallace understands Plato and Hegel, because there intelligibility always refers outside itself, ultimately to the Good/One/True Infinite/Absolute.

But here, if nothing is anything/something before finite creatures are conscious of them (and how would this work for finite creatures being aware of each other?), then this question seems quite relevant:

Now, the idea that there is only flux prior to our "constructions" mentioned earlier strikes me as different. Here, flux is prior. But this still seems to me to be heading towards the idea of man as the source of the world, if not in the role of God, then at least a demiurge. Are the principles of things contained in the flux (say, virtually), or is the flux a sort of prime matter on which man imposes form and makes everything what it is? And if the latter, from whence this form?

For instance, here I'd like to ask "interpretations of what?" If things do not have any determinant identity before we "interpret" them then the interpretations would seem to be of "nothing in particular." But then I wouldn't even want to call them interpretations, since they aren't "of" anything. They would be more like "generations," in that we would be imposing extrinsic form on them (which begs the question, how does this informing faculty work and what determines it)?

They're similar positions in that they deny the standard materialist position. I don't think that makes them that similar. I don't think for instance, think that Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism is consistent with the idea that things are nothing/nothing in particular prior to being perceived by us.

As for why we perceive colours the same way, all of us belong to a common species, and also share a common language and culture. If we were a different species with a completely different cognitive system everything might appear completely differently to what it does to h.sapiens . The evolutionary pathway gave rise to h,sapiens, not centaurs, and as a species, we share a common world (to an extent).

Right, but appealing to evolution from presumably non-conscious life (and prior to that, non-living dissipative processes) is appealing to something determinant that is prior to the perception of finite beings. You're making an appeal to determinant causes prior to the first finite mind. If the two (experiencer and experienced) are rather wholly co-constituting, as a self-moving cause, this doesn't work. There is no interaction prior to consciousness that shapes why consciousness is one way and not any other, because consciousness itself is the only thing that makes anything one way and not any other (i.e. actual). That's the whole idea of "nothing is actual until we constitute them," right?

What makes an argument valid? Isn't the idea you've advocated for in the past a sort of unrestricted logical pluralism based on what we deem useful? But I do not find it useful for me to embrace any logic where my argument isn't valid here, and it is surely valid in at least some.



I'm not even sure what this "Great List" is supposed to be. Propositions as abstract platonic objects? The options for understanding truth are not limited to early and late analytic philosophy. Early analytic philosophy has the dubious honor of being the new Cartesian substance dualism, only rolled out so that people can knock it down and declare their particular theory the victor by process of elimination.

I didn't say, nor imply, that there isn't a determinant, that there is no external world.

No, but I said "determinant actuality prior to the senses." And this is a denial of that, right?

The term that I believe is common to both phenomenology and Buddhism is that the world is 'co-arising'. This tends to subvert the whole question of whether logic or order are 'in the mind' or 'in the world'. Answer is: neither, or both.

If both, it would be saying that the things we know are both prior and posterior to our knowing them, which is arguably a contradiction. That is, our knowledge of things would be both dependent and not dependent on their prior existence.

To say neither is to say that the knowledge of the knower is not dependent on or caused by the known. This seems problematic too.

Hence, the "both" option seems more promising, but now we have a cause that is posterior (and prior) to its effect. A self-moving cause. But why would a wholly self-moving cause (a spontaneous move from potency to act) have one effect and not any other? Whereas , if the process isn't wholly self moving (i.e. randomly generating) then something is prior and determining the process, and so there is some "prior actuality," which was my only point.

This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes presorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism)

I mean, given these quite unattractive framings of both idealism and realism, of course we want a via media. I am not sure if "human thought and the physical world are both (and neither) prior nor/and posterior to one another" is the only option though, or one without difficulties.

I take it that here "experience" means "our experience." So the Earth becomes what it is because we experience it, not because form is itself intellectual. Yet if nothing is prior to man (or life), if we rule out any distinctions in being that are actual prior to finite consciousness, why would consciousness be one way and not any other? Why would we be men and not centaurs? The sky blue and not purple?

There seems to me to be a crucial difference between acknowledging that the experience of finite creatures is always filtered through their cognitive apparatus and denying the actuality of being as such prior to creatures' finite conscious awareness of it. The latter move puts potency prior to act if the idea is that the two (finite mind and world ) are the result of self-generation, with nothing outside this process. The world becomes the result of a self-moving process which, having nothing prior to it, is random. That is, sheer potency moving itself to generate the world, potency "co-constituting itself" into determinant actuality ex nihilo (or eternally I suppose, but the eternal framing doesn't make the question of quiddity, why being is one way and not another, any less acute). It's the same sort of issue you get with the physicalist claim that being and quiddity are "brute facts."

Another difficulty is that if things' actuality is not prior to their being known, then it's hard to see how they could have any essence. All predication would be accidental (or essential, the difference is collapsed) and so there would be no pre se predication. Rather, things change what they essentially are when known differently. You get all the issues of Heraclitus, without the Logos as an ad hoc backstop. Presumably, there might be ways to iron this out, but it comes to mind.

Now, the idea that there is only flux prior to our "constructions" mentioned earlier strikes me as different. Here, flux is prior. But this still seems to me to be heading towards the idea of man as the source of the world, if not in the role of God, then at least a demiurge. Are the principles of things contained in the flux (say, virtually), or is the flux a sort of prime matter on which man imposes form and makes everything what it is? And if the latter, from whence this form?

But this act is interpretive - we impose identity, distinguish boundaries, and construct exclusions in order to make sense of the flux. Logic is thereby a function of cognition, not a pre-existent feature of a mind-independent reality.

For instance, here I'd like to ask "interpretations of what?" If things do not have any determinant identity before we "interpret" them then the interpretations would seem to be of "nothing in particular." But then I wouldn't even want to call them interpretations, since they aren't "of" anything. They would be more like "generations," in that we would be imposing extrinsic form on them (which begs the question, how does this informing faculty work and what determines it)? The contrast to "things-in-themselves" and "mind-independent" reality make sense, given philosophy's continued focus on the Cartesian/Kantian dilemma, but I'm increasingly thinking that these are dragged out to be shot down as a sort of comparison case at least as often as they are actually embraced though.

The analogy I'd want to make is that just because we must always see a light after it passes through a tinted window doesn't mean that light isn't a light before it passes through the glass. But neither does it mean that there is anything to see without the light ("mind independent being") or that one can "see the light before it emits any light" (the sterile thing-in-itself).

From the absence of a universal criterion, Tim concludes that no valid judgment can be made. That doesn't follow.

You keep tacking on things like "universal," "absolute," "infallible." I asked for any criterion, which was allegedly a "leading question."

And the only answer so far comes from @J and is: "it's a different criterion in each instance and you sort of 'know correctness when you see it,' but it also involves being thoughtful." This seems to me to be incredibly vague, and seems to open the door to declaring oneself justified, or others unjustified, whenever one feels like it, just so long as one considers oneself thoughtful. That is, it seems open to authoritarianism.

I don't recall you agreeing to any criterion though, no? Can one be provided?

I want to be clear that, in contrast to your much more interesting response, I think there is a formal fallacy in the argument on which Tim relies. I'd hoped to show him the problem with the Great List account, but apparently he can't see it there.

I find this to be a very authoritarian position. Apparently you think that unless someone uses a form from your Great List of Valid Arguments they are creating a "fallacy." This is an inappropriate demand for completeness vis-á-vis argumentation. How can you know the entire list of valid arguments and when they apply in each instance? What's the criterion for this?

Now look, I thoughtfully considered that argument. It's consistent with my habit of practice, which is robust. I know good argument when I see it, and that argument is definitely one of them. Others agree!

