I think not, but it's far from clear. The traditional distinction is that we're supposed to understand things in the human sciences and explain things in the physical sciences. Where does this kind of experience fall? — J

I have nothing further to add in response to the rest of your post, but I'm wondering when you say that we understand things in the human sciences you mean that we understand human behavior in terms of reasons not causes. If so I agree. But can this also apply to experiences?

Reasons for behavior seem to be understood to be intentional and it's not clear to me that we could understand someone having a mystical experience in terms of them intending to do so unless we think in terms of practices designed to elicit such experiences such as taking certain drugs or practicing meditation.

What the implications and explanations are of the fact that taking drugs and other practices may elicit mystical or religious kinds of experiences is not clear, and I wonder whether it ever can be made definitively clear.

~~

I'm wondering when you say that we understand things in the human sciences you mean that we understand human behaviour in terms of reasons not causes. — Janus

If I may, there's good arguments that reasons just are causes, from both Davidson and Anscombe, of all people. This might give pause to reconsider what sort of thing a "cause" is. It's a fraught topic.

I am not going to disagree, except to say that we have what seem to be coherent conceptual distinctions between reasons and causes, distinctions which nonetheless may not be based on anything other than our naive intuitions, and which indeed may come apart at the seams under the pressure of analysis.

Yep. Just noting that this is a bid area. We say things like "She picked the Pumpkin because she wanted to make soup"and talk of beliefs causing revolutions.

:up:

Yes, a long literature on this one. I myself think it's important to keep reasons distinct from causes. If reasons "just are" causes, we'd need to revise a lot of our way of talking about them. Perhaps we should -- but the other issue that seems important here is the vexed notion of freedom. If I'm caused to do something, I wasn't free to do otherwise. Is this how it is with thoughts, beliefs, even perceptions? Again, this could be true, but now we'd need a big conceptual revision about ourselves.

I'm wondering when you say that we understand things in the human sciences you mean that we understand human behavior in terms of reasons not causes. If so I agree. But can this also apply to experiences? — Janus

Exactly. I think so, but I'm not sure. Let's go back to the dream, rather than a mystical experience. When I interpret my dream, have I explained it or have I understood it? This is fuzzy, of course, but wouldn't we want to say that the interpretation can take place with or without an explanation? Put it in terms of the question, "Why did you dream X?" If I answer this by giving my interpretation, that doesn't quite suffice. The "why" question seems to require a bigger background story, something more theoretical about how dreams occur in the first place, and why I might have dreamed X at the particular moment in my life that I did. Certainly this isn't separate from interpretation, but I do think it's different.

This is all to show that the original question of what it is to mean something is a very difficult one, especially when extended beyond sayings and into experiences.

I understand that it was Cavendish, not Lavoisier, who first identified water as a compound (through experiments around 1781), though Lavoisier's chemical revolution helped fix the conceptual framework. — Banno

Yes, I stand corrected.

It occurred to me on looking again that there are two readings of what you wrote - the de re and the de dicto. The sentence ‘Water is H₂O’ was not something people could assert or know before Cavendish; the term "water" did not yet rigidly refer to H₂O. So if you were saying that the word "water" could not be used to refer to H₂O before Cavendish announced his work, I agree. — Banno

Yes! Bingo! de dicto is what I mean --

However, if the assertion is that prior to Cavendish's announcement, the chemical structure of water was not H₂O, it is I think in error. — Banno

There's a sense in which we can entertain the idea that matter itself changed, but I think it's an erroneous inference -- even if it were true there'd be no way for us to make that inference because we don't live in that time. We live in now. And what seems most consistent is that nature hasn't changed all that very much from then to now, in the sense that there are fewer hoops to jump through mentally to make an inference.

Note, though, that none of this is scientific. It'd be impossible to determine, scientifically, if the meaning of "water" in Aristotle's time excluded H2O as a possibility, which is where I think the sympathetic readings of Aristotle get headway: broadly accepting an Aristotelian framework while changing the details to match what we know now in a scientific spirit.

