Ok, so you are saying that the hammerness is already there in the thing, logically prior to the use as a hammer; and that the use brings out the hammerness....revealed... — Astorre
Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, — Astorre
That's the analytic approach at work. Thanks for indulging me.You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words. — Astorre
What I Propose:
The modality (or the name can be changed to your liking) of a hammer is its "shadowy depth" (like Harman's), objective and inaccessible in isolation. — Astorre
Take “redness” as an example. Under the substantialist view, redness is either an inherent trait of the object or the set of all red things. In processual ontology, redness is an event that unfolds through the interaction of:
The thing (e.g., the apple, whose structure determines how it reflects light);
The light (photons of a particular wavelength);
The observer (a human or other creature interpreting that reflected light through their perceptual apparatus).
Redness, then, is not inside the apple. It is born from the interplay of all three participants. This makes the property contingent: for a different observer (say, someone with color blindness), or under different lighting conditions, redness may not manifest at all.
Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, as does a stone, especially when attached to a stick, as does a microscope when used to drive nails. But this property is not in the object or the subject, but in the encounter. In the involvement. After this encounter, as I said, the hammerness remains in our consciousness. Hammerness can be lost in modus (the hammer just rotted and became unusable), hammerness can be lost in act (for example, people started using screwdrivers and stopped hammering nails), and hammerness can be lost in consciousness (we have raised a generation that doesn't know what a hammer is or what to do with it).
As I have already mentioned, the modus is what is contained in the hammer itself.......................So we come to the fact that when we call something something, we don't necessarily need to know all its boundaries, but they must exist somewhere, and once we know them all, we may call it something else....................Therefore, the modus is again a construct of the mind, rather than something that actually exists., — Astorre
My modus is not a static thing-in-itself. — Astorre
I am defending the subject, but not to the degree of anthropocentrism seen in Kant, whose phenomena are an act of cognition. — Astorre
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.