You want to impose your One True Standard of Argument on us with your authoritarian List of what is valid, but I think there is a happy mid-point between declaring oneself infallible and in possession of the One True List of Valid Arguments and not allowing just any argument at all. I don't allow just any argument. I don't make just any argument. I try to only accept or make just those arguments that, per the case in question, would be justifiably valid according to my practice. But this is one of those cases. I have been thoughtful. My argument is valid here, not fallacious!

In my usage, a narrative has a truth value - it sets out how things are, or at least it sets out how they are supposed to be. A narrative ought be consistent, and truth matters.

Interesting. So is truth a criterion for accepting narratives? Do true narratives contradict one another?

I think Neoplatonism would be the paradigmatic example of the opposite orientation, although the idea is central in Scholastic thought, "Golden Age" Islamic thought, and some Hindu thought. I think Shankara's Advaita Vedanta would qualify, since phenomenon is maya ("illusion"). The idea is that the higher principle is more real than the particular. What is most properly knowledge is the co-identity of form in the intellect. The idea is that the experience of particulars is always incomplete and refers outside the particulars and sense experience. These are not wholly intelligible in themselves (and so not wholly themselves), both the experience of particulars (or experience itself) and even physical particulars themselves. Experiences are incomplete. They only "exist" as a sort of "abstraction," a pulling away from the whole that is not wholly real, in that the separation is an affectation (the creature having no real existence outside the One, God, Brahman, etc.).

Now obviously, if "abstract" is defined as "separation from experience of particulars (or matter)," this won't be the case. But in a broader sense abstraction is often taken to mean a separation from reality or unity. That is, abstractions are "less real." They are ens rationis, interpretive creations of the mind that are ontologically posterior to experience. We "construct" them. Yet any metaphysical realism is going to reverse this to at least some degree, because the forms grasped by the intellect will be prior to experience. They will be ontologically prior, while experience will be merely epistemically prior to a grasp of the universal/form.

Plotinus' undescended intellect is probably the best example I can think of, but that's likely unfamiliar. I'll share Wallace below just in case you're interested because he makes Plato and Hegel fairly Neoplatonic. It's sort of an ancillary objection, I know. It just occurred to me in my reading that what is considered "abstract" is in a sense inverted in the early modern period.

By calling what we experience with our senses less real than the Forms, Plato is not saying that what we experience with our senses is simply illusion. The “reality” that the Forms have more of is not simply their not being illusions. If that’s not what their extra reality is, what is it? The easiest place to see how one could suppose that something that isn’t an illusion, is nevertheless less real than something else, is in our experience of ourselves.

In Republic book iv, Plato’s examination of the different "parts of the soul” leads him to the conclusion that only the rational part can integrate the soul into one, and thus make it truly “just.” Here is his description of the effect of a person’s being governed by his rational part, and therefore “just”:

Justice . . . is concerned with what is truly himself and his own. . . . [The person who is just] binds together [his] parts . . . and from having been many things he becomes entirely one, moderate, and harmonious. Only then does he act. (Republic 443d-e)

Our interest here (I’ll discuss the “justice” issue later) is that by “binding together his parts” and “becoming entirely one,” this person is “truly himself.” That is, as I put it in earlier chapters, a person who is governed by his rational part is real not merely as a collection of various ingredients or “parts,” but as himself. A person who acts purely out of appetite, without any examination of whether that appetite is for something that will actually be “good,” is enacting his appetite, rather than anything that can appropriately be called “himself.” Likewise for a person who acts purely out of anger, without examining whether the anger is justified by what’s genuinely good. Whereas a person who thinks about these issues before acting “becomes entirely one” and acts, therefore, in a way that expresses something that can appropriately be called “himself.”

In this way, rational self-governance brings into being an additional kind of reality, which we might describe as more fully real than what was there before, because it integrates those parts in a way that the parts themselves are not integrated. A person who acts “as one,” is more real as himself than a person who merely enacts some part or parts of himself. He is present and functioning as himself, rather than just as a collection of ingredients or inputs.

We all from time to time experience periods of distraction, absence of mind, or depression, in which we aren’t fully present as ourselves. Considering these periods from a vantage point at which we are fully present and functioning as ourselves, we can see what Plato means by saying that some non-illusory things are more real than other non-illusory things. There are times when we ourselves are more real as ourselves than we are at other times.

Indeed, we can see nature as a whole as illustrating this issue of how fully integrated and “real as itself ” a being can be. Plants are more integrated than rocks, in that they’re able to process nutrients and reproduce themselves, and thus they’re less at the mercy of their environment. So we could say that plants are more effectively focused on being themselves than rocks are, and in that sense they’re more real as themselves. Rocks may be less vulnerable than plants are, but what’s the use of invulnerability if what’s invulnerable isn’t you?

Animals, in turn, are more integrated than plants are, in that animals’ senses allow them to learn about their environment and navigate through it in ways that plants can’t. So animals are still more effectively focused on being themselves than plants are, and thus more real as themselves.

Humans, in turn, can be more effectively focused on being themselves than many animals are, insofar as humans can determine for themselves what’s good, rather than having this be determined for them by their genetic heritage and their environment. Nutrition and reproduction, motility and sensation, and a thinking pursuit of the Good each bring into being a more intensive reality as oneself than is present without them.

Now, what all of this has to do with the Forms and their supposedly greater reality than our sense experience is that it’s by virtue of its pursuit of knowledge of what’s really good, that the rational part of the soul distinguishes itself from the soul’s appetites and anger and so forth. The Form of the Good is the embodiment of what’s really good. So pursuing knowledge of the Form of the Good is what enables the rational part of the soul to govern us, and thus makes us fully present, fully real, as ourselves. In this way, the Form of the Good is a precondition of our being fully real, as ourselves.

But presumably something that’s a precondition of our being fully real must be at least as real as we are when we are fully real. It’s at least as real as we are, because we can’t deny its reality without denying our own functioning as creatures who are guided by it or are trying to be guided by it.13 And since it’s at least as real as we are, it’s more (fully) real than the material things that aren’t guided by it and thus aren’t real as themselves.

From Robert M. Wallace - Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present

The key thing here is "self-determination." But this can be taken to be "self-determination" in a more abstract, metaphysical sense as well.

[Hegel] thinks he has demonstrated, in the chapter on “Quality,” that the ordinary conceptions of quality, reality, or finitude are not systematically defensible, by themselves, but can only be properly employed within a context of negativity or true infinity...

Note: For instance, one cannot understand “red” atomically, but rather it depends on other notions such as “color” and the things (substances) that can be red, etc. to be intelligible. This notion is similar to how the Patristics (e.g., St. Maximus) developed Aristotle in light of the apparent truth that even "proper beings" (e.g., a horse) are not fully intelligible in terms of themselves. For instance, try explaining what a horse *is* without any reference to any other plant, animal, or thing. This has ramifications for freedom as the ability to transcend “what one already is,”—the “given”—which relies on our relation to a transcendent absolute Good—a Good not unrelated to how unity generates (relatively) discrete/self-determining beings/things.

[Hegel] has now shown, through his analysis of “diversity” and opposition, that within such a context of negativity or true infinity, the reality that is described by apparently merely “contrary” concepts will turn out to be better described, at a fundamental level, by contradictory concepts. The fundamental reality will be contradictory, rather than merely contrary. It’s not that nothing will be neither black nor white, but rather that qualities such as black, white, and colorless are less real (less able to be what they are by virtue of [only] themselves) than self-transcending finitude (true infinity) is…

From Robert M. Wallace - Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God

I think a similar example could be made involving hard science, but this is not my field, and one's enough to show what I have in mind.

I find it funny that your example comes from an area that I would imagine most people think is purely a matter of subjective taste, akin to "which food tastes better." I would disagree with that of course, but it seems like a particularly fraught example for this reason.

or at least try to.