For myself I'd say that Aristotle is not a scientist in the modern sense -- this isn't to speak against his work as a scholar, only to note that first guesses will often be inadequate, even if they hold a certain spell to them. What's atractive in Aristotle is how it all seems to fit together into a harmonious whole -- but this is a siren's song more than a mark of wisdom, if you ask me.

It's entrancing, but doesn't really look like the world I see now. And I'm not sure how the methods of metaphysics in Aristotle are somehow better than latter methods of metaphysics -- it seems to me that this is very much in the realm of philosophy and philosophy alone, where the science is a grab-bag for examples of reflection, but not philosophy itself.

This to go back to my point with @Richard B -- that philosophy is not using science to give itself credibility, and it has no need to do so.

There's all sorts of complexities here. The foremost is that Kripke's "Water=H₂O" is intended only for extensional contexts. While Aristotle presumably believed fish live water, he doubtless did not believe that they live in H₂O.

We should head back to the topic at hand, which is "what is real". The idea seems to be that there is an essence, a "what makes a thing what it is", and that this is of use in deciding what is real and what isn't. Along with this goes the view that there really is a difference between what is real and what is not real, such that for any x, the question "is x real" has a firm "yes" or no"no" answer.

I think that view is mistaken, for reasons I gave earlier. And I think that view is quite common amongst philosophers - at least those who are alive. — Banno

We're in agreement here, for the most part and for what's worthwhile in the thread as points of contention.

there's a grab-bag of entities which don't have as firm an answer as we'd like -- dreams, halucinations, mistaken worldviews, historical counter-factuals, hypothetical examples...

We could certainly stipulate answers, though I tend to think "X is real" sounds like "X exists", and I'm still fairly well persuaded by Kant on that -- that there is no difference between the imagined unicorn and the real unicorn in terms of its predicates. The old "existence is not a predicate" thing, which isn't strictly true but it gets at something important about making inferences about existence -- in a lot of ways we treat reality like it's given. If whatever we conceptually designate as "the given" matches our conceptions of "the given" then we are inclined to say such and such exists.

Or to go along with Quine -- to be is to be the value of a variable. So it's not a predicate, but a quantifier over predicates. (EDIT: Or individuals? "Over" loosely meant)

Both seem to handle inferences about existence better than positing an essence, to my mind. Which part of water are we to call its essential part, after all? As you note, in Aristotle, the essential part was not that it is H2O. So why the switch? What makes this description a better example of essence, or is it at all?

But here are those amongst us who, bathing in the light of Plato and Aristotle, seek to reinvigorate metaphysics by bringing back the "what makes a thing what it is" version of essence. And that's pretty much were the argument here stands. — Banno

Funnily enough I kind of welcome the resurgence, as long as we take the historical approach. They really do have valuable things to offer a thinking mind, and points of comparison between ancient and modern science are deeply illuminating on the practice of producing knowledge.

It's their difference that I value, above all. I don't care of its true! :D

I'll leave this now, although I might come back to it and talk about water again.

Cheers.

Cheers!

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O).
2. Water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry.
3. "Water" nor "H2O" "pick out" what water or H2O is. — Leontiskos

Er, but how are you disagreeing?

Again:

(2) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1a). And (3) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1b).
— Leontiskos

So:

P1. (2) does not contradict (1)
P2. (2) contradicts (1a)
P3. (3) does not contradict (1)
P4. (3) contradicts (1b)

If you disagree, then assign truth values to P1-P4. Be clear about what you are saying. If you say you disagree then apparently at least one of the truth values must be false. — Leontiskos

P1 is False. 2 counters the claim that water was always H2O -- in Aristotle's time, water was not H2O. Aristotle in particular stood against Democritus, so we even have reason to believe Aristotle would oppose the belief that water is always H2O. That's an atomistic belief.

De dicto, note. Not De re.

The idea that "some people are not perfected" by one's own presumably correct doctrine makes me smile, but I suppose it expresses the attitude you'd have to take if you saw philosophy as an attempt to make a single correct view triumph, and the failure to do so is down to the other guy, not the issue itself.

It's just an admittedly old-fashioned way of putting it. People have a potential for knowledge/understanding/good behavior, etc. The goal of education, law, etc. is to actualize this potential more fully ("bringing it to perfection.") One needn't think one's law is perfect or infallible to think that people are improved by doing the minimum to follow it (e.g. littering), and so to for philosophy.

