I think the issues you raise here regarding assemblages—defined loosely as groupings or networks of interconnected elements—should be tied into one of the pioneers of "systems" type theories—Alfred North Whitehead. In the quote below, there are three views going on here (two that agree about metaphysics of process—Whitehead and his defender, the quote's author Shaviro—and Harmon, an essentialist).

Whitehead - Reality is process, but there are endurances of patterns, meaning recurring structures or configurations that maintain coherence over time and can often be seen as persistent objects. Whitehead preserves these endurances by viewing each moment of becoming as an "actual occasion," which integrates prior patterns into a unified experience. These occasions form a sequence, inheriting qualities from their predecessors, allowing stable patterns to persist even as the underlying processes continually shift.

Graham (contra Whitehead) - Reality is objectile, and each object possesses a "hidden essence" that cannot be fully accessed by other objects. For example, a stone might be perceived differently depending on its relation to a human observer, a riverbed, or geological forces, but its core essence—the quality that makes it a stone rather than something else—remains inaccessible and unaltered by these interactions.

Shaviro (agreeing with Whitehead, contra Graham) - Reality is process, and Whitehead accounted for persistence through the recognition of persistent patterns.

Here is the quote:

Harman rejects Whitehead’s relationalism for two reasons: 1) he worries it reduces ontology to “a house of mirrors” wherein, because a thing just is a unification of its prehensions of other things, there is never finally any there there beneath its internal reflections of others; and 2) he claims that an ontology based exclusively on internal relations, wherein entities are said to hold nothing in reserve beyond their present prehensional relation to the universe, cannot account for change or novelty. In such a universe, there would be “no external point of purchase from which structure could be transformed,” as Levi Bryant puts it (The Democracy of Objects, 209). As Shaviro is quick to point out, however, Whitehead was well aware of this potential objection (see page 35 of PR, for example), which is exactly why he amended his ontology sometime between his final editing of Science and the Modern World (1925) and Process and Reality (1929) so that becoming was understood to be atomic rather than continuous. A fair reading of Whitehead’s mature metaphysical scheme should acknowledge (despite a few inconsistent statements here and there) that his goal was to strike some balance between internal and external relations, precisely for the reasons put forward by Harman and Bryant.

In response to Harman’s first worry regarding an infinite regress of prehensions, I’d call his bluff and say that a truly aesthetic ontology (which he also claims to be seeking) would leave us with just such an infinite regress of appearances. A thing’s “style” or “allure” doesn’t need to be understood as emanating from some substantial core or fixed essence; we can also understand a thing’s “style” as Whitehead does in terms of the “enduring characteristic” realized by a historical route of actual occasions. There is nothing hidden from view by such outward qualities other than the occasion in question’s moment-to-moment subjective enjoyment of these characteristics. Which brings us to Harman’s second (I believe unfounded) worry about relational reductionism. Whitehead’s dipolar account of the process of experiential realization includes both a public moment of display and a private moment of withdrawal. Every drop of experience begins by taking up the “objectively immortal” data of its past. It then unifies this data into its own singular and private perspective on the world. It is this moment of privacy that most closely resembles Harman’s doctrine of withdrawal. The occasion in question is in this moment entirely independent of its relations. But as soon as this private, never before experienced perspective on reality is realized, it perishes into objective immortality, becoming publicly available for the next occasion of experience to inherit as it moves toward its own novel concrescent realization. “The many become one, and are increased by one.” Whitehead is able to make sense of change and novelty while at the same time preserving a non-reductive account of internal relations. It seems to me that Harman’s insistence on the irrelevance of evolutionary time for ontology is part of the reason he is unable to make sense of Whitehead’s attempted compromise (“The ontological structure of the world does not evolve…which is precisely what makes it an ontological structure” [GM, 24]). In effect, Whitehead’s entire process ontology can be understood as an imaginative generalization of evolutionary theory. — Shaviro

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model. — Srap Tasmaner

I think this is quite right, and I think it feeds into the points @Count Timothy von Icarus is making against @fdrake.
(And no, you can't model switching on a model - in the relevant sense.)

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva. — Srap Tasmaner

No, I don't think so. I was wondering when that would come up.

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack. — Srap Tasmaner

The problem occurs when one says, "Everything is a verb (and nouns are taken for granted)." Or for @fdrake, "Everything is a socially constructed norm (and norms of truth-telling understand that things go beyond socially constructed norms)." All Aristotle is doing is not taking the quiet part for granted.