Do they ever succeed, in musicology, ethics, physics, metaphysics? If they did succeed, how would you know? If you cannot know if they ever succeed in saying "some things that are acceptable, true, and valid," how is this not an all-encompassing skepticism?

Such a narrative will, we hope, be "reasonable." And it has no strict criteria. We may or may not know it when we see it -- there's usually debate among musicologists concerning this kind of thing -- but we aren't utterly in the dark either. We don't want historical mistakes or bad reasoning, but merely avoiding these things will not get us where we want to go. This is, perhaps, the difference between "criteria" understood as rules which can be applied in all cases, and something much more rough-and-ready. But I still have trouble seeing how this makes anything arbitrary.

Well, suppose I was uncharitable and was to say that this is "invalid and not reasonable epistemology." And I "know good epistemology when I see it," having practiced it. And indeed, I could probably draw on an appeal to consensus, or at least majority opinion on this point. However, I cannot offer you much by way of what does make for good epistemology, or what is wrong with your approach. What is the response then? Am I being unfair? Am I being "reasonable" in my rejection?

It's a practice, it is learned and deepened over time, and new consensuses produce new question

Is this supposed to be an appeal to democratization and popularity, or just "if you do it a lot 'you just know it when you see it' better?'"

It may be the case that some philosophers, doing a certain kind of philosophy, need to find indubitable foundations to be going on with, but most areas of knowledge and interpretation aren't like that.

How could it ever be demonstrated that this is the case? This would surely be debated. But then the same problem of amorphous standards would plague that debate as well.

For some phenomenologists. Phenomenology could hardly have become so influential in Catholic thought (winning over two saints and a pope) if it was inextricable from the idea that man is the measure of beings, or that subsistent being was not prior to created being.

To perceive trees, squirrels and rooms with tables and chairs is to constitute them through the interplay between expectation and response. — Joshs

An expectation of what is the defining question here? There is the question of ontological priority, what causes experience to be one way and not any other.

But that wasn't really my point. My point was that the phenomenological perspective is not the default. I think the overwhelming number of readers would agree that Husserl or Marion provide far more abstract descriptions of experience than common narratives about what one sees in the woods.

The idea that the immediate is less abstract assumes a certain sort of framing. That's the point of Hegel's quip at least. To assume that the most general theories or philosophy, the universal, the higher principles, etc. are necessarily "more abstract," is to have already abstracted parts of reality from the whole, and decided the part is more fundamental. A focus on the specific over the general is itself the result of abstraction. It's still in the mold of materialism and reductionism, the smallism that developed in reaction to the overarching bigism of classical metaphysics. Now maybe one really is more warranted than the other, that's another question.

There's clearly something in this all-or-nothing position that seems incontrovertible to you.

I don't think it's that hard to get. Either all narratives are acceptable/true/valid, whatever you want to call it, or they aren't. If some aren't, in virtue of what are some to be rejected?

If one cannot offer any criteria for making this judgement, then the choice seems arbitrary. In the past you have said some narratives are not "reasonable." But what does "reasonable" mean here? From what I've gathered, it has no strict criteria, but "you know it when you see it." If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me. If I am right, can you not see how such an incredibly amorphous, ill-defined criteria essentially makes inquiry all a matter of taste?

I was looking at his books. What books or articles would you recommend as a starting point?

Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation is the only one I wouldn't really recommend. Not that it isn't good in some ways, but it's extremely continental. I have a decently high tolerance for that sort of thing, but it was too much. It's also his dissertation I think and seems less polished.

The Catholicity of Reason is very good, and the quotes give a good idea of its main subject matter. Plato's Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic is written two years later and centers around the same themes. Being a deep dive on the Republic, it isn't as broad as the earlier book, but in some ways I think this focuses the arguments and makes them more accessible, and it also expands the consideration more into the metaphysics of appearances and goodness. Schindler was apparently the student of Eric Perl, and you can see that coming through in the metaphysics.

Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth is probably the most accessible, until the last part where it shifts quite a bit. It's also shorter. I really appreciate the idea of an accessible work on the Transcendentals, and I think he does a pretty good job. The later part is more of a deep dive into Thomistic theories that treat beauty as one of the transcendentals, whereas the intro is a broader social commentary.

Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty might someday be considered a "mature work." It brings in a lot from the prior texts, and starts to work a lot of these ideas into the framework where the defining feature of modernity is the elevation of potency over actuality (matter over form, etc.). It's a study of notions of liberty in Plato and Aristotle as compared with Locke (and a lesser focus on later thinkers like Kant and Spinoza). I think this is perhaps the biggest thesis because it rings very true and the ramifications have obviously been huge.

Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition is the second volume of Freedom From Reality, but it's more a history of the development of classical Christian notions of freedom. This might be my favorite, although it doesn't intersect much with modern thought in the way the other works do. It covers Plotinus, Augustine, Dionysius, Maximus, Anselm, Bernard, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and then Scotus and Ockham. Normally, many of these names are relegated to niche books and articles and its really great to have them in a systematic dialogue. There is supposed to be a third volume at some point covering modern thought.

He also has a book on freedom in the German idealists from a decade prior. I've only read the Hegel chapters. It was good, but really quite focused on those thinkers.

The Politics of the Real is the main critique of liberalism. I think it's also the weakest. It's not a bad critique, it's just that a lot of people have made similar points, and in some ways supported them better by wading into political science and economics more. Being political, it's unsurprisingly the most polemical. It has a section on the philosophy of rights that is quite good, but he sometimes weakens his argument by going off to justify Catholic social teaching when he doesn't really have space to make the argument (marriage was the big example here). It still had some good stuff though.

He has some other more theological stuff I haven't read, mostly on Von Balthasar.



I assume @J has something in mind, like "we" (i.e. people) make the standards for mathematics (although this seems opposed to the idea that mathematical discoveries were "always there" so maybe not?) Otherwise, wouldn't something like medicine be quintessentially authoritarian? For, either the patient lives, or they don't. Either they end up disabled, or they don't. There is a clear arbiter of success. Likewise, for engineering, the bridge either collapses or it doesn't.

There is clearly better or worse medicine, better or worse military science, etc. and the results of these arts are always highly consequential, with great moral import. A person who kills their patients through negligence, designs a bridge that collapses on people, or loses a winnable war is blameworthy. How could they not be? Likewise, academic dishonestly, e.g. falsifying data, is also blameworthy.

But to suppose that metaphysics, ethics, politics, etc. is not like engineering, medicine, military science, etc., i.e. that it has no proper authority, or that its measure is man and not the subject matter, is extremely consequential. It cannot be an a priori stance without presuming much, which is the opposite of humility. Nor, if each individual man is the measure, does it seem like there will be much to say about those fields, since "everything goes," whereas, if the measure is men collectively, an appeal to democratization, we seem to simply have a power battle.

Well, Witt’s approach is air tight

Is it? I don't think Wittgenstein's philosophy is presuppositionless. Its style (both early and late), does not make its presuppositions clear, but we can infer them from what must be assumed to make arguments like the rule following argument from undetermination go through. These require certain ideas about warrant and knowledge. Quine is helpful here because he makes similar arguments from underdetermination, but is much more explicit about what is needs to be presumed to make them go through.

Argument from underdetermination was not unknown in ancient thought (skeptical equipollence), but it wasn't considered a strong form of argument. It only becomes undefeatable when it is assumed that learning is a sort of pattern recognition, which stems from the empiricist program, nominalism, etc.

Historically, the empiricists' epistemic presuppositions were actually grounded in metaphysics, in corpuscular mechanism, but they have hung around in the tradition even after their initial motivation has disappeared. However, they are hardly "presuppositionless" or "without bias." They assume specific answers to metaphysical questions (although they are often justified by appeals to ignorance and skepticism, which is not a valid justification; one cannot say "I don't think we can decide the realism debate, therefore I am justified in assuming nominalism." At least, that isn't "humility.")