But when it comes to philosophical views? I would have said that one of the key differences between thinking philosophically and our ordinary ways of thinking about the world is the recognition that we don't propose ignorance or bad faith as a plausible explanation for someone's disagreeing with us. And I have to admit how difficult it is for me even to imagine carrying on as you suggest.

How are you defining philosophy here? If philosophy encompasses the sciences, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and our most bedrock metaphysical assumptions—if it is the broadest study of human knowledge—I hardly see how it's the sort of thing than can be rendered a manner of taste without trivializing essentially everything

Note though that it would be a sort of strawman to tie an acknowledgment of first principles to a "one true description of being," or a "one true methodology." There might be many methodologies, useful for different things. A broad "realism" is not committed to, and in general does not proclaim, "a one true description of being or ethics." Rather, it claims that there are descriptions that are more or less correct and that all correct descriptions share morphisms and do not contradict one another. That's all that's needed.

I share your concerns, but like I said, I think there is a good philosophical argument for the idea that relativism will actually tend to make philosophy into more of a power struggle/matter of politics. I think one can even observe this happening in some cases. Scientific debate can always get heated, but things get particularly fraught when the unitary truth is abandoned in exchange for "different approaches" that are allowed to contradict one another. This is where you get "Aryan versus Jewish physics," "capitalist versus Marxist genetics," and claims to a sui generis but equally valid "feminist epistemology." How can one bridge the gap in the "culture wars" if different identity groups have different epistemologies?

Whereas I don't share the concern over being "rational" as a sort of limitation or source of unfreedom. This seems to me to only be a problem under more deflated notions of reason as something more akin to a mere calculator.

What would you think of the method that says, "Hmm, tell me more. Help me understand why you say this. Here's how I see it. Let's see what we can learn"?

Is this not open to people who deny a sort of pluralism or relativism? I don't think so. Again, when I think of which areas of philosophy seem most siloed, it seems that the exact opposite might be the case. The committed Nietzschean is, in my experience at least, the person least interested in understanding other ethical theories, instead waving them away with (normally unflattering) arguments from psychoanalysis. But this isn't incidental, it flows from their relativism.

When parts of philosophy become matters of taste or art, one is then able to dismiss broad areas on merely aesthetic grounds, to simply not take them seriously. Whereas more evangelical philosophies, while they might tend to be more dogmatic, also seem to have much more of an incentive to understand other positions, both out of fear that their own position might be wrong, or to convince others. One cannot fear error if it is not possible to be wrong.

Posts like this ↪Leontiskos are a part of the reason that J and I moved our conversation to the PMs. J. would have understood that. Butt out. nothing to do with you. — Banno

Not sure how I am to "butt out" of a PM I am not a part of.

Note that I have known @J longer than anyone here. I was the one who him to the forum. I was having private dialogues with J before you had even been acquainted. When you were being invited to engage J’s threads and , I was actually reading the sources J presented and engaging them—something you have been .

What I concluded is that the reason @J has such a penchant for playing devil’s advocate is because his ultimate concern is to oppose strong knowledge claims. Thus if someone makes a strong knowledge claim, J will oppose it even if he agrees with it. This reflects a problematic telos for philosophical inquiry, and I have been pointing that out.

Now, at last, J is beginning to consciously probe his own premises in that area. He is beginning to identify the moral fear that underlies his reservations about strong knowledge claims. I think that’s great, which is why I encouraged him by telling him that he is asking and that I am his recognition of the moral motivation. Only once that moral motivation is discerned does it become susceptible to critique, and I think J would become a better philosopher if he moved beyond that strong fear of knowledge claims. I worry that he seeks the truth until he finds it, and then abandons it because he thinks knowledge claims are "morally questionable."

P1 is False. 2 counters the claim that water was always H2O -- in Aristotle's time, water was not H2O. Aristotle in particular stood against Democritus, so we even have reason to believe Aristotle would oppose the belief that water is always H2O. — Moliere

Okay thanks Moliere. Let's think through this:

You made three basic claims, and the second and third were meant to contest essentialism:

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O).
2. Water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry.
3. "Water" nor "H2O" "pick out" what water or H2O is.

Now let’s look at three equivocal senses of essentialism:

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O).
1a. The essentialist would say that the term “water” signified H2O before 19th century chemistry.
1b. The essentialist would say that the description “water” “picks out” what water is.

Now you began the discussion with (1), which was a great start. (1) is certainly true. But then you immediately began to equivocate between (1), (1a), and (1b). (2) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1a)... — Leontiskos

P1. (2) does not contradict (1)
P2. (2) contradicts (1a) — Leontiskos

You say, "In Aristotle's time, water was not H2O." You say, "We even have reason to believe Aristotle would oppose the belief that water is always H2O."

It still looks like you're fixated on 1a rather than 1. You are focused on what someone before 19th century chemistry (Aristotle) would say the term "water" signifies. Note that whether water was H2O before 19th century chemistry has nothing to do with what Aristotle or anyone else thought. Only the question of signification has to do with what people like Aristotle thought, i.e. only the question that pertains to 1a.

So if we follow your reasoning and say, "Aristotle did not think water signified H2O (or was H2O), therefore in Aristotle's time water was not H2O," then the claim contradicts 1a, not 1. I can explain further if you require it.

From earlier:

My guess is that you think water was not known to be H2O before the 19th century, which is a very different claim. You have switched to talking about signification, which is tangential to the crux of essentialism. — Leontiskos

I'm using Aristotle because he's an essentialist, and his notion of essence seems to be the sort of thing essentialist have in mind -- so rather than setting up a character, The Essentialist, I'm using an essentialist to help clarify just what essentialism is.

If what Aristotle believed doesn't pertain to essentialism, then what's the difference between yourself and Aristotle's "essence"?

So is this your argument?

<A 4th century B.C. essentialist did not believe that water was H2O, therefore water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry>

I don't see how Aristotle's essentialism makes it true that <If Aristotle did not believe water was H2O, then water was not H2O>. Again, the antecedent disproves 1a, not 1.

No, not in the least.

I don't believe in essences, so I have to pick up someone else's beliefs in essences just to make sense of the notion. If his essentialism isn't the one being advocated for then by all means the example is off topic.

But then are we talking in terms of Kripke's essentialism? In which case what I've said ought to make sense -- if water is H2O then water is necessarily H2O a posteriori. I can go that far.

But that a posteriori bit is important, after all. It means that we discovered a necessary relationship between terms after the fact -- so before the fact (or perhaps later when we use a new way of talking about matter the necessity de-emphasizes) there was nothing to say there was an essence in the first place.

In a rather direct sense this relates to the external thread I mentioned <here>, "The Philosophical Virtue of Certitude Shifting." *

@J's concerns materialize when there is no certitude shifting and all certitude is maximal/certain. @Count Timothy von Icarus's concerns materialize when relativism precludes all certitude along with any possibility of certitude shifting (precisely because where there is no certitude there are no certitude differentials).

This is central to Aristotle's whole understanding of argument, explicated in PA. It is the idea that a true argument moves from what is more certain (premises) to what is less certain (conclusion). What this means is that for Aristotle @J's fear is impossible, because to hold a conclusion with the same certitude that one holds the premises is irrational.


* That thread was more appropriate to that forum than to this one. This forum struggles more with skepticism than certainty.

there's a grab-bag of entities which don't have as firm an answer as we'd like -- dreams, halucinations, mistaken worldviews, historical counter-factuals, hypothetical examples...

Right, or, to continue with the broadly Aristotlian view, we also have stuff like "humanity considered absolutely," "the notion of humanity in my mind," and "humanity as instantiated in Socrates." And we have stuff like "animal" and "animality." One might see animals everywhere, but one never sees just "an animal," but always "an animal of a particular species." And even if one accepts that species and genus are real distinctions, they are certainly not "real" in the way a horse or man is. You can touch and interact with both the horse or man, or point to them. But where in nature can one interact with a 'genus?' The universe is full of quantities, but one never stumbles across "just one" or "just two." This last part seems particularly relevant to the extent that chemistry and physics (and so H2O) are mathematized relationships.

The medievals turned this into a whole series of distinctions. There is ens reale, real existence, and ens rationis, things existing only in the mind. Then we also first intentions (our concepts about things like trees and dogs) and second intentions (our concepts about concepts, such as genus and species).

This becomes relevant when we want to speak of essences. A horse has an essence. What about a centaur though? Is it also an essence, because it seems it could possibly exist, or does it lack an essence because it is really just the mind concatenating two real essences? We might make a distinction here that the centaur represents a known essence, but not an actual essence (because it has no real act of existence). But this isn't quite the "real / unreal" distinction. I think the "real / unreal" distinction might actually reveal itself to be better thought of as many different sorts of distinction.

Water, having a real essence, doesn't change its essence when people learn about it. It has its own unique act of existence (actuality) that is prior to (and informs) cognition.

Hegel has the idea of essences unfolding in time. This is in earlier thinkers like Saint Maximus the Confessor and Eriugena too, although in a different way, since the particulars are just the realization of the universal (its becoming what it is as respects immanence), while things always already what they are in the fullness of the Logos. But then, some readers of Hegel take a similar approach to identify at "the end of history," (Wallace) and it's not clear that water would be the type of thing that is changing in Hegel.

My take, argued below from a past post, would be that it is in the relationship of being known by a rational agent that things most fully "are what they are." Hence, the evolution of human knowledge represents a sort of unfolding of essences in history. However, this unfolding is not arbitrary, although it is subject to contingencies (e.g., it did not need to be Cavendish who discovered that water is H2O for instance). This unfolding occurs according to prior actualities, and the prior actuality by which water is water (which determines its relationship with material knowers) is its form, which is unchanging.

One of the claims that is often made by the representationalist position that Sokolowski critiques is that many of the properties of objects that we are aware of do not exist "in-themselves," and are thus less than fully real. For example: "nothing looks blue 'of-itself, things only look blue to a subject who sees." If the property of "being blue," or of "being recognizably a door" does not exist mind-independently, they argue, such properties must in some way be "constructed by the mind," and thus are less real.

What I'd like to point out is that this sort of relationality seems to be true for all properties. For example, we would tend to say that "being water soluble" is a property of table salt. However, table salt only ever dissolves in water when it is placed in water (in the same way that lemon peels only "taste bitter" when in someone's mouth). The property has to be described as a relation, a two-placed predicate, something like - dissolves(water, salt).

I think there is a good argument to be made that all properties are relational in this way, at least all the properties that we can ever know about. For how could we ever learn about a property that doesn't involve interaction?

So, "appearing blue" is a certain sort of relationship that involves an object, a person, and the environment. However, this in no way makes it a sort of "less real" relation. Salt's dissolving in water involves the same sort of relationality. The environment is always involved too. If it is cold enough, salt will not dissolve in water because water forms its own crystal at cold enough temperatures. Likewise, no physical process results in anything "looking blue" in a dark room, or in a room filled with an anesthetic that would render any observer unconscious.

Intelligibilities (form abstracted from the senses) require syntax to acquire (ratio). They result from bringing many relations together in such a way that they can be "present" at once and understood (intellectus). The grasping of a thing's intelligibility by a rational knower is a very special sort of relationship. This isn't just because it involves phenomenal awareness. "Looking blue" or "tasting bitter" is a relationship between some object and an observer, but these do not "actualize" an intelligibility. What the grasp of an intelligibility by the intellect does is it allows many of an object's relational properties to be present together, often in ways that are not possible otherwise (e.g. something cannot burn and not burn, dissolve and not be dissolved, be wet and not wet, etc. at the same time, but we can know how a thing responds to fire, acid, water, etc.)

For example, salt can dissolve in water. It can also do many other things as it interacts with other chemicals/environments. However, it cannot do all of these at once. Only within the lens of the rational agent are all these properties brought together. E.g., water can boil and it can freeze, but it can't do both simultaneously. Yet in the mind of the chemist, water's properties in myriad contexts can be brought together.

In a certain way then, things are most what they are when their intelligibility is grasped by a rational agent. For, over any given interval, a thing will only tend to manifest a small number of its properties — properties which make the thing "what it is." E.g., a given salt crystal over a given interval only interacts with one environment; all of its relational properties are not actualized. Yet in the mind of the rational agent who knows a thing well, a vast number of relational properties are brought together. If a thing "is what it does," then it is in the knowing mind that "what it does" is most fully actualized. And this is accomplished through syntax, which allows disparate relations to be combined, divided, and concatenated across time and space.

So, rather than the relationship between knower and known being a sort of "less real" relationship, I would argue it is the most real relationship because it is a relationship where all of a things disparate properties given different environments can be brough together. And this is a relationship that is realized in history.

I am reminded here that in Genesis God first speaks being into existence, but then presents being to Man to know and name himself. There is the being of things within infinite being, and then their unfolding in immanence, the two approaching each other (e.g. in the, admittedly suspect, idea of the "Omega Point").

Just to tie up this loose end . . .

This wasn't meant as a refutation of relativism, it's just pointing out that it doesn't make people play nice or avoid disagreement. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK, I see that. I guess I wasn't imagining relativism as trying to avoid disagreements. And I'm sure you're right that a "crude relativist" could leave a discussion worse off than they found it, by accusing people who aren't relativists of being wrong. I hope we agree that this doesn't characterize a position that anyone could take seriously.

I hardly see how it [philosophy] is the sort of thing than can be rendered a manner of taste without trivializing essentially everything — Count Timothy von Icarus

I may never understand your rhetorical habit of contrasting Position A with a Position B that no one has ever espoused! :smile: In this case . . . do you honestly think that the single alternative to foundational philosophy is to make philosophy a "manner/matter of taste"? Do you find any philosophers saying this? When thinkers like Habermas and Gadamer and RJ Bernstein devote their careers to trying to articulate a way of thinking about these issues that does them justice, do you really believe their arguments come down to "it's all a matter of taste"? I call this a rhetorical habit of yours because I don't think, at bottom, you actually believe it. You're too intelligent and sensible. Why the rhetoric, then?

And I'm sure you're right that a "crude relativist" could leave a discussion worse off than they found it, by accusing people who aren't relativists of being wrong. I hope we agree that this doesn't characterize a position that anyone could take seriously.

Lots of people take that sort of view seriously. I see it all the time. We were just in a thread were total anti-realism and relativism re values was being argued, and where "good argument" was framed entirely in terms of persuasion, not truth (i.e. a "good argument" is one that gets people to agree with you—gets you what you want—i.e. a power relation). Virtually every ethics thread on this site had at least one user popping in to add that value is subjective and "objective value" a sort of delusion. You yourself seem to think the septic, if not the relativist, has extremely strong arguments here. It's also the view I was brought up with. Relativism is very popular. It's certainly less popular re theoretical reason, but it is hardly a fringe position there either.

Let me ask, did A.C. Grayling make the "cognitive relativism" thesis discussed here up? Is he objecting to a view no one has advocated for? I posted the thread here because his description of cognitive relativism reminded me of a thesis I had seen presented here before.

Sam Harris likewise opens up the Moral Landscape by running through a number of troubling encounters he had with extreme relativists at academic conferences, and quoting a number of similar positions. If relativism is a hallucination, it's apparently a group one.

I may never understand your rhetorical habit of contrasting Position A with a Position B that no one has ever espoused!

Fictionalism, etc. are popular opinions. Open up a mainstream introductory text on metaphysics, something like the Routledge Contemporary Introduction, and you will find it introduced there as a major position.

No one has ever espoused these positions? I have personally espoused them :rofl:! That was the default I was brought up with. And I have had plenty of conversations on this site with people exposing extreme forms of nominalism. We get someone (normally a new user) popping in to assert epistemic nihilism every few weeks. I assume they rarely stick around because epistemic nihilism makes philosophy fairly boring.

Go check out the sort of questions that get asked to credentialed philosophers on AskPhilosophy. Some people are genuinely confused about how anyone could not be a relativist.

So, I may have misunderstood what you were getting at, but I hardly think I have hallucinated the existence of relativist positions.

But in terms of your particular framing, you said the problem was:

In short, if you start from premises you believe you can show to be foundational, does that commit you to also saying that everything that follows is rationally obligatory?

To which I said:

What would the opposite of this be? You start with premises that are foundational and then refuse to affirm what follows from them?

So:
P
P→Q

But then we affirm:
~Q, or refuse to affirm Q.

Yes, this is what most people would call "irrational." No?

To which you replied:

That's why indisputably foundational premises might be abandoned in favor of something closer to epistemic stance voluntarism. This may not be a worry for you, but many philosophers, myself included, are concerned about the consequences of rational obligation which do seem to follow, as you correctly show, from allegedly indisputable premises. The idea that there is only one right way to see the world, and only one view to take about disagreements, seems counter to how philosophy actually proceeds, in practice, and also morally questionable.

But what you're saying isn't a problem just for "foundational premises," it literally is a problem for affirming any proposition at all. To say:

P
P → Q

Is to say that you believe that the person affirming ~Q is mistaken (or that some further distinction is needed, etc.). Assuming the principle of non-contradiction, it is to say that there is a right way to describe the world and that the right way includes P and Q, not ~P and ~Q. An appeal to "voluntarism" as resolving the issue of disagreement just seems to me like relativism. How is it not?

If you don't want P to imply that the person affirming ~P is mistaken, you need all judgements to be hypothetical. Perhaps that is your solution? I recall you saying that we can reason about values, but only ever generate a "hypothetical ought." All I can say is that this would seem to imply a far-reaching skepticism. Doesn't this imply that we could never say "P is wrong," but only "if you adopted these premises, with these inference rules, P would be wrong?"

And again, I am not sure how holding to premises non-hypothetically necessarily precludes considering that it might be we ourselves who are in error, or attempting to resolve seeming contradictions through distinctions.

Maybe I should have expanded what I meant by “crude relativism.” It would be something like this:

“Everything is relative. There’s no true or false. There’s no right and wrong.”
“But I don’t agree with that.”
“Then you’re wrong!”

This is what I meant by a position no one could take seriously.

Reading over your responses here, though, I realize that I have a rhetorical habit of saying “anyone” or “no one” when what I really mean is “ . . . within the universe of competent philosophers.” You remind me that there are people willing to accept most any position, if it has some emotional appeal. I rarely encounter them, because I live my intellectual life largely in the company of the philosophers I’m reading (and TPF, of course). But you’re undoubtedly right – what I call “crude relativism” may present no problems whatsoever for some people. So I should amend what I just wrote, above, to read, “ . . . a position no one familiar with philosophical inquiry could take seriously.”

But what you're saying isn't a problem just for "foundational premises," it literally is a problem for affirming any proposition at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

By foundational premises, I meant to include not just the logical forms, but the bedrock propositions to which the reasoning applies. Foundational philosophy doesn't merely specify modus ponens, for instance, but also declares content for P and Q that is claimed as foundational. Or, if "content" is suspect, it stipulates the connection between logical form and the world.

* That thread was more appropriate to that forum than to this one. This forum struggles more with skepticism than certainty. — Leontiskos

On the contrary, I'd say the forum is not skeptical enough. ;)

If reasons "just are" causes, we'd need to revise a lot of our way of talking about them. — J

I don't agree, but saying why would be extending the topic...

Do we want to do that, or start another PM conversation including @Janus, or a new thread, or leave it?

I'll leave it unless something else happens.

There's a sense in which we can entertain the idea that matter itself changed, but I think it's an erroneous inference — Moliere

:up:

Note, though, that none of this is scientific. — Moliere

:up:

For myself I'd say that Aristotle is not a scientist in the modern sense — Moliere

:up:

And I'm not sure how the methods of metaphysics in Aristotle are somehow better than latter methods of metaphysics — Moliere

:up:

...that philosophy is not using science to give itself credibility, and it has no need to do so. — Moliere

Yep. Philosophy is not science without the maths.

Both seem to handle inferences about existence better than positing an essence — Moliere

Yep. And there is the additional problem of their never quite explaining what an essence is, at least not in a way that is anywhere near as clear as "A property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists".

Funnily enough I kind of welcome the resurgence, as long as we take the historical approach. — Moliere

I also welcome exegesis, but when Aristotelian ideas are toted as better than more recent stuff, together with an apparent misunderstanding of that more recent stuff, then it's worthy of comment.

"A property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists". — Banno

Nice. That's a very clear rendition.

It's the standard rendering from modal logic, after Kripke. To be compared to

...it is in the relationship of being known by a rational agent that things most fully "are what they are." — Count Timothy von Icarus

...which for my money says very little.

I liked it in sentence form :D

I think that I can make sense of the notion @Count Timothy von Icarus says -- I'm still chewing on it.


My immediate guess is it sounds like hylomorphism, which seems relevant to "Water is H2O" to me -- but I've encountered resistance here now: there's an updated essentialism that isn't Aristotle, but Aristotle-inspired.

I'm interested, though I suspect I know which way my thoughts will go.

In a certain way then, things are most what they are when their intelligibility is grasped by a rational agent. For, over any given interval, a thing will only tend to manifest a small number of its properties — properties which make the thing "what it is." E.g., a given salt crystal over a given interval only interacts with one environment; all of its relational properties are not actualized. Yet in the mind of the rational agent who knows a thing well, a vast number of relational properties are brought together. If a thing "is what it does," then it is in the knowing mind that "what it does" is most fully actualized. And this is accomplished through syntax, which allows disparate relations to be combined, divided, and concatenated across time and space.

.....

I am reminded here that in Genesis God first speaks being into existence, but then presents being to Man to know and name himself. There is the being of things within infinite being, and then their unfolding in immanence, the two approaching each other (e.g. in the, admittedly suspect, idea of the "Omega Point"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does "are-ness" or "being" admit of degrees?

I'm close to agreeing with you where you say

So, rather than the relationship between knower and known being a sort of "less real" relationship, I would argue it is the most real relationship because it is a relationship where all of a things disparate properties given different environments can be brough together. And this is a relationship that is realized in history.

I don't think that the relationship is "less real" -- hence the grab-bag of ambiguous examples -- I just don't believe there are degrees of reality.

Though it being realized in history is something I'm sympathetic to, at least from a materialist perspective.

There's a renewed interest in odd versions of essentialism, which I've tried to discuss here - see Essence and Modality: Kit Fine

My cynical self says that, having been unable to provide a suitable account of essences in ontological terms using modal language, Fine moved essentialists over to epistemology and now seek to give an account of essences as how we know (understand, conceive, etc.) that something is what it is. It pictures essence as a lost soul looking for a home; or as a misguided picture of how things are, looking for a way to fit in. — Banno

The motivation seems to be at least in part a desire to make use of essences in ontological arguments for god.

That sentence isn't meant to be a definition of essential properties. It's a response to representationalism.



We had a thread on a while back. I think my answer might be a very qualified "yes," as presented through the notions of virtual quantity in Aquinas and similar notions in Platonism and Hegel. Perhaps "more intelligible in itself" would be better.

That sentence isn't meant to be a definition of essential properties. It's a response to representationalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. Good.

So, what is an essence, if not a property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists?

I think I've asked you that before.

Does "are-ness" or "being" admit of degrees? — Moliere

If an answer is given, be on the look out for a crossing of the floor here, from ontology to morality. "are-ness" and "being" (?) are ontological terms. Degree usually involves some form of evaluation. Now we probably can't say outright that such a move is a mistake, but it will be worth keeping an eye on how the evaluation is done.

But what you're saying isn't a problem just for "foundational premises," it literally is a problem for affirming any proposition at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes! :up:

By foundational premises, I meant to include not just the logical forms, but the bedrock propositions to which the reasoning applies. Foundational philosophy doesn't merely specify modus ponens, for instance, but also declares content for P and Q that is claimed as foundational. Or, if "content" is suspect, it stipulates the connection between logical form and the world. — J

The point is that your objection will exist whether or not the topic is so-called "foundational philosophy." If X is true then people who hold X to be false will be wrong. And if modus ponens is true, then people who reject modus ponens will be wrong. There is nothing special here about a foundational claim (in fact it's just the opposite, but I will keep it simple).

So if we don't want anyone to be wrong then we have to do much more than avoid so-called "foundational philosophy." We have to avoid all claims of truth and validity. Indeed, we must avoid all normative claims whatsoever.