The virtus dormitiva flies over the head of the modern, but let's apply the same thing to your duck example. Note again:

Why does it speak at one time and not at another? Because it has a power to speak English. — Leontiskos

[On Verbism,] If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns. — Leontiskos

If you don't admit that the duck and its quack are two different kinds of thing, then your "commonsensical" claim that everyone knows ducks quack and that ducks are not constantly quacking, is petitio principii.

Ducks have a power to quack. Sometimes they quack, sometimes they don't. The quack comes from them. It is their quack. The noun and the verb are not the same thing, but are related as substance-accident.

Now you can say, "Yeah, duh!" But if you don't accept that substances and accidents both exist, then you're begging the question. You can't begin, "Only behaviors exist; ducks are not behavior; therefore ducks do not properly exist," and then go on to say, "But the quacking still comes from the duck." You can't annihilate ducks with your left hand (which are beings-and-not-behavior) and then conjure them up again with your right hand.

There was a very stark example of this:

Like general principles "a being is what it does" — fdrake

This is a straight up contradiction. "A noun is a verb." "A being is a behavior." It isn't. These are word games. Or poetry in search of philosophical coherence.

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. — fdrake

"And our norms of truth-telling understand that." This is tantamount to Banno's refusal to go beyond <"Snow is white" is true iff snow is white>. It is similar to Michael's refusal to reckon with the limitations of nominalism. You can't just appeal to poetic metaphor and pretend that it's metaphor all the way down. Norms don't understand anything. That happens to be a problem.

You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge. — fdrake

No, we just want truth-telling, and we're pointing out that your theory doesn't get us there.

In which Ramanujan's statements prior to his collaboration with Hardy were correctly assertible but he did not assert them while following the norms of mathematical discourse at the time — fdrake

Which is proof that what is correctly assertible deviates from the norms, and this is what you keep denying. You have odd equivocations going on between 'truth', 'correctly assertible', and 'norms'.

His principles were useful but not correctly assertible, but people believed them nevertheless, and just didn't give a crap about the self contradiction because the overall endeavour seemed cromulent and useful. The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}. — fdrake

"Not giving a crap about self contradiction" doesn't seem like serious philosophy to me. I don't think you can stand on that and call it a day.

I was planning something like this, but Count already did it:

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall?

I would maintain it is not possible. Adolf Hitler will not become the first President of the USA at some point in the future due to any relative shifts in "frames in virtue of which things are true." I think I'm on fairly strong ground with this assertion.

However, if I am mistaken, and background frames can shift such that Adolf Hitler was the first president, then surely claims like "we need not worry to much about this shifting because it is occurring very slowly" are also liable to become false. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's a good entry point. If everything is mutable then what about the first President of the United States?

No one denies that norms condition the manner in which we tell truths. But that is not enough. Truth outruns and precedes the norms, and it is not enough to say, "Yeah, well the norms know that truth outruns them." The norms are not an omnipotent deity in which all of reality can be grounded. Studying norms is not first philosophy. First philosophy requires us to study the things that the norms norm. Norms can be right or wrong, and this itself proves that we need to talk about something other than norms. If we are honest, frame-talk can't replace truth-talk.

No, we just want truth-telling, and we're pointing out that your theory doesn't get us there. — Leontiskos

I am interested in what else you would want? What would you like out of a theory of truth telling?

"Not giving a crap about self contradiction" doesn't seem like serious philosophy to me. I don't think you can stand on that and call it a day. — Leontiskos

It is nevertheless what happened with Newton's method of fluxions. You can even read Berkley's and Marx's criticisms of it. It was well understood that his mathematical artifice was self contradictory, and no one cared because the ideas in it were essentially right nevertheless. People do this all the time!

When we get down to it, it seems like you want to say something like, "Yeah, my approach is contradictory. But it will work itself out in the end." Or perhaps you would just say, "But it's cromulent/pragmatic, and that's all that matters." Again: Bacon.

Well I can't control how you read it or must parse it in your terms. @Number2018 seems to have no problem with it in principle! But that's probably because we come at this from similar perspectives to begin with.

s the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory. — fdrake

This may be a quibble, but it seems me a difference between Gallagher’s approach (and other enactivists) and Deleuze’s is that Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality. The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages. Foucault comments:

The Logic of Sense can be read as the most alien book imaginable from The Phenomenology of Perception. In this latter text, the body-organism is linked to the world through a network of primal significations which arise from the perception of things, while, according to Deleuze, phantasms form the impenetrable and incorporeal surface of bodies; and from this process, simultaneously topological and cruel, something is shaped that falsely presents itself as a centered organism and distributes at its periphery the increasing remoteness of things.

