Catness is that which is had by a cat, such that it is a cat and not some other thing.

Somewhat circular, no? — Banno

How so? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, if you can't see the circularity in setting out the essence of cats in terms of catness, and catness in terms of what it is to be a cat, and what it is to be a cat in terms of essence, there's not much more to say.

If we say a being a cat consists in having some set of properties... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not something I'd agree with. It presumes that there is a something it is to being a cat...

Simpler to just say that some individuals are cats. Telling, in it's way. You appear to think that the only alternative to essentialism is reductionism, so that's what you are addressing. But what is being mooted here is that we simply do not need access to an essence. Not even a reductionist one - if by that what you mean is "some set of properties."

A particular picture of how language works has you enthralled. In that picture there is a something that is the meaning of a word, and the aim is to set out what that something is.

But what if there is no such something? What if we just use words, and in using them get on with life?

Perhaps you cannot see how this would work. Hence your rejection of Quine and Wittgenstein and most anything more recent than the French Revolution.

But sure, we agree that there are cats and trees.

Well, if you can't see the circularity in setting out the essence of cats in terms of catness, and catness in terms of what it is to be a cat, and what it is to be a cat in terms of essence, there's not much more to say.

So is everything that is irreducible also circular? Are definitions of mathematical objects circular?

Not something I'd agree with. It presumes that there is a something it is to being a cat...

Yes, that cats exist is an assumption here. The denial that cats, trees, or human beings exist is prima facie absurd though.

Simpler to just say that some individuals are cats.

So there is nothing that makes cats what they are, but then there are "some individuals who are cats?" Either the term refers to something specific to cats or it doesn't. Either there is something on account of which some individuals are called cats, or the term is arbitrary. So on account of what are cats called "cats?"

Further, an explanation of why something is called such is not the same thing as an explanation of why it is such, unless we are committed to linguistic idealism (which you often seem to be).

Telling, in it's way. You appear to think that the only alternative to essentialism is reductionism, so that's what you are addressing. But what is being mooted here is that we simply do not need access to an essence. Not even a reductionist one - if by that what you mean is "some set of properties."

Hardly. But @MoK seemed to suggest the reductionist thesis and you have defended the reductionist modal thesis time and time again as vastly superior, so that's what I responded to. Plus, it's at least more plausible than "there are no such things as cats, just the utterance "this is a cat."

Indeed, to say there are "individuals" called cats itself also suggests the question "in virtue of what are there individuals? When is something an individual?" If things are individuals just in case they are called such, then this explanation is hollow. It's just restating the fact that these words are used, which is undeniable (although, to be fair, so is the existence of cats as living organisms).

A particular picture of how language works has you enthralled. In that picture there is a something that is the meaning of a word, and the aim is to set out what that something is.

As noted above, essences are not about language or signification, except inasmuch that the former explains the causes of the latter (e.g., disparate cultures all developed a word for "ant" because there are ants). This is the same mistake your article makes, assuming that essences are entirely about philosophy of language.

Hence your rejection of Quine and Wittgenstein and most anything more recent than the French Revolution.

I don't think I'm disagreeing with Wittgenstein here. Wittgenstein is very careful not to tread into metaphysics. You frequently use Wittgenstein to make metaphysical claims that he himself does not make. Anti-metaphysics cannot make claims like "essences don't exist" without becoming metaphysics.

But sure, we agree that there are cats and trees.

How is this not a preformative contradiction. Aren't you arguing that there is nothing that makes trees trees and cats cats? Hence, you are equivocating here. I am saying, such entities as trees and cats exist, not that they are spoken about. You are essentially saying "yes, we use the word "tree" and "cat." But why do we use them? Presumably because these sorts of things exist. And indeed, the entire field of biology supports the conclusion that trees existed long before human language. The linguistic idealism at play here would make more sense if it was explicit, rather than relying on continual equivocations. If what makes a tree a tree is man saying "this counts as a tree," then there is an important sense in which trees did not exist before man and his language. But I'd maintain that such a claim is absurd.

Think on this a bit, if you will. It carried the very point Wittgenstein and others have made against essences.