Arguably (from the viewpoint of other traditions) the problem simply occurs when you treat meaning as psychological or behavioral, having rejected natures and real essences, and thus have already reduced intellectual knowledge to inductive habit or training.

But we might object that, in at least some cases, to “follow a rule” is not to obey a convention or social practice, but is rather to act in accordance with the nature (form) of the thing you're engaging with.

For example, arithmetic on this view is not a set of social customs, but an application of the intelligible structure of quantity (multitude). If you say “2 + 2 = 5,” the problem isn’t that you're out of step with a language game—it's that you're violating the essence of multitude as discerned by the intellect. And, given the way arithmetic developed the same way across disparate cultures, and the way in which failing to observe its rules seems to result in wrong answers, regardless of our customs, this does not seem like it is obviously wrong.

So, the "Wittgensteinian" conclusion here, particularly Kripke's extension, could arguably just be taken as a reductio against the epistemic presuppositions that lead there.

There's a lot of truth in this, but I want to dwell on why it appears this way. Let's take math. Is math authoritarian? Is it structured to preclude objection? Well, yes, if by "objection" we mean an alternative correct answer in a given math language. Math is deductive, apodictic -- in some grand sense, if we could really understand numbers, we could have predicted the Mandelbrot set. Even incompleteness was "there from the beginning," from this perspective.

If mathematical findings were "there from the begining" who exactly is the authority that is being "authoritarian" here?

Second, the whole idea of "authoritarianism" as an evil is based on the idea that the authority is illegitimate or wielded improperly. If some random stranger wandered into your house and began eating your food and availing themselves of your valuables, and you said: "stop that, get out of my house," you could hardly be accused of acting in an authoritarian fashion. Indeed, the objection by the stranger that your statement was warding off possible objection by laying claim to the house would be farcical, insane.

And yet your statement is no doubt there to ward off all objection. It is your house. You decide who gets to eat all the food and carry off the TV. This has been commonly accepted at least since Homer giddily celebrated Odysseus murdering all of his "guests" (who to be fair, were definitely asking for it).

So in a systematic philosophy, who exactly is the authority? Is it Aristotle for philosophers partial to him? It would appear not, because the most famous users of Aristotle all change significant elements of his thought. Plotinus adapts it considerably. Aquinas changes much. Arendt is not just explicating him.

In Aquinas this is particularly clear because the format he uses asks a question and then provides objections pro and contra from various authorities. But Aquinas frequently sides with none of the authorities he cites, or reinterprets them. Now if Scholasticism is authoritarian, in virtue of what does Thomas countermand all the recognized authorities?

Well, from the replies, it would seem that this is normally done on the basis of logical argument, appeals to experience, etc. That is, these would be the relevant authority. But then the question is, do these lack proper authority in philosophical debate? Is it authoritarian to insist on them as arbiters? And if it is authoritarian, what is the proper authority, or is there none? If it is none, or none in particular, and there is no arbiter, how is this not "anything goes," with the issue decided by power?

Now, presumably the non-authoritarian pluralist, when faced with any objection, does not automatically grant it the status of an equally valid position besides all others. If they did, then "anything goes," since all positions must be accepted. So in virtue of what are some objections denied instead of accepted as equally valid alternatives? To avoid full Protagorean relativism you still need some standard (authority) by which some objections and theories are excluded.

Indeed, to simply say of any objection: "ah, I see your point. So you have discovered an equally valid explanation contrary to my own!" is to refuse to take objections seriously, to immunize yourself from all critiques, and to absolutize the authority of currently held positions.

Further, systematic philosophers often do allow for different explanations, valid in their own context. The medieval problem of universals was allowed to be an open problem for 1,000 years. Yet to simply deny that disparate, contradictory claims need to be harmonized is to make them immune from challenge on the grounds that they are demonstrably untrue from even "valid" prospectives.

The pluralist either recognizes some authority or else "anything goes," which in turn makes all their own positions immune to contradiction.

Where did logic come from? Natural selection.

Yes, but this presupposes something prior that determined human logic.



So does:

Logic comes from predictability. What works consistently over what doesn't that generally offers tangible benefit, usually life saving circumstance.

I get what you're saying, but I don't not think meant to conflate human logic, e.g. predicate logic, the writing of the Prior and Posterior Analytics, etc., with the "logic" that is intrinsic to being. As I took it, he is saying the former (human formal systems and patterns of speech/thought) depend on something that is prior to them. Indeed, human logic has to depend on something prior to it in some way, else it would be uncaused and would have to spring out of the aether as is. So I guess the question would rather be whether there is a similitude between the human forms and what lies prior to them, and I think the point is "there must be such a similitude in some sense for anything to be 'anything at all.'" Which is also to say that the human mind doesn't create the logical intelligibility of the world as a sort of sui generis feature of reality.

However, supposing an isomorphism (or some sort of morphism) between this prior logic and human logic doesn't require that the two are one and the same thing.

Doesn't Merleau-Ponty's point only hold in cases where one intentionally seeks to "get behind" judgement—to attempt to enter something like Hegel's analysis of sense certainty? In everyday experience, we walk through forests full of trees and squirrels, rooms with tables and chairs, etc., nor streams of unmediated sense data. When we see an angry dog, we do not have to abstract from sense data and think: "ah, that sense data incoming from over there can conform to a large, angry dog, I better run away."

Rather, this sort of understanding is automatic, and people can recognize objects about as quickly as they can provide any other sort of motor reaction to stimuli. It takes serious additional extra mental effort to enter the world of unmediated sense data where each moment of the same object can be judged distinct and not part of a preexisting whole (and this move is often unsuccessful), which arguably makes that more abstract. Animals seem to do the same thing. The sheep does not seem to require any process of induction to recognize the whole of the wolf from its "sense data," and to act.

I am not sure if the sort of assumptions underpinning empiricists like Locke might not be in play here. Or at least, there is a presupposition that elevated the many over the one.

That is, logic doesn't arise from being as such, but from how we encounter and articulate being. To cite another source that might resonate with the OP's concerns, Charles Pinter (Mind and the Cosmic Order) argues that logic is not something inherent in the world itself, but relies on the cognitive and conceptual framework through which we interpret experience. Even mathematical objects, Pinter says, are not discovered are constituted through acts of mental abstraction. They are real, but their reality is not the same as physical existence. Pinter suggests that logical laws emerge when we attempt to refer—that is, when we try to single something out and hold it steady in thought. But this act is interpretive - we impose identity, distinguish boundaries, and construct exclusions in order to make sense of the flux. Logic is thereby a function of cognition, not a pre-existent feature of a mind-independent reality.

Right, but if there is no logos, no determinant actuality prior to the senses or intellection, then why is experience and intellection one way and not any other? If the relationship between appearances and reality were arbitrary, then there is effectively only appearances (we have no grounds to posit reality, and it makes no difference to us). But if there is only appearances, appearances just are reality.

Hegel's style is only monolithic because it is presuppositionless and thus without the multiplicity introduced by bias :cool:

Although, more seriously, it is interesting that few thinkers are interpreted in more diverse ways. But if Hegel can produce Magee's hermetic sorcerer, Pinkard's Aristotleian "naturalist," Blunden's proto-Marx, Kojeve's liberal, Dorrien's theologian, Houlgate's ontologist, Pippen's logician, Harris' semi-mystic, or the proto-fascist Hegels of yesteryear, he can hardly be monolithic. Rather, all have issued from what he put forth in virtual form, and they shall all sublate one another on their return to Hegel as Geist. But they are each moments in the Absolute Hegel.