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

As in: "really true," i.e. not something that merely appears to be true, is said to be true by others, or is believed to be true. Presumably, there is a difference, as you say: "The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that."

Our norms of truth telling also understand things like if people stopped using a currency, it would cease to have value. See what I mean?

I don't think so. Is the idea that if people's standards for determining what is true changed, what is true would also change. So, if 10,000 years from now our descendants have a very deficient understanding of history, and they think Adolf Hitler was the first President of the USA, and this belief is justified by their epistemic standards, by the "currency" they use, it would thereby really be true that Hitler was America's first president?

I can see how this would make all claims mutable, but I can hardly see how this would avoid more extreme forms of relativism. At any rate, I would argue that the norms of determining truth presumably become what they are because they help us discover what is really true (there can, of course, be other factors). The truth is not, in all cases, dependent on our norms however.

I didn't say the quoted text. Think this is a typo on your part.

No one denies that norms condition the manner in which we tell truths. But that is not enough. Truth outruns and precedes the norms, and it is not enough to say, "Yeah, well the norms know that truth outruns them." The norms are not an omnipotent deity in which all of reality can be grounded. Studying norms is not first philosophy. First philosophy requires us to study the things that the norms norm. Norms can be right or wrong, and this itself proves that we need to talk about something other than norms. If we are honest, frame-talk can't replace truth-talk.

Right, and this shows up most clearly in the realm of ethics. If there is no truth about what is "truly good" outside the realm of norms, then there are simply no grounds for criticizing other culture's norms (including their epistemic norms; relativizing practical reason inevitably relativizes theoretical reason).

The stories Sam Harris relates in The Moral Landscape are pretty good examples of the consequences of this sort of thinking. He discusses being a conferences full of doctors and public health officials who are unwilling to say that compulsory female genital mutilation can in any way be judged bad. He also discusses asking one doctor if it would be bad if a superstition led a culture to tear the eyes out of every third born child soon after birth. Her response was: "well, if its a cultural practice..."

Now, I get that many people might not want to go as far as "middle aged men should be able to buy young girls as wives and babies should be mutilated so long as it's a norm," but when you also accept that reason simply cannot adjudicate such claims all that is left is power struggles.

This was probably covered already, but what about forbearance? I am the drinking of the tea, but am I also the lack of caring about the weather? I mean, do we always have to describe behavior in positive terms? Or can I be the not-remembering of what day it is?

Gallagher’s model of body schema and body image is drawn from Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal intersubjectivity, whereas Deleuze is informed by Nietzsche’s critique of causality. — Joshs

What should matter is how a particular theory functions, rather than the historical associations that can be made with it.

The elements of an assemblage for Deleuze, the partial objects of desiring machines which are the basis of sense, are affective drives. By contrast, Gallagher and other enactivists partially separate the affective and the conceptual aspects of assemblages. — Joshs

Indeed, at a ‘molecular’ level, D&G’s philosophy of desire considers a field of heterogeneous drives, flows, and partial objects. Desire, in this sense, is a machine—an assemblage of disparate parts that functions coherently. However, from the outset, this libidinal regime is inseparable from the socius, meaning that libido directly invests the field of molar, socio-political production. As Deleuze and Guattari write, “Affects and drives form part of the infrastructure itself” (D&G, AO, p. 53). Therefore, the notion of desiring machine is later giving way to the concept of abstract machine, which designates a link between these two different levels.

Right, and this shows up most clearly in the realm of ethics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality.

Bringing this back around to the OP, we just take it as self evident that morality starts with treating a person as a subject. We do say there's a "stroke in room 9" but there's a danger in this, that a person is being treated as a piece of meat.