You choose to ignore the fact that we ubiquitously use words without having at hand an essence. — Banno

I don’t ignore that. I get it. I said “you don’t say how to use “cat” either, you just use it” and I knew what I was saying. I get that it makes Witt’s point. You can stop there if you want, and sit in silence with Wittgenstein.

I think it’s just plain giving up. It’s not wise. I think we can do better. I see more than use.

Witt is leaving meaning and essence on the table as if they were never there. As if there never need be a table to use “table”.

We just don't need essences to get on. They are a philosopher's invention. — Banno

“Meaning is use” is precisely a philosopher’s invention. So “philosopher’s invention” is not helpful. And we DON’T “get on” without seeking the essence of things, or without seeking the meaning of our words, simply bumbling through ever-changing uses. We bicker and confuse and speak falsely. The lack of essence you see is only us using words poorly.

———

There is a trinity involved in speaking meaningfully.

There is the speaker.
There is the word spoken.
There is what is spoken about.

To even have this conversation at all, we need at the very least: ‘speaker - words - about what’. Three separable pieces need to attempt to line up for any useful, meaningful utterance.

All three are always there, where words are being used.
All three are necessary to even conceive of notions like “there are essences” or “meaning is use.”

But the “meaning is use” proponents simply de-emphasize what is spoken about. They ignore one leg of the stool. For them, meaning/use need only be found between the speaker and the words used.

That way you can use words and see if they work, instead of saying what they mean. But meaning doesn’t disappear; meaning and essence aren’t discarded, they are just ignored because they are difficult to find, and because they are only found in the world, in the things that are essentially unique individuals, in the muddle. We must do better.

Simpler to just say that some individuals are cats. — Banno

Are you simply trying to explain how to say things simply? Or are you ever actually talking about cats, and what cats do, and how cats are, and are not? Because in that case, it’s simpler to just say you are talking about what it is to be a cat.

It’s only simpler to say “some individuals are cats” after there are things that are cats.

———

essences are not about language or signification, except inasmuch that the former explains the causes of the latter (e.g., disparate cultures all developed a word for "ant" because there are ants). This is the same mistake your article makes, assuming that essences are entirely about philosophy of language. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There is the speaker.
There is the word spoken.
There is what is spoken about.

Essence is intimately connected to language, and intelligibility, but it is not wholly subsumed by language and more rightly sits in things, as “what is known and said about them.”

As if there never need be a table to use “table”.

Right, and theories of essences and universals are not primarily about naming and referring. The idea of use fixing the meaning of stipulated signs is in realists, such as Saint Augustine, John of St. Thomas, etc. The analogy between languages and games doesn't preclude realism either, provided it isn't stretched too far into positing a sort of sheer formalism.

Essence is intimately connected to language, and intelligibility, but it is not wholly subsumed by language and more rightly sits in things, as “what is known and said about them.”

Right, in general what is more directly relevant is metaphysics and physics, or the basic intelligibility by which arbitrary terms can even be coherently formed via composing, concatenation, and division. Final causality is probably the most relevant issue, not signification.

From my perspective, no one here is saying cats don't exist. But the idea of bundling up the characterization of cats neatly in terms of essences feels ridiculous when if you want to be as veridical and precise as possible about it, cats are clearly emergent structure from impossibly intractable physical processes. Yes, we can obviously identify commonalities, structures, properties, patterns that cohere under the "cat" name we have chosen to use in their vicinity. Is this what you mean by essence? Well it doesn't deserve the name because rarely are things in here either neat or essential, especially not without coarse-graining over very real details and invoking vagueness and fuzzyness into one's characterizations. The whole notion of essence just seems seems either over-reductive or completely redundant in its vagueness. There certainly isn't an essence of cats that wouldn't suffer these criticisms, and there are probably various posaible candidates.

I must mention that non-mind-sort substances possess properties, whereas mind-sort substances possess abilities and properties. Mind-sort substances are irreducible only, whereas non-mind-sort substances can be irreducible (like ideas) or reducible (like a cup).

no one here is saying cats don't exist. — Apustimelogist

I would think it would be more precise to say, no one here is saying things don’t exist.

The issue is how to say what each thing is, or, from where different things get identified as such?