See if I have this right. I've said "it's not the case that anything goes". You understand this as implying that there must therefore be, amongst the Great List of statements, those that go and those that don't. And that further, if we know that there are some that go and some that don't, there must be a criteria for sorting the Great List in this way. And you chide me for not setting out that criteria

I didn't imply anything about a great list. I implied that some explanation of how "everything doesn't go," is needed for you to be offering more than: "absolute pluralism, except arbitrary limited by what we feel can be excluded by fiat."

The rest of the post doesn't include such a standard. The idea on disjuncts is interesting, although I wasn't thinking in terms of "lists." However, by itself, it seems to still allow for the inclusion of everything, except now only hypothetically. But accepting all possible contradictory claims as "true" (or acceptable, or whatever) only hypothetically is pretty much epistemic nihilism lite. Another way to put it: how does this not include "all possible disjuncts," which is still "anything goes?" It seems to me that some must be excluded by some principle.

This doesn't offer a principle for exclusion at all. Indeed, it simply tries to neutralize even the bare minimum effect of PNC as an exclusion principle. But if nothing is excluded, then "anything goes."

Plus, is this consistent with your stated positions, e.g. a strong claim the elective abortion in unproblematic, that Plato's forms are nonsense, that the "view from nowhere" is an inappropriate standard? It seems all this gets you is a list of hypothetical disjuncts where these positions you reject are both rejected (false) and not-rejected (presumably hypothetically true).

And this, looking around, seems to be what we do have. Discrete areas of expertise, either unrelated to each other, or addressing the same things in different ways.

You should read: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/995248

The second alternative above, namely, that I claim knowledge about things in a delimited area, but make no judgment one way or the other regarding anything outside the limits, is at least apparently less presumptuous than the first, ironically because it does indeed admit that some of its knowledge is true.

The difficulty is in fact twofold. On the one hand, as we observed at the outset of this chapter, one can set limits in the proper place only if one is already beyond those limits, which means that to the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself [or language], the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know. On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous.

It does not in the least do to insist, “But I am limiting my claims only to this particular aspect!” because this begs the very question being raised here...

For example, one might isolate economics from politics as a closed system in itself, which is evidently misleading insofar as the “agents” of economic transactions are living members of communities whose choices inevitably reflect in a significant way the nature and structure of those communities. Perhaps less obviously, but with analogous implications, one might also separate politics from philosophical anthropology, anthropology from metaphysics, or metaphysics from theology. The problem will be there whenever one isolates a part from the whole in a way that excludes the relevance of the meaning of the whole to the meaning of the part, which is to say that one fails to approach the part as a part, i.e., as related to what is greater than it, and so one (presumptuously) makes it an absolute in itself.

Wouldn't that form be a sort of "debunking argument?"

It does, however, directly entail that your belief in the state of affairs is false.

A debunking argument will claim to show that the cause of your belief that p is not caused by p (or something that entails p). It is stronger if it also shows you now lack good warrant to believe p, but it can also just show that the relationship isn't direct. In this case, the warrant is undermined, not the conclusion.

There are problems with that sort of argument though. When they proceed from underdetermination, they seem to show that virtually all beliefs are unwarranted, which is obviously far too strong. Using underdetermination, we can cast doubt on the idea that the sun will rise tomorrow, or that mating cats to cats produces cats and not frogs, or that the universe wasn't created seconds ago, etc., but this seems a tad much. The trick is really finding out what goes wrong in the extreme cases (or for some philosophers, it's rebuilding all of philosophy on radical skepticism due to underdetermination...)

But it's also obvious that they are sometimes appropriate.

A key difference here would be belief in the eternal existence of matter (Aristotle), or the pre-existence of matter (some heterodox theologians), whereas Aquinas holds to the orthodox positions of creation ex nihilo. But he thinks this is something that comes to us from revelation, and that Aristotle merely fails to prove the eternity of the world.

However, I think it's a bit stronger than that when you take Aquinas' corpus as a whole, because the preexistence of anything but God makes no sense. Essence, what something is, exists in God in the way a sculpture exists in the mind of the sculptor, as creative potential (generally ascribed to the Logos, Christ, in the Patristics). But everything exists in God, "in whom we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). And so there is a clear distinction between essence, what, and existence, that, both of which must be posterior to God.

When God creates the intelligences (which being intelligences, are immaterial) he is bringing them into being with a certain whatness, through the granting of existence to form (not through generation, the informing of matter, but rather through creation from nothing) but these are not pure being (essence ≠ existence), and so they are subject to change. Indeed, since God can change all finite creatures, this clearly must be so, since only infinite, subsistent being is changeless, since all else is subject to the divine will. The contrary would imply that God needs matter to create.

I have a good quote on this pointing out the radical dependence of creation. This existential shift is very consequential, so even though Aquinas keeps a lot of Aristotle, this has very large ramification. But Aristotle had also been interpreted as a Platonist/Neo-Platonist for centuries (and not without reason), so the difference isn't as large as it might seem, at least on some readings of Aristotle. Still, I think it's fairly different. Matter plays a different role given this separation of form and actuality/existence.

Creare [creation] can never be used to indicate the generation of things from or by what is itself a contingent [temporal] 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.


Christian Moevs - The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy - pg. 119-120

Or from the introduction:

these principles are that (1) the world of space and time does not itself exist in space and time: it exists in Intellect (the Empyrean, pure conscious being); (2) matter, in medieval hylomorphism, is not something “material”: it is a principle of unintelligibility, of alienation from conscious being; (3) all finite form, that is, all creation, is a self-qualification of Intellect or Being, and only exists insofar as it participates in it; (4) Creator and creation are not two, since the latter has no existence independent of the former; but of course creator and creation are not the same; and (5) God, as the ultimate subject of all experience, cannot be an object of experience: to know God is to know oneself as God, or (if the expression seems troubling) as one “with” God or “in” God.

Let me spell out these principles at greater length. In medieval hylomorphism (the matter-form analysis of reality), pure Intellect (consciousness or awareness) is pure actuality, or form, or Being, or God: it is the self-subsistent principle that spawns or “contains” all finite being and experience. Intellect Being is what is, unqualified, self-subsistent, attributeless, dimensionless. It has no extension in space or time; rather, it projects space-time “within” itself, as, analogously, a dreaming intelligence projects a dream-world, or a mind gives being to a thought. The analogy holds in at least three respects: (1) like dreams or thoughts, created things are radically contingent, and dependent at every instant of their existence on what gives them being; (2)as there is nothing thoughts are “made of,” so there is nothing the world is “made of”: being is not a “something” to make things out of; and (3) dreams and thoughts have no existence apart from the intelligence in which they arise, but one cannot point to that intelligence because it is not a thing. In the same way, one cannot point to the Empyrean, the tenth heaven that the Comedy presents as the infinite intelligence/reality “within” which all things exist; remove it and the universe would instantly vanish. Note that the analogy in no way implies that the world is “unreal” or a “dream” (except in contrast to its ontological ground); rather, it expresses the radical non-self-subsistence of finite reality. This understanding of the radical contingency of “created” things is the wellspring of medieval Christian thought, without which the rest of medieval thought makes little sense.

D.C. Schindler might be my favorite philosopher currently putting out regular material (and he puts out a lot). I will say though that he has a tendency to sometimes be a bit too polemical on some issues, which I'm afraid might turn some people off. He also tends to be fairly technical, although I've only found his first book on Von Balthasar to be really slow going.

What's interesting here is that he makes a similar critique of liberalism vis-á-vis political theory. In claiming skepticism about a host of issues (including everything related to any real human telos), liberal theory ends up taking up an absolutized stance on these issues that is far from neutral, and involves many impositions. Yet it doesn't make these impositions based on positive claims that can be challenged through public debate, but rather bases these impositions on an appeal to ignorance, which essentially makes the position unchallengeable (or at least, defendable using an arbitrarily heavy burden of proof to shut down opposition).