It's moral to remember of the people you consider, whether villains or victims, that it could be you. This is why starting the discussion with a focus on objects and whether they're stationary or just relatively stationary obscures the real issue. People have to be united subjects. The simple but mighty argument for this is: morality — frank

When you talk about treating a person as a subject, you bring into play notions of empathy, seeing things from the other’s perspective, allowing yourself to become involved in their situation. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target. Since the movement of their experience involves a vantage that is different from yours, you must be able to navigate not just the contextually changing vicissitudes of experience as you experience them, but be able to some extent to see these changes from another’s eyes. Moral concepts can help or hinder this project depending on how well they take into account the stance-dependency of experience, and the mobility of stances in response to changing circumstances. We may accept that persons are not stationary in their attitudes, opinions and responses to the world and to each other, because our attitudes are mutually affected by interaction with each other, but we may still feel it necessary to impose stationary moral principles on the dynamics of our involvement with each other.

I don't think so. Is the idea that if people's standards for determining what is true changed, what is true would also change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not quite. The idea is that people can tell whether something is dependent upon human opinion for its properties, or existence. And assessing what senses that dependence has. Assessing such dependence/independence is part of our epistemic apparatus, and is something which is correctly assertible sometimes and not others.

I understand the counterargument you and @Leontiskos are advancing against my position as follows:

Call correct assertibility of a sentence A C( A ) and truth of a sentence T.

1 ) There exists a system of norms N such that {following N in assessing if A is C( A ) forces C ( A )}.
2 ) N is conventional.
3 ) N can thus be changed to some M such that {following M in assessing if A is C( A ) forces { C( not-A ) or not C( A ) }.
4) Assume that T ( A )
5 ) Then it's possible that T( A ) and not C( A ).
6 ) Therefore C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ).

Things I agree with in this argument:
A) I agree with 1.
B) I agree with 3, up to restricting the scope of which changes are appropriate given that N has actually assessed A and found C( A ) - it could very well be that no moves are possible from the current state of N such that not-C( A ).
C) I agree with 5.
D) I sort of agree with 6. I agree C( A ) doesn't mean the same as T( A ), but I don't agree it follows from the rest of the argument.
E) I could agree with 2, depending on how convention is construed.

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )}, moreover the inference from 5) to 6) is something I reject, since two predicates sharing an extension doesn't meaning they're used the same way {Clarke Kent and Superman}.

I think there existing M and N such that C( A ) in M and not-C( A ) in N is working as intended. This isn't logical contradiction unless M=N. I also claim that it's a good description of how things work. I've given an example of that before with Ramanujan coming to adopt the system of norms of mathematics and thus being able to correctly assert his claims, even though he couldn't correctly assert them before.

Perhaps a better example is the discovery of atomic orbitals. In ye olde days atomic physicists believe all positive and negative charges obeyed the Coulomb force rule. They also knew that this entails that electrons were attracted to the nucleus of an atom. They also knew that electrons did not collapse into the nucleus of an atom. In this regard when they adopted the coulomb force theory, they were correctly asserting something - charges attract or repel in an inverse square law - but also correctly asserting something which contradicted it - some charges do not attract in an inverse square law. The difference is in context. You might be able to think of this as a quantifier restriction on the scope of the prior coulomb law, but I'm just going to say it's different contexts of use. Regardless, people behaved as if the coulomb law had unrestricted quantification over charges and restricted quantification over charges at the same time. And this was fine, science did not implode.

It's also a case where people knew the coulomb law was not true in some absolute sense, but could be asserted without problem {correctly!} in some contexts! I'd made prior comments about the difference between truth as a concept and assertibility as a concept is that asserting a statement is true means enacting a particularly precise and pernickity form of correct assertibility.

You might say that this doesn't clear anything up, as if it's a sub case of correct assertibility you can reiterate the above argument. And there I'd agree, you can. But I don't think this is a problem.

What would be a problem was if in the same context of use something was true and untrue, or correctly assertible and not correctly assertible. Then that context of use would be committed to a contradiction of some sort. Which can be... alright, pragmatically.

Why is it that people agree on so much? I think this comes down to how norms of judgement are generated. Peoples' eyes agree on object locations very durably, so location within a room works like that. Even if they might disagree on the true locations of objects when the rulers come out - like if my coaster is 30cm or 30.005cm from the nearest edge of my desk to me. If correct assertibility is an assay, truth is crucible.

When people share the same contexts, the overwhelming majority of conduct norms about such basic things are very fixed like that. That includes various inferences, like "if you put your hand in the fire, you'll burn it", "don't put your hand in the fire" comes along with that as the judgement that burning your hand in the fire for no reason is bad is very readily caused by the pain of it.

In the latter regard, there's a room for a moral realism in terms of correct assertibility, since the conventions are so durable and there's room to claim that "needless harm is bad" is true.