Some are saying you call this thing a “cat” and you call that thing a “squid” because people just do. And like things are in flux, what people do is in flux.

Others are saying you call this thing a “cat” because of something about the thing, and you call that thing a “squid” because of something else about that other thing. And you identify the “something else” (the property) because of, again, something about that thing.

Some are saying language of “cat” or “squid” comes first (we exist inside languages already being used) and we just jump in and do what people do with those words, and watch things all come together for speakers and language users, or not. And one’s recourse, when things go awry with language and speakers, is to reevaluate what’s been said and what speakers are doing.

Or,

The thing that is a cat or squid comes first, and we develop our language about those facts. When things go awry with language, they don’t just look at the speakers and what’s been said, but also at what was intended (purpose, final causality) by the speaker’s words - or in other words, by looking at the thing in the world that is being spoken about, like a cat, or a squid.

Final causality is probably the most relevant issue, not signification. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

So is everything that is irreducible also circular? Are definitions of mathematical objects circular? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, no, and it's odd that you would supose this. Of course a circular argument may be formal valid - but the point is that as an explanation circularity is a bit useless. Wittgenstein's hinge propositions are an example of an irreducible item that is not circular.

The definition of mathematical objects from ZFC are certainly not circular, so I can't make much of that part of your comment either.

Your reply here misses the point. (indeed, it a non sequitur). It remains for you to present a way of dealing with essences that is not circular.

You'll have to lay out what you understand by "essence" because I'm not sure how these objections apply to what I've said or realist uses of the term more generally. In its most basic terms, the rejection of essences would be something like: "there is nothing in virtue of which all cats are cats."

The essences might be "emergent" is a pretty common position among those philosophers who hold to a position that requires emergence (process philosophy normally denies that it needs any such notion).

Essences are principles, so they are by definition, general. They are a unifying one by which a many are known. To wit:

The epistemic issues raised by multiplicity and ceaseless change are addressed by Aristotle’s distinction between principles and causes. Aristotle presents this distinction early in the Physics through a criticism of Anaxagoras.1 Anaxagoras posits an infinite number of principles at work in the world. Were Anaxagoras correct, discursive knowledge would be impossible. For instance, if we wanted to know “how bows work,” we would have to come to know each individual instance of a bow shooting an arrow, since there would be no unifying principle through which all bows work. Yet we cannot come to know an infinite multitude in a finite time.2

However, an infinite (or practically infinite) number of causes does not preclude meaningful knowledge if we allow that many causes might be known through a single principle (a One), which manifests at many times and in many places (the Many). Further, such principles do seem to be knowable. For instance, the principle of lift allows us to explain many instances of flight, both as respects animals and flying machines. Moreover, a single unifying principle might be relevant to many distinct sciences, just as the principle of lift informs both our understanding of flying organisms (biology) and flying machines (engineering).

For Aristotle, what are “better known to us” are the concrete particulars experienced directly by the senses. By contrast, what are “better known in themselves” are the more general principles at work in the world.3,i Since every effect is a sign of its causes, we can move from the unmanageable multiplicity of concrete particulars to a deeper understanding of the world.ii

For instance, individual insects are what are best known to us. In most parts of the world, we can directly experience vast multitudes of them simply by stepping outside our homes. However, there are 200 million insects for each human on the planet, and perhaps 30 million insect species.4 If knowledge could only be acquired through the experience of particulars, it seems that we could only ever come to know an infinitesimally small amount of what there is to know about insects. However, the entomologist is able to understand much about insects because they understand the principles that are unequally realized in individual species and particular members of those species.iii

Some principles are more general than others. For example, one of the most consequential paradigm shifts across the sciences in the past fifty years has been the broad application of the methods of information theory, complexity studies, and cybernetics to a wide array of sciences. This has allowed scientists to explain disparate phenomena across the natural and social sciences using the same principles. For instance, the same principles can be used to explain both how heart cells synchronize and why Asian fireflies blink in unison.1 The same is true for how the body’s production of lymphocytes (a white blood cell) takes advantage of the same goal-direct “parallel terraced scan” technique developed independently by computer programmers and used by ants in foraging.2

Notably, such unifications are not reductions. Clearly, firefly behavior is not reducible to heart cell behavior or vice versa. Indeed, such unifications tend to be “top-down” explanations, focusing on similarities between systems taken as wholes, as opposed to “bottom-up” explanations that attempts to explain wholes in terms of their parts.i...

What exactly is the difference between a property and an ability? Or is it just that minded things have abilities instead of properties for whatever "properties" relate to their mindedness? Or are abilities volitional? For example, is the ability to feel pain or get angry and ability? Or is it more like the ability to choose to walk across a room?

Sorry, I am not familiar with this distinction.

Neither of us is denying that cats and trees exist. You seem to have the idea that unless there is an essence, there cannot be cats and trees. That's odd, since it seems you cannot actually tell us what an essence is, beyond "that which makes something a cat or a tree". That, again, is the picture that has you in thrall.

What makes a cat a "cat" is at least in part, that we use the word "cat" to talk about some things but not others. It's we who seperate cats form dogs and from kittens, and we who manage to use the word despite not having to hand an explicit essence of catness...

This is a lesson not just from Wittgenstein, as cited above, but from Quine's Gavagi parable. But you could not follow that in our previous conversation, either.

Either there is something on account of which some individuals are called cats, or the term is arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You've tried this argument before. The term "cat" is indeed in a sense arbitrary. We could have used any word we like, we could have not had a word for cats, or had one word for both cats and dogs, or any of innumerable other combinations. That we happen to have the word "cat" is not ordained by God, but an accident of the history of English.

...you have defended the reductionist modal thesis time and time again as vastly superior, so that's what I responded to. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Me?

This arguing in terms of "isms" is a hedge. You never quite say what "reductionism" is.

So let me be quite specific, and lay this misrepresentation to rest. I have been at pains to point to a non-reductionist position. I do not think that there must be a set of properties that are necessary and sufficient to set out what it is for something to be a cat. I have consistently argued, using material from both Wittgenstein and Quine, that we use such word despite there not being such a set of properties.

There remains the possibility of our stipulating some set of such criteria. We do this, in some circumstances. But it is not necessary that we do this in order to make use of such words.

There is also the term of art, "essence", that in modal logic is the set of properties had by some individual in every possible world. This is simply one way in which we might understand the word "essence", a way that has huge advantages over your "what makes a thing what it is", since it brings with it the structure of modality and possible world semantics.

We do not need to have access to to such a set in order to make use of words.

Right, this is the extreme volanturism and linguistic idealism I was talking about. Cats would not exist if man was not there to call them forth as such.

But my point would be that disparate cultures all came up with names for species, and the notion of species, because those things exist. That is, simply appealing to use is a not an answer. There are causes for what appears to be useful. The fact that biological species exist (prior to man and his language) is the cause of such categorizations being useful in the first place.

You've tried this argument before. The term "cat" is indeed in a sense arbitrary. We could have used any word we like, we could have not had a word for cats, or had one word for both cats and dogs, or any of innumerable other combinations. That we happen to have the word "cat" is not ordained by God, but an accident of the history of English.

First, name one culture that conflates cats and dogs, or any other domesticated animal.

Such categorizations are not arbitrary. If you try to mate cats to dogs you don't get offspring. If you try to get cats to help shepherd your flocks it will be an exercise in futility. You cannot lash cats to a sled to pull yourself around, etc. What people find to be useful has causes that are prior to any human consideration of usefulness. The entire example of a civilization that is "just as technologically advanced as ours," but doesn't understand the periodic table is absurd. They could obviously categorize things in many different ways. But categorizations that allow for modern technology will necessarily be isomorphic to one another.

As I put it before, I reject the idea that:

"In the beginning the Language Community created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the soup of usefulness. And the Spirit of the Language Community moved upon the face of the waters. And the Language Community said, Let this be light: and thus it was light."

I don't think I'm disagreeing with Wittgenstein here. Wittgenstein is very careful not to tread into metaphysics. You frequently use Wittgenstein to make metaphysical claims that he himself does not make. Anti-metaphysics cannot make claims like "essences don't exist" without becoming metaphysics. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wittgenstein carefully dismantles presumptions of metaphysics. To say he is not doing metaphysics would be an error.

Some are saying you call this thing a “cat” and you call that thing a “squid” because people just do. And like things are in flux, what people do is in flux.

Others are saying you call this thing a “cat” because of something about the thing, and you call that thing a “squid” because of something else about that other thing. — Fire Ologist

For me, when we say that people just call things "cat" just "because people do" its alluding to the fact that we are very good at identifying, recognizing, picking out patterns and commonalities in the world, but often this is much more intricate, subtle, flexible than one can possibly articulate. To me, essences just seems like an easy way of being over-reductive about things in the world when often we can't even characterize what we are talking about in a way that is unambiguous, precise, unique, informative enough to deserve the name "essence". The whole thing seems completely redundant. If I want to learn about cats, I will look at the field of biology for facts about cats and all the subtleties which, from where i'm standing, don't seem easily compressed into a simple essence. Essence just seems like unnecessary inflation that has the connotation that there is something more to cats than the underlying physics from which they emerge. There is no homogenous, self-contained entity attached to the word which has "catness" in virtue of itself. "Cat" is more a kind of label to bundle together structures and properties that will often co-occur -but not in any strict, rigid, deterministic way -and to communicate our inherent abilities to identify, distinguish, predict those things. If I want to learn about those things, I can talk to a scientist. Essence is unneeded baggage, vestiges of antiquated world views.

volanturism and linguistic idealism — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ism, ism, ism...

Cats would not exist if man was not there to call them forth as such. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course there would be cats. Just no one to call them "cats" - except your God, of course, and perhaps this is what your argument is actually about. You want to set up a theory of language that needs God.

The arc, again, in which you only accept those ideas that are compatible with your dogma.

Such categorizations are not arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course they are not arbitrary. They are useful.

You are repeatedly attributing the ism of linguistic idealism. That just shows a lack of imagination. Have another look at "On the very idea of a conceptual schema" as an example of an alternative. We do not need the odd juxtaposition of idealism and realism.

@Count Timothy von Icarus

Babies use words despite not understanding Aristotle

There is the speaker.
There is the word spoken.
There is what is spoken about. — Fire Ologist

You left out the interpreter. In doing so you ignored the fact of communality that is inherent in language. Hence your account is inherently incomplete.

How might a computer recognize a cat? Surely differently than humans, but is the code, whatever it might be, the best definition of a cat?

I'd suspect a Wittgensteinian analogy could be used to describe computer recognition - thousands of examples with certain statistical patterns revealing family resemblance, with no required certain characteristic. However, there is no shared form of life from within the computer, so that analogy has some limits..

I'd also suspect computer identification error that humans would not make, which is an interesting suggestion because it posits humans as the gold standard. That is, if humans say the picture is not of a cat, then it's not. The computer must rely upon the human fed data.

no one here is saying cats don't exist. — Apustimelogist

Obvious as this is, I am pleased that at least you have understood this.

The whole notion of essence just seems seems either over-reductive or completely redundant in its vagueness. — Apustimelogist

Yes, and will stay that way until the challenge is met.

Notice the rhetorical move:

You'll have to lay out what you understand by "essence" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Sigh. Attempting to throw the ball back to you.

We await Tim's providing an coherent explanation of what an essence is, and why it is needed.

How might a computer recognize a cat? — Hanover

Yep.

Perhaps picture a large statistical model connected to appropriate sensors, comparing what is said to what is sensed, and making a statistical connection between hearing "cat" and certain things it is seeing/hearing.

The code might not be algorithmic, would not set out explicit criteria, but would perhaps use the word sometimes correctly sometimes not, and change the various weightings of it's model to accomodate further information.

What Tim is proposing is like a database lookup table - an analogy he used - where the computer runs down a list of criteria until it finds "cat". (Added: appears to be stuck in the same trope.)

That's not how neural nets and LLMs work.

We await Tim's providing an coherent explanation of what an essence is, and why it is needed. — Banno

What do you await? How it's used? It's irrelevant that there are no essences we can point to.

Well, what do you think of the notion of principles outlined above? And could there be a principle by which different individuals are the same sort of thing?

Do you also think there are no natural kinds? Or are there at least some, like the photon, electron, iron atoms, helium, etc.? Do things have accidental and essential properties, or are all properties accidental (or essential)?

The key idea of a nature, physis, is precisely that things are always changing and that there is no strict, univocal measure of the sort you are speaking against. In later refinements of the idea there is also the realization that things are defined in terms of their contexts. For instance:

For all created things are defined, in their essence and in their way of developing, by their own logoi and by the logoi of the beings that provide their external context. Through these logoi they find their defining limits.

-St. Maximus the Confessor - Ambiguum 7

I'm afraid the rest doesn't give me much to go on. What exactly is the notion that is antiquated? To 's point, "Sigh. Attempting to throw the ball back to you." That isn't it. The term "essence" has been used in very different ways throughout the history of philosophy. Locke's real/nominal essences are very different from what Hegel has in mind and both are very different from what modern analytics have in mind, with their "sets of properties"/bundle theories, which is wholly at odds with how the Islamic and Scholastic thinkers thought of essences. So I am just trying to disambiguate.

My first thought on your first response was that it didn't seem to contradict the idea of essence I laid out last page, and that's sort of how I feel about this one. Unless the idea is simply that "metaphysics" is antiquated as a whole, and that this is why "science" answers questions about essences?




Well, there has to be some thread of invariance running through any coherent process. Linear algebra's change of basis theorems and basis-independent operators are a good window into this. Invariance under transformation is essential for deep learning and other machine learning models' ability to generalize. What allows for this is that the same underlying relations endure despite shifting representations. Were there no conserved structures or consistent symmetries it's hard to see how any learning would be possible.

Of course there would be cats. Just no one to call them "cats" -

Ok, then explain in virtue of what they would be cats in this case?

Obvious as this is, I am pleased that at least you have understood this.

I think we may be equivocating on "exists." If to exist is something like "to be the value of a bound variable," it should be obvious that this is not what I have in mind, or what is commonly meant by the term.

Babies use words despite not understanding Aristotle

Is this inane strawman more "performance art?"

What do you await? — Hanover

I really do not know...

I'll leave it to Tim.

Ok, then explain in virtue of what they would be cats in this case? — Count Timothy von Icarus

In virtue of the supposition of a world that includes cats but not people.

That's how modality works. We can stipulate a possible world in which there are cats but no people to call them cats. It's a world that is logically accessible from our own. In that world there are cats, because that is how that world is specified.

If you are not going to study modal logic, I guess you will have to take my word for it.

Babies use words despite not understanding Aristotle

Is this inane strawman more "performance art?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

It shows again that we do not need a theory of essences in order to use words.

It might well be the core of our differences. I take effective language use as granted - it's foundational that we are talking here about cats and essences and possible worlds. If that is not granted, then our talk would indeed be incongruous scratchings. You, in opposition, seem to hold that we could only have this successful practice against a complicated Aristotelian or Platonic theoretical base.

But babies do talk, and the do not understand Aristotle.

The performative contradiction is in your already using language in order to formulate the very theory you think you need in order to use language.

In virtue of the supposition of a world that includes cats but not people.

So cats would still be cats in a world without people in virtue of the fact that people have created a logical system that allows them to say "cats would still be cats in a world without people?" And I suppose that trees were trees before there were people in virtue of the fact that people can make the claim "there were trees before people?"

If you are not going to study modal logic, I guess you will have to take my word for it.

Use of modal logic has nothing to do with your explicitly metaphysical claim that cats are cats in virtue of the fact that modal logic allows us to say that cats are cats in a world without people. We could also have the supposition that cats would not be cats in a world without people, so I have no idea what this is supposed to show. If things are what they are simply in virtue of our ability to simply state that they are so this would seem to lead to a sort of Protagorean relativism.

Indeed, it looks like the supposition is doing all the lifting here and modal logic has nothing to do with it. "Cats are cats in virtue of the fact that we say they are cats, and they would be cats even if we didn't exist to say this in virtue of the fact that we say that they would still be cats even if we hadn't said so." I am not sure if this is contradictory or not.

Can you see why I call this extreme volanturism?

Anyhow, for someone who says they logic is just a tool, and that any logic can be used just in case we find it useful, you sure do like to appeal to formalisms quite a bit to make metaphysical claims.

It shows again that we do not need a theory of essences in order to use words.

It might well be the core of our differences. I take effective language use as granted - it's foundational that we are talking here about cats and essences and possible worlds. If that is not granted, then our talk would indeed be incongruous scratchings. You, in opposition, seem to hold that we could only have this successful practice against a complicated Aristotelian or Platonic theoretical base.

But babies do talk, and the do not understand Aristotle.

The performative contradiction is in your already using language in order to formulate the very theory you think you need in order to use language.

Essences are not primarily called upon to explain common terms. I have pointed this error out before.

Can you see why I call this extreme volanturism? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd say it's becasue of your penchant for rhetoric over logic. Ism, ism, ism - the need to find the right box, rather than take the argument on its merit. I'm not overly impressed with what you have said here, nor in the referential opacity thread. I think you are showing the limits of your grasp of logic.

Possible worlds are posited, not found. You can specify one with cats, or one without, but either way there are already cats (∃(x)(x is a cat) in order for you to do the specifying.

To see how it works, you have to do the work.

Anyhow, for someone who says they logic is just a tool, and that any logic can be used just in case we find it useful, you sure do like to appeal to formalisms quite a bit to make metaphysical claims. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep. That's becasue as a tool it is quite good at showing where mistakes are being made.

So cats would still be cats in a world without people in virtue of the fact that people have created a logical system that allows them to say "cats would still be cats in a world without people?" And I suppose that trees were trees before there were people in virtue of the fact that people can make the claim "there were trees before people?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The concept cat wouldn't exist do to there not being a language, but the fact (the state of affairs in which cats exist) would still obtain. In other words, facts would still exist without the concepts that refer to them. Modal logic does apply. Modal logic deals with possibility and necessity, and you're positing a possible world without humans, if I'm following you correctly.

First, name one culture that conflates cats and dogs, or any other domesticated animal. — Count Timothy von Icarus

English.

The word "deer" comes from the PIE dheusom, "creature that breathes". In Old English it referred to any non-domestic animal.

Old English conflated any non-domesticated animal - dear, pigs, foxes, whatever - into the one word - "deor". Perhaps becasue of the preference for retrieving venison in a hunt, the word came to pick out only the cervidae.

Near enough.

The term "essence" has been used in very different ways throughout the history of philosophy. Locke's real/nominal essences are very different from what Hegel has in mind and both are very different from what modern analytics have in mind, with their "sets of properties"/bundle theories, which is wholly at odds with how the Islamic and Scholastic thinkers thought of essences. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not only different cultures, but also different forms, levels or states of consciousness. Something the Scholastics and Islamists will understand that the analytics will not.

A lot of fuss about very little here. I think I triggered it, by trying to point out that the word 'essence' is obviously a form of the Latin 'esse', 'to be'. So it denotes the essential qualities of a particular, what makes it what it is.

Apropos of which Max Delbrück, a physicist turned biologist, famously argued that Aristotle, in his biological writings, had anticipated the core principle of DNA: that a living being's development is guided by an inherent "form" or plan. Delbrück saw Aristotle's concept of the soul (psuche) as the form (morphe) that shapes and directs matter, mirroring the way DNA encodes the blueprint for an organism's development. He even humorously suggested that Aristotle deserved a Nobel Prize in biology for this insight (however Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously, much less to someone who died more than two millenia ago.) Delbrück highlighted that it's the formal aspect of DNA, the information it carries, rather than the physical material of DNA itself, that is crucial for inheritance and development. This aligns with Aristotle's view that the soul (form) is distinct from the physical body. Also, presumably, one of the reasons that Aristotle's hylomorphism is still very much a live option in contemporary philosophy.

Aristotle, in his writings on embryology and reproduction, emphasized the role of "form" or "entelechy" as the principle that shapes and guides the development of living things. He saw semen as carrying this form, which directs the development of the offspring.

What has this to do with essence? It's that the same philosophical heritage that gave rise to 'essence' and 'substance', also gave rise to the scientific disciplines that discovered DNA. And I don't think this is coincidental.