Since one can always find at least some reasons to question and deny almost any position, particularly in something as high level as politics, the skeptic can always defend their skepticism by appeals to ignorance and humility. And they can just set the bar for evidence warranting any positive counter position incredibly high, since on their view, they don't have to prove anything because they are only claiming ignorance and a position that follows from it (whether liberalism even follows from such skepticism is another matter; arguably, "might makes right," follows instead).

Of course, this skeptical justification doesn't mean that liberalism recommends a state that doesn't impose much on the individual, families, churches, corporations, etc. Quite the opposite; the state becomes omnipresent. In the progressive liberal vision, there state is ubiquitous, and in many formulations of conservative liberalism, the state is still ubiquitous in order to ensure that the market can be even more all-encompassing. And obviously, liberals generally also want education, civic culture, etc. based around their ideology.

I guess part of the problem is that proper humility still involves a mean. There can be modesty that isn't prudent. Pusillanimity is a vice, as is senselessness. We would hardly applaud a doctor who didn't treat a patients' cancer out undue skepticism about the diagnosis. That there is an ideal level of skepticism that is prudent, and that it is often a vice when considering the practical sciences, where the needs of action are always immediate and bad actors on the move, is partly what is at issue.

Have you stopped beating your wife?

Banno, is asking you, "how does your system not lead to 'anything goes?'" really a leading question ? You cannot offer any answer to this? How is it even leading?

I made "I have all and only the truth" a claim of hubris. This is not the same as "

Well, you see my confusion, you didn't write: "I have all and only the truth," but rather "I have truth."

Hubris, to presume on has access to the one true narrative. That, and a certain deafness. One might cultivate a sustained discipline of remaining open to what calls for thought. One might work with others on developing a coherent narrative while not expecting to finish the job. Something to sit between "I have the truth" and "Anything goes".

I was reading this charitably as suggesting a standard other then truth because otherwise, as it seems you did intend it, it's a sort of hyperbolic strawman dichotomy. I mean, what is the point of setting up a dichotomy between declaring oneself omniscient and infallible and epistemic nihilism? Who exactly do you intend to critique here? It's like saying: "well, it's silly to love Hitler, good governance is somewhere between Hitlerism and complete anarchy." Ok. Not many people are claiming otherwise.


But if "not anything goes," then how is one not making a claim to a "true narrative?" Apparently certain narratives can be definitively excluded. In virtue of what are they excluded and why isn't this exclusion hubris?

Second, either all true narratives avoid contradiction or they don't. If they don't contradict each other, then they are, in a sense, one. If they do contradict one another, you need some sort of criteria for when contradiction is allowed (which all serious dialtheists try to provide) because otherwise, if contradiction can occur anywhere, then "everything goes" (and doesn't go).

You might be interested in Robert Sokolowski's framing of how predication emerges from the phenomenology of human experience. It doesn't really go against anything you've said, since everything we know suggests the dependence of experience on what is prior to it, but it does show how predication is grounded in experience itself.

[Husserl] tries to show how the formal, logical structures of thinking arise from perception; the subtitle of Experience and Judgment is Investigations in a Genealogy of Logic. The “genealogy” of logic is to be located not in something we are born with but in the way experience becomes transformed. Husserl describes the origin of syntactic form as follows.

When we perceive an object, we run through a manifold of aspects and profiles: we see the thing first from this side and then from that; we concentrate on the color; we pay attention to the hardness or softness; we turn the thing around and see other sides and aspects, and so on. In this manifold of appearances, however, we continuously experience all the aspects and profiles, all the views, as being “of” one and the same object. The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.” The identity of the thing is implicitly presented in and through the manifold. We do not focus on this identity; rather, we focus on some aspects or profiles, but all of them are experienced, not as isolated flashes or pressures, but as belonging to a single entity. As Husserl puts it, “An identification is performed, but no identity is meant.” The identity itself never shows up as one of these aspects or profiles; its way of being present is more implicit, but it does truly present itself. We do not have just color patches succeeding one another, but the blue and the gray of the object as we perceive it continuously. In fact, if we run into dissonances in the course of our experience – I saw the thing as green, and now the same area is showing up as blue – we recognize them as dissonant precisely because we assume that all the appearances belong to one and the same thing and that it cannot show up in such divergent ways if it is to remain identifiable as itself. [It's worth noting the experiments on animals show they are sensitive to these same sorts of dissonances].

[Such experience is pre-syntactical, nevertheless] such continuous perception can, however, become a platform for the constitution of syntax and logic. What happens, according to Husserl, is that the continuous perception can come to an arrest as one particular feature of the thing attracts our attention and holds it. We focus, say, on the color of the thing. When we do this, the identity of the object, as well as the totality of the other aspects and profiles, still remain in the background. At this point of arrest, we have not yet moved into categoriality and logic, but we are on the verge of doing so; we are balanced between perception and thinking. This is a philosophically interesting state. We feel the form about to come into play, but it is not there yet. Thinking is about to be born, and an assertion is about to be made…

We, therefore, in our experience and thoughtful activity, have moved from a perception to an articulated opinion or position; we have reached something that enters into logic and the space of reasons. We achieve a proposition or a meaning, something that can be communicated and shared as the very same with other people (in contrast with a perception, which cannot be conveyed to others). We achieve something that can be confirmed, disconfirmed, adjusted, brought to greater distinctness, shown to be vague and contradictory, and the like. All the issues that logic deals with now come into play. According to Husserl, therefore, the proposition or the state of affairs, as a categorial object, does not come about when we impose an a priori form on experience; rather, it emerges from and within experience as a formal structure of parts and wholes...

This is how Husserl describes the genealogy of logic and logical form. He shows how logical and syntactic structures arise when things are presented to us. We are relatively passive when we perceive – but even in perception there is an active dimension, since we have to be alert, direct our attention this way and that, and perceive carefully. Just “being awake (Wachsein)” is a cognitive accomplishment of the ego. We are much more active, however, and active in a new way, when we rise to the level of categoriality, where we articulate a subject and predicate and state them publicly in a sentence. We are more engaged. We constitute something more energetically, and we take a position in the human conversation, a position for which we are responsible. At this point, a higher-level objectivity is established, which can remain an “abiding possession (ein bleibender Besitz).” It can be detached from this situation and made present again in others. It becomes something like a piece of property or real estate, which can be transferred from one owner to another. Correlatively, I become more actualized in my cognitive life and hence more real. I become something like a property owner (I was not elevated to that status by mere perception); I now have my own opinions and have been able to document the way things are, and these opinions can be communicated to others. This higher status is reached through “the active position-takings of the ego [die aktiven Stellungnahmen des Ich] in the act of predicative judgment.”

Logical form or syntactic structure does not have to issue from inborn powers in our brains, nor does it have to come from a priori structures of the mind. It arises through an enhancement of perception, a lifting of perception into thought, by a new way of making things present to us. Of course, neurological structures are necessary as a condition for this to happen, but these neural structures do not simply provide a template that we impose on the thing we are experiencing...

-Robert Sokolowski - The Phenomenology of the Human Person

There was a thread on this a while back you might find interesting: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14593/what-is-logic/p1

Stage 3: Even pure being implies logic Even if we take the concept of pure being, logic still arises. We are gesturing to a concept, being, and automatically differentiating it from its negation; the idea of nothingness. As we did earlier with the chair, we are taking a concept (pure being), differentiating it from something else (nothingness)< and from here emerges the fundamental laws of logic. If being is A, then we now know that A=A, A != not A, etc.