But I doubt you will find any of this particularly satisfying.

. As an ethical task, this is one of life’s biggest challenges, since a personality is not stationary but a moving target. — Joshs

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person.

As a person moves and changes, it's the same person. — frank

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves.

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva.

Yes, it generally not helpful to approach a philosophy through the lens of an explicit parody of it-which is what Moliere’s Invalid Imaginaire is doing here-nor to attempt to emulate that parody.

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack.

Right, people are unlikely to be satisfied by an empty parody of philosophy. But an explanation that explains that ducks quack in order to signal an interest in mates, to signal for dangerous predators, to signal that they have spotted food, to coordinate their flying behavior so as to take advantage of aerodynamic drafting and expend as little energy as possible while flying long distances (which they do to seek food and warmer weather more conducive to homeostasis), etc. seems pretty edifying to me.

Likewise, Socrates was willing to die, rather than to capitulate on his beliefs and flee or beg for mercy, because he thought that this was truly better.

Yet the explanations of this sort of goal-directedness is famously difficult if one begins with the assumption that everything is just a heap of inscrutable, atomic behaviors or "building blocks." And it's difficult to explain why different sorts of things seek the particular goods they do without any reference to what they are, particularly if your starting assumptions assume that "beings" can only be defined relatively arbitrarily, leaving no unified, goal-directed organic wholes to go about seeking the sorts of goals that those sorts of organic wholes are inclined to seek.

"Natures" are originally called in precisely to explain mobile, changing being, to explain why things change the way they do. With no natures, and no beings, it is incredibly common to oscillate between smallism (everything is just ensembles of composite building blocks of atoms of behavior, and all facts about large things are reducible to facts about smaller things) or bigism (there is just one thing). Either one tends to lead to claims like "there are no sheep, ducks, stars, etc. in the world, all this is an illusory projection of man's mind, there is just one thing/many fundamental bits."

Basically, show me how you get from a heap of behaviors with no essential unity to something like Achilles thinking through his choices and choosing glory and a short life over a long but inglorious life.

The idea that thing's "do what they do because of what they are" is quite popular in contemporary philosophy of physics. This tends to go along with pancomputationalism, and conceptions of causation as a sort of computation. This is more of an explanation then "for no reason at all." Yet, these philosophies often have problems with a slide into bigism or smallism. For instance, for Tegmark, each "universe" in the "multi-verse" is a discrete "mathematical object." This is a view that retrieves formal cause, but in a very deflated way. Still, it's more than nothing.

Of course, if one allows for some sort of emergence that goes beyond the data compression of weak emergence, then there doesn't seem to be much of a problem with positing natures. One of the advantages of process philosophy is that it is able to tackle emergence much better. However, the slide into "bigism" remains a problem for much process philosophy. The Scylla of Parmenides' silent monism and the Charybdis of Heraclitus inchoate slide into plurality remain book ends for a lot of metaphysical projects even today.

The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

Only if the difference between ChatGPT and self-reflective, thoughtful human speech or the difference between a rock (largely a heap of external causes) and a living organism, with its (relative) capacity for self-organization, self-determination, and self-government, is "thin." If biology is "just physics we have arbitrarily decided to separate from physics, and is, in the end, just the study of particular sorts of heaps of particles (which are heaps of behaviors)," then yes, the difference does seem very thin indeed. However, I think we are plenty justified in seeing a thick, substantial difference between a heap of ground meat in a butchers shop and a living, thinking human child-that the two are different sorts of things.

Joshua Hochschild has a good article on just this divide.

https://www.academia.edu/36162636/What_s_Wrong_with_Ockham_Reassessing_the_Role_of_Nominalism_in_the_Dissolution_of_the_West

He responds directly to Moliere's caricature.

What we have here, notably, is not an argument against the notion of formal causality, but a perspective which simply fails to appreciate the role that formal causality once served for those thinkers that took forms seriously. Forms had explanatory power in the older realist framework, not because general belief in that power was supposed to replace the empirical work of discovering and characterizing how they operated, but because confidence that there were such causal powers helped to account for the order of nature and the very possibility of successful scientific inquiry.

It is commonly said that modern science neglects formal causes but attends to efficient and material causes; but classically understood, efficient and material causes cannot function or even be conceived without formal causes, for it is form which informs matter, giving concrete objects their power to act on other objects. The loss of formal causality is thus in a sense the loss of efficient and material causality as well—an implication that is not quite fully realized until we see it brilliantly explored in the philosophy of David Hume.

