wonderment — Wayfarer

Will bafflement suffice?

...wonderment... — Wayfarer

...which I much prefer to bafflement... :confused:

Yeah probably a better word. All I’m trying to avoid is the taken-for-grantedness that seems to inhere in ‘that’s just how we do it.’

Crossed two versions of that post... I'm baffled as to how.

Not a source of wonder?

I wondered how it happened - but was baffled.

I must have had two windows opened, unawares.

A few things strike us as necessarily true, like basic logic and math, but that isn’t the same as claiming there must be some particular thing that exists. When people ask whether anything exists necessarily, a lot hangs on whether “there could have been nothing at all” and if that makes sense. I for one would say “absolute nothing” is not a real option, because even trying to describe it uses ideas like “is,” “not,” and “could,” which already assume a background where talk and truth have a foothold. You could reasonably conclude that reality can’t be completely empty. But even if that’s right, it doesn’t automatically mean there’s one special thing that exists no matter what. It could simply be that there’s always something there, while what that “something” is can vary: in every possible version of reality there is at least one occupant, yet for any particular occupant you pick, there could have been a version where it never existed at all. In that sense, existence might be unavoidable even if every individual thing is still contingent.

@Banno @Joshs @Philosophim

There has been a lot of drift in the discussion since the opening replies to the OP, so I'm going to try to recapitulate my stance by gathering the loose threads and tying them back to the original question asked by the OP. Sorry for the length, but there's a lot to consolidate.

In my exchange with @Joshs I've been trying to clarify a persistent misunderstanding. I’m not treating norms, intelligibility, or truth-conditions as items in the domain, nor confusing formation rules with what those rules are about. The issue isn’t ontological inflation. The point is that modal semantics already presupposes truth-apt judgment; the distinction between being right and merely being coherent within a framework. My original objection to Meillassoux’s “absolute contingency” was that it relies on that distinction while denying that anything non-optional obtains at the level of reality itself.

So @Banno, I was not asking modal logic to generate metaphysical necessity, nor claiming it forces a necessary being. I was questioning whether modal frameworks can underwrite the metaphysical thesis that nothing whatsoever must be the case (per Meillasoux), given what they presuppose in order to function. That’s a methodological disagreement about what modal structure tracks, not a confusion about grammar or model theory.

I think part of the difficulty here is that we’ve been talking a lot about norms and practices, but not enough about the act of judgment itself. In inquiry, there’s a real difference between continuing to ask questions and reaching a point where no further relevant questions remain without undermining the reasons already in play. To judge that something is the case is not merely to conform to a practice or stabilize commitments; it’s to take responsibility for the claim that the relevant conditions have been met. That’s why judgment is truth-apt in a way that rule-following alone isn’t.

While judgment doesn’t require a metaphysical guarantor in the sense of an external foundation, it also isn’t neutral with respect to necessity. When we judge that something is the case, we commit ourselves to the claim that, given the relevant conditions, it cannot be otherwise without error. That is a minimal but genuine sense of necessity; one that arises from inquiry itself rather than being imposed from outside it. Practices can explain how we arrive at judgments; judgment explains why certain denials are no longer optional once understanding has been achieved.

If we take judgment seriously in this way, it doesn’t just commit us to particular necessities (“given these conditions, this must be so”), but raises a further question about the totality of conditions themselves. Inquiry doesn’t only ask whether this or that claim is adequately grounded, but whether reality as such is intelligible or merely a brute fact. If everything were conditioned without remainder, then the responsible affirmation of any claim as finally true would be undermined in principle, since further conditions could always be demanded. Yet inquiry does make such affirmations, not dogmatically, but as answers to questions that have been adequately satisfied.

That commitment points beyond any particular conditioned object or causal explanation to something unconditioned; not as an entity within the universe, nor as an empirical cause among others. This “beyond” is not introduced as a further hypothesis or item in the domain, but as what inquiry already relies on when it affirms that its judgments are answerable to how things are, rather than to nothing at all. To deny this would not simply revise our ontology, but would undercut the very distinction between getting things right and merely going on coherently. In that sense, the unconditioned is not merely thinkable or regulative, but real; not by possessing existence as a further attribute, but by not being the sort of thing whose existence could be contingent on conditions. Its reality is inseparable from its role as the ultimate term of judgment, rather than an object among objects. My suggestion is that inquiry can bottom out here without incoherence, without a priori posits, and even without appeal to a cosmic mind/subject.