Or, as Hegel has it, it also "implies" much else, since sheer, indeterminant being ends up being indistinguishable from nothingness and collapses into its opposite. Houlgate's commentary is excellent here. For Hegel, this necessitates the sublation of nothing by being, leading to becoming, whereby being is constantly passing into nothingness.

You can describe this in information theoretic terms too (as Floridi has done). An infinite stream of just 1s, or the same 1 measured again and again, ad infinitum, is incapable of conveying information. Indeed, it can only "be a 1" as compared against some background that serves as a 0. Spencer Brown's Law's of Form are another way to get at this. Likewise, you can imagine a soundwave of infinite amplitude and frequency (the sheer fullness of being). All the waves will cancel out, due to the infinite frequency and amplitude, with each peak being offset by an identical trough, and the result will be silence (albeit a pregnant silence, the silence of the Pleroma if you will).

Stage 4: Being itself generates logic The conclusion: Logic isn't a set of rules we invented to think clearly. It's not even something minds discover about reality. Logic is the automatic byproduct of existence itself. The moment anything exists - anything that has potential for differentiation - logical structure emerges naturally. Where there's being, there's logic.

I think this is another thing that can be formulated quite well in information theory, although I have a suspicions that all these different ways of looking at it are isomorphic in a way.



Right, Stage 1 reminded me of the opening of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where sheer sense certainty collapses into contentless sheer abstraction. Of course here, it is experience that is most abstract (for Hegel at least). As Hegel quipped, "gossip is abstract, my philosophy is not." That the particular individual (or particular individual interval of experience) is less abstract (more real) is itself a sort of presupposition (one C.S. Peirce goes as far as to label satanic, lol).

And note that Hegel is not idiosyncratic here, but is following the classical tradition he drew so much from. This ordering would hold true for Plato, Neo-Platonism, Augustine, Aquinas, high scholasticism, much Islamic thought, and arguably Aristotle. It's worth considering here then that the inversion of this tendency in modern thought (the preferencing of immediate experience and the particular) was first only countenanced on epistemic grounds. That is, it applied to the order of knowing. But this already applied to the order of knowing in the classical thought, according to the Aristotlian dictum that "what is known best to us" (concrete particulars) is not "what is known best in itself" (principles). Yet materialism turned this epistemic stance into a full blown metaphysical dogma. Robert M. Wallace is pretty good on this sort of thing (i.e. the greater reality of form), at least in Hegel and Plato.

Still, something must account for why experience is one way and not any other. And this suggests a prior, determinant actuality, which must include difference.

I'll also note that I disagree here:

Now, you probably recognise that when we talk about separate objects like "chairs" and "tables," the mind is arbitrarily cutting up reality into conceptual pieces - these aren't necessarily fundamental divisions within nature itself. BUT the key point is that there must still be genuine differences between one part of reality and another, rather than complete uniformity. Even if our specific conceptual boundaries are arbitrary, there's still real distinctness and differentiation in the fabric of reality itself.

Strictly speaking, an entirely arbitrary relationship between reality and appearances destroys the very notion of a reality/appearance dichotomy. If the relationship were such, then "reality" doesn't really have anything to do with appearances, since it "effects" it completely randomly (and so doesn't really effect it at all). We could never have access to "reality" if it was arbitrarily related to appearances. Yet, if all we have is appearances, and it is all we can ever have, by what grounds do we posit this separate, arbitrarily related "reality?"

However, if there is only appearances, then appearances just are reality.

That said, I don't think we have any good reason to think appearances are arbitrarily related to reality. That there is being prior to our experiences, and that it is determinant, is implied by the regularity of experience and the very possibility of intelligibility.

Still, there is a difficulty in calling "logic," as relates to human practices, by the same term as the "logic" of being. The two would seem to be related analogously. I am not sure what term to use here. I have considered "logos" for the "logic of being," with "logoi" for the discrete principles (in line with Patristic/Scholastic Greek usage). I actually think the Book of Causes (which no one reads anymore because it is an anonymous "rip-off" of Proclus' Elements) is a decent lens for explaining this. Maybe.

This conversation reminded me of a passage from D.C. Schindler's the Catholicity of Reason that focuses on the major presumptions made by those who, out of "epistemic modesty" set hard limits on reason.

First, he responds to the idea that we never grasp the truth, the absolutization of Socratic irony as the claim that "all we know is that we don't know anything (absolutely)."

[Here], the scope is universal: one expresses a general reluctance to claim truth, “absolute knowledge,” in any particular instance. But note: this stance implies that the question of whether or not one’s ideas, in one case or another, are true in fact is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. The phrase “all intents and purposes” is particularly appropriate here because the stance willy-nilly absolutizes pragmatism.

But there is an outrageous presumption in this: if pursuing the question of truth requires one to venture, as it were, beyond one’s thinking to reality, dismissing this question means resolving not to venture beyond one’s own thinking as one’s own, which is to say that one keeps oneself away from the world and in one’s own head [or perhaps language game] — which is to say, further, that one absolutizes one’s own ego over and against God, reality, others, whatever it may be, all of which is equally irrelevant to that ego.

What reason does one have for dismissing the question of truth and suspending one’s judgment? While it could turn out in a particular case or another that suspending judgment is prudent, there can in fact be no reason at all for a universal suspension of judgment, insofar as accepting a reason as true requires suspending this suspension. It follows that this suspension is strictly groundless; it is a wholly arbitrary a priori, which claims preemptively that no statement will ever have a claim on one’s judgment without obliging oneself to listen to and consider any given statement. It may be that one opinion or another that one happens to hold is in fact true, but the suspension of judgment neutralizes its significance for me qua truth, again for no reason. I thus absolve myself of all responsibility: if I make no claim on truth, then truth never has a claim on me.

pg.24

The second idea he addresses is a sort of "bracketing" out of "epistemic humility."

The second alternative above, namely, that I claim knowledge about things in a delimited area, but make no judgment one way or the other regarding anything outside the limits, is at least apparently less presumptuous than the first, ironically because it does indeed admit that some of its knowledge is true.

The difficulty is in fact twofold. On the one hand, as we observed at the outset of this chapter, one can set limits in the proper place only if one is already beyond those limits, which means that to the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself [or language], the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know. On the other hand, and perhaps more profoundly, to allow oneself judgment on one side of a boundary and at the same time to suspend judgment on the other side is to claim — again, in an a priori way, which is to say without any sufficient reason — that what lies on the other side does not in any significant sense bear on my understanding of the matter or matters lying on this side. But of course to make this claim without investigation and justification is presumptuous.

It does not in the least do to insist, “But I am limiting my claims only to this particular aspect!” because this begs the very question being raised here...

For example, one might isolate economics from politics as a closed system in itself, which is evidently misleading insofar as the “agents” of economic transactions are living members of communities whose choices inevitably reflect in a significant way the nature and structure of those communities. Perhaps less obviously, but with analogous implications, one might also separate politics from philosophical anthropology, anthropology from metaphysics, or metaphysics from theology. The problem will be there whenever one isolates a part from the whole in a way that excludes the relevance of the meaning of the whole to the meaning of the part, which is to say that one fails to approach the part as a part, i.e., as related to what is greater than it, and so one (presumptuously) makes it an absolute in itself.

To avoid this presumption, one might first seek to attenuate one’s insistence on knowledge within the delimited sphere in light of one’s ignorance of the larger whole, which would seem to acknowledge at least in principle the significance of that whole. But in fact this is a retreat into what we showed above to be the greatest possible presumption, namely, the universal suspension of judgment. The only way to avoid the dilemma is in fact to achieve actual knowledge about the whole...

pg. 24-26

...ironically, the more one insists on modesty in science, the more “impenetrable” one makes it, i.e., the more one makes it an absolute in itself and so unable to be integrated into a larger whole. To set any absolute limit not only keeps reason from exceeding a boundary, it necessarily also keeps anything else from getting in.

pg. 28

This is, of course, not to suggest there is no benefit to setting things aside. And we can still respect Aristotle's advice that we should not expect explanations to be more precise than the subject matter warrants. But it does point out a way appeals to humility become totalizing.

Perhaps it also explains the tendency of theorists to want to go beyond claims of mere skepticism, and to instead claim that the whole of being or intelligibility must be contained within the limits of humility they have set.

I could give me my answers to the questions, I just don't think it would be particularly helpful. "Testability" of "falsification" are often offered as criteria for science. I do think this works. Theoretical work often predates the possibility of any sort of test or "verification" by decades. Mach famously decried the atom as unfalsifiable. A number of major physicists decried the quark on the same grounds. The quark and anti-particles were first developed as speculative theories and were not immediately testable. The theory had to come first though. Quantum foundations is often decried as unfalsifiable, but in fact some theories of objective collapse have been successfully tested (and seemingly falsified). This work has given us real insights. We wouldn't have Bell's work on locality without it for example.

And this sort of issue isn't limited to physics. You can see it in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate in biology just as well. Information theory, and the idea that "biological information" is "really reducible to mechanism," is a particularly apt case, because it becomes a very philosophical question, really one of metaphysics when one wants to challenge the idea that dyadic mechanism is the way causation must be described. Understanding dynamical systems and a lot of complexity studies in quite similar.

If science only becomes science when it is testable, then a great deal of what scientists do, especially theoretical work, is philosophy and not science. So, like I said, the line is not very clear by this criteria, or at least it fails to corresponds to common usages.

Ethics is not necessarily the study of ends, but the ends in relation with some intent because we see people that accidentally caused harm different than people that intentionally caused harm.

Right, because the former are seeking different ends from the latter.

What people do and what is best for them is different than what an individual does and what is best for the individual, which could conflict with what is best for the group.

Potentially. That's a question ethics and politics studies, the role of the "common good" being key here.



Good questions. The difficulty in answering these are precisely why I don't see a particularly strong line between the two.

My guess is that the number of assents which involve the will in such a way is very large. It doesn’t seem to be practicable to avoid all such assents, which is probably why people like ↪Russell and Banno so often overreach their own intellectualist criteria. Janus is someone who gives a very idiosyncratic approach to this problem by positing a set of non-rational assents which are justifiable to oneself but not to others. Williams James seems to go too far in collapsing truth into will altogether. Pascal’s Wager represents an especially potent leveraging of the problem. But even after dissecting all of the errors, it is very hard to deny that there must be some rational assents which are not derived entirely from the intellect.

The Medieval answer to this philosophical problem is found in both a robust understanding of the relation between the intellect and the will, and also in the doctrine of the convertibility of the good and the true.

This is a very interesting post. It reminds me of how Aristotle (or maybe it is Aquinas in the commentary), likens moral reason to advice given by a father or friends, rather than the strict informing of theoretical reason vis-á-vis demonstration.

One idea here in the medieval context is that, because we only ever encounter finite goods, the will is always underdetermined. Thus, there is always a "choice factor" in our pursuits (and from a theological point of view it is this separation that allows/is necessary for man to transcend his own finitude and so to become more "like God"—at least this is one answer for "why were Satan and Adam not created fixed on God?")

@J might find this interesting because, if I have understood him correctly, this relates to why he thinks all moral reasoning is always hypothetical? That is, we can tell what follows from moral premises, but never be led to any particular premise (even though the premises are indeed really true or false, and knowable as such, which is the part I don't get, since this would seem to imply non-hypothetical judgements are possible).

I think this goes too far. There are at least some things that can be known as good vis-á-vis human nature, particularly ceteris paribus, and if the good is more choice-worthy than the bad, then we have a clear intellectual line to the preferability of at least some habits, i.e., the virtues (intellectual and moral). But I'll certainly grant that this does not apply to every case, and is not without difficulties in particular applications. Nor do I think this suggests the absolute priority of the intellect in the pursuit of virtue, in that the appetite for knowledge, including knowledge about what is truly best, always plays a role.

I think such remarks are self refuting and mischaracterise both mathematics and philosophy by falsely implying that they are separate language games. Indeed, formalism fails to explain the evolution of mathematlcs and logic. There's nothing therapeutic about mischaracterising mathematics as being a closed system of meaning.

Right, reason becomes trapped in the disparate fly-bottles of sui generis language games. Man is separated from being, either by the mind, or later by language. He is like the separated lover who can never reach his other half in the Symposium. Language, the sign vehicle, ideas, etc. become impermeable barriers that preclude the possibility of union, rather than the very means of union.

D.C. Schindler has a book on the "catholicty of reason," the way it always relates to the whole and always is already beyond itself that I quite like. It's very continental though, which is not everyone's cup of tea.

From the text:

One of the first and most decisive forms of this self-restriction of reason is no doubt Kant’s determination to set limits to reason “in order to make room for faith." Such a determination seems eminently reasonable: the remedy for presumption is modesty, and modesty would seem to be best ensured by restricting reason’s scope, which would cause it to respect what lies beyond it as genuinely “beyond.” But our argument is that setting limits to reason in this way in fact makes modesty impossible, and that the only way to avoid a closed system is vigilantly to insist on “totality.” The problem with Hegel, for example, who is typically presented as the very peak of Western rational presumption, is not that he claimed too much for reason, but too little: his system closed in on itself the moment he allowed reason to lose sight of the whole.

You know, the old Hegelian dictum that: "to have recognized a limit is to have already stepped beyond it."

How about what makes science a good way to know things is that it is the only method that has provided answers and philosophy has provided none. Name one answer philosophy has provided that did not involve some semblance of the scientific method - observing and rationalizing one's observations

But you made a distinction between philosophy and science. As commonly conceived, philosophy deals in observations all the time. This is true of phenomenology, ethics, metaphysics, etc. Is the claim that whenever these involve observation they are actually "science" and not "philosophy?"

I would just say that this would make most (perhaps all) philosophy into "science," or at least "scientific" (in virtue of involving observation). Indeed, it's a popular axiom in philosophy that "there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses [i.e. "observed"]. And this other sort of "philosophy" that doesn't involve observations would either be very small or non-existent.

Are we talking about them from the "internal" position of distinguishing right and wrong and beauty and plainness, or "externally" with ethics and aesthetics simply being one of the many means humans use complex social behaviors to improve their social fitness?

I'm not really sure why these should be different. Ethics is the study of ends. Politics, as a sort of archetectonic study of ends in the broadest sphere possible, is both a study of what people do and what they would benefit from doing, and this is recognized in the contemporary social sciences.

Right, there are all sorts of modifications possible in quotation, ampilation, appellation, etc. But these are hardly counterexamples. Descriptive sentences, claims, signify "what is." But truth vis-á-vis sentences just is the property of signifying "what is" If descriptive sentences, claims, facts, etc. did not signify "what is" it's hard to see how they even have content. We are, after all, predicating something of something, which is to say that something is, which is also to say that it is true that something is.

Would we ever claim: "x is y, but it is not true that x is y?" (And please, no examples using quotation, this obviously applies to actual claims only). If not, then there is a convertability and it is related to the possibility of signification and content. Appellation, etc. are certainly important, as is the question of assertoric force, but those are unrelated as far as I can see. The convertability deals with cases where there is assertoric force, and surely, there is at least sometimes assertoric force, and this is crucial for signification.

The strong counterexample would be that there is never assertoric force, or that saying "x is y," doesn't entail that it is true that "x is y," i.e. that x can actually be y, but this isn't true of x. Or, that saying something about what is is not basic.