Of course, the gravity of the loss of teleology is also evident in the realm of ethics. Ockham was no libertine or relativist, but he prepared the way for the intractable confusion of modern moral reflection. Morality is concerned with ends, and humans, having the natures they do, need to acquire certain further qualities or forms—virtues—which help them fulfill their essential natures and achieve their
ultimate end. Alasdair MacIntyre has most famously traced the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project to explain morality without teleology. Ockham’s denial of forms and formal causality is unquestionably part of the conceptual disaster that left Enlightenment thinkers with only misunderstood fragments of a once very different project of moral theorizing.

There is another, even more basic, implication of the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality. In the realist framework, the intrinsic connection between causes and effects was particularly important for explaining how the mind knows the world; concepts formed by the mind, insofar as they are causally connected to things which are the foundation of those concepts, necessarily retain some intrinsic connection to those things. While we can be mistaken in particular judgments, we can be assured of the basic soundness of the mind’s power, thanks to the intrinsic connection between concept and object. The kind of radical skepticism Descartes proposed, even if only methodologically, was simply never entertained through most of the middle ages.

More classical versions of skepticism, usually having to do with the fallibility of the senses, were commonplace, but the possibility of a complete incongruity between the mind and reality—such that even mathematical concepts could be the product of some deceptive manipulation and have no connection to the mathematical “realities” they seem to represent—this was not available in a realist
framework for which concepts are formally and so essentially related to their objects. Ockham’s nominalist innovations almost immediately raised the specter of such radical doubt; this was noticed not only by the first generation of Ockham’s critics, but even by Ockham himself, who proposed thought experiments about God manipulating our minds to make us think things that are not true. For Ockham, such thought experiments were possible not only because of God’s absolute transcendent power, but because the human mind retained for him no intrinsic connection to an intelligible order. Ockham was no skeptic, and he was no Descartes; indeed, he was rather confident in the reliability of human cognition. But the law of unintended consequences applies in the history of philosophy as elsewhere, and it was only a matter of time before some philosopher exploited, as fully as Descartes did, the new opportunity of skepticism made possible by the nominalist rejection of forms and formal causality.

Accordingly, Thomists and other critics of Ockham have tended to present traditional realism, with its forms or natures, as the solution to the modern problem of knowledge. It seems to me that it does not quite get to the heart of the matter. A genuine realist should see “forms” not merely as a solution to a distinctly modern problem of knowledge, but as part of an alternative conception of knowledge, a conception that is not so much desired and awaiting defense, as forgotten and so no longer desired. Characterized by forms, reality had an intrinsic intelligibility, not just in each of its parts but as a whole. With forms as causes, there are interconnections between different parts of an intelligible world, indeed there are overlapping matrices of intelligibility in the world, making possible an ascent from the more particular, posterior, and mundane to the more universal, primary, and noble. In short, the appeal to forms or natures does not just help account for the possibility of trustworthy access to facts, it makes possible a notion of wisdom, traditionally conceived as an ordering grasp of reality.

Preoccupied with overcoming Cartesian skepticism, it often seems as if philosophy’s highest aspiration is merely to secure some veridical cognitive events. Rarely sought is a more robust goal: an authoritative and life-altering wisdom. Notice: even if contemporary philosophers came to a consensus about how to overcome Cartesian doubt and secure certainty, it is not clear that this would do anything to repair the fragmentation and democratization of the disciplines, or to make it more plausible that there could be an ordered hierarchy of sciences, with a highest science, acknowledged as queen of the rest—whether we call it first philosophy, or metaphysics, or wisdom.

I suppose another difficulty has reared its head ITT. If modeling (with deflationary assumption or not) is something like "the one true methodology," then whatever cannot be modeled to our satisfaction must be jettisoned, or reduced to something that can be modeled.

Primary targets here have been truth, goodness, beauty, and consciousness, but even "life" comes in for this sort of treatment. For instance, "life" being defined somewhat ambiguously in biology has already been offered up as evidence that such a thing cannot exist. But it seems to me that the assumption supporting this needs to be something like: "either it can be modeled (generally mathematically/logically) or it cannot exist."

I suppose that a commitment to models need not go along with a commitment to empiricism, but they often go together. This occasionally leads to, IMHO, bizarre conclusions. For instance, behaviorist, and later eliminitivist discussions of language will often want to dispatch with any sort of "internal meaning" by which we "mean things by our words," or through other arts, gestures, etc. This is normally argued for on the grounds that such meaning is "unobservable." Yet this is a fairly strange conception of what counts a "observable," for I can think of few things more directly observable to me than that I mean something by my words. This is a bit like telling someone: "no, you are not really in pain because you have failed to shriek and grimace."

I'd argue here that the problem isn't actually that things like the quiddity, whatness, of things is unobservable. Quite the opposite, we observe such things everywhere. It is rather that such observations cannot be modeled.

People wouldn’t so much time trying to find themselves if they couldn’t lose themselves. — Joshs

Das Man blinds them. Wherever you go, there you are. :grin:

I am interested in what else you would want? What would you like out of a theory of truth telling? — fdrake

I think the problem is that there is no truth-telling occurring. You are allergic to the word:

It's a giant hall of mirrors. Every time someone is going to say "true", I'm going to replace it with a behavioural concept that's jury rigged to fit just how we use the word. And then I'm going to argue that the jury rigging is also in the territory. Irritatingly for everyone involved, self included, the jury rigging will actually tend to be there, and that can restart our conflict. — fdrake

Are you capable of using the word 'true'? Do you think it has meaning? Do you think it can be replaced with your frames and models and norms and "counts as" and "correctly assertible"?

Or as Srap said:

But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model. — Srap Tasmaner

To "switch on" a model or proffer a model is apparently to make a claim that a model is true or represents something true. You seem to want to substitute model-play and frame-play for truth talk, and then you want to pretend that your model-play and frame-play are not simply presupposing truth in the first place.

I'm not trying to commit myself to the claim that {T( A ) iff C( A )} — fdrake

I don't think you have any clear sense of how truth is supposed to relate to the things you are trying to substitute in its place:

The moral of the story, I think, is that counting as a duck is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a duck. Being a duck is also not a necessary or sufficient condition for counting as a duck. — fdrake

...I realise this could have been unclear earlier. Ordinarily the conditions under which someone correctly identifies X as a duck immediately count X as a duck too. I see that {and I think Sellars sees that} as a behavioural connection rather than a logical one. If something is identified as X, it counts as X. — fdrake

More:

I think there existing M and N such that C( A ) in M and not-C( A ) in N is working as intended. This isn't logical contradiction unless M=N. I also claim that it's a good description of how things work. I've given an example of that before with Ramanujan coming to adopt the system of norms of mathematics and thus being able to correctly assert his claims, even though he couldn't correctly assert them before. — fdrake

Do you even know what you mean by "correctly assertible?" You've already vacillated a few times on whether Ramanujan's early claims were correctly assertible, actually contradicting yourself . That doesn't surprise me.

Generally I would see something as "correctly assertible" in relation to some conventional norm. But this just begs the question of how the assertion relates to truth and how the norm relates to reality. We can rearrange norms, models, and frames until the cows come home, but the question remains: what do these norms, models, and frames have to do with reality? What do our statements in these languages have to do with truth?

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality.

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall? — Count Timothy von Icarus

And the pragmatist isn't shielded from truth. If he wants his combustion engine to run he will need combustible fuel. Gasoline is either combustible or it isn't, and we don't ask norms, frames, or models whether it is combustible. We ask reality. The only use of norms, frames, and models is in mediating reality. — Leontiskos

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all?

Take another look at this argument. Anything odd about it? Anything at all? — Srap Tasmaner

Not sure what you're getting at.

When one talks about a magnifying glass and looks at a magnifying glass while under the impression that the magnifying glass itself is the object of interest, they have misunderstood what a magnifying glass is, and how to use it. So too with norms, models, frames, etc.

• What do you see?
• A magnifying glass.
• No! What do you see!? The magnifying glass is there to help you see small things.

This sort of reification of norms is not innocuous:

The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. — fdrake

Or to put a finer point on it, say, "The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our norms of truth telling, and our norms of truth telling understand that." This gets us a step closer to fdrake's (quasi-redacted?) idea that "counting as" has no necessary or sufficient relation to "being", and vice-versa. Which is tantamount to despair of truth.

And I realize that these problems bother fdrake. Well they should. But he keeps trying to paper over the problems and pretend that all is well and good. ...And all the while his inner engineer seems to be jury rigging a Newtonian "self-contradiction isn't so bad" parachute. :brow: