Hammerness is just an example (and as I mentioned, perhaps with an inaccurate translation). The idea is that a hammer can be used both as a tool for hammering nails and as a stand for a refrigerator. You can also use a microscope to hammer nails... Just consider it an example

Hammerness is just an example — Astorre

Sure.

Does hammerness inhere in the hammer, or is it something we attribute to the hammer?

Is hammerness a permanent, even essential, part of the hammer, or is it something we do with and attribute to the hammer?

The hammer's hammerness is revealed in the act of nailing. I am saying that it was inherent in the hammer before the act (modus), and then became a property in the act of nailing. As a result, we named (or attributed) this hammerness to the hammer for cognitive purposes.

For example, if Mowgli sees a hammer without any explanation of what it is for, then for Mowgli, the hammer will have the properties that Mowgli will use it for (throwing it at Shere Khan). Mowgli will probably not discover the hammer's properties. However, the hammer's properties (such as being used for nailing) will remain intact and will be revealed in the hands of a carpenter.

...revealed... — Astorre

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.

Why not go the whole hog and say that there is no "hammerness", no property of being a hammer already there; but that what happens is that we decide that it counts as a hammer, basically for our own purposes. That there is no "hammerness already there in the thing".

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).

Still, a hammer has a modus (potential, opportunity) to be a hammer, — Astorre

I don't know how to make sense of that.

Is your suggestion that hammerness is a potential or opportunity or modus inherent in a microscope?

Much simpler to just say that someone might use a microscope as a hammer. Drop all the hoo-ha.

This way it is easier for me: the hammer appears in the act of meeting; and even more briefly: the thing is revealed in the Participation. You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words.

You asked questions, so I had to clarify everything, write a lot of words. — Astorre

That's the analytic approach at work. Thanks for indulging me.

It might well be a language issue, since my reservation rests on that word "revealed". Something is revealed that it is already there but hidden, and comes to be seen. The letter is revealed by opening the envelope, the body revealed by removing the clothing, and so on. But a microscope does not have a hammerness that is revealed by using it as a hammer...

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

An object in the world such as a rock has an almost infinite number of possible relations. As you say "properties infinitely vary in processes". For example, hitting another rock, hitting a bird, hitting a molecule of air, hitting a different molecule of air, being used by a person as a hammer, being used as a person as a paperweight, being used by a person as an art object, etc.

As you say, "as a property emerges as an event-dynamic and contextual", which cannot be argued against.

But you also say "The modality..............of a hammer is its "shadowy depth"..........objective and inaccessible in isolation"

If the modality of an object can only emerge within dynamic contexts, and there are an almost infinite number of possible dynamic contexts, this makes the modality of an object unknowable.

If the modality of an object is unknowable, then we cannot even talk about an object having a modality.

Then modality is an unknown unknown.

Yes, your judgments look consistent. In all possible acts, the hammer can manifest itself in an unknowable way. Perhaps we will never know it in all its possibilities. What prevents us from acknowledging this and moving forward? This is precisely what science does: it discovers new properties in new combinations, records them, and we use them. Even though we know that the hammer is unknowable, we can still use it to drive nails, right? Further exploration of the properties of a hammer is justified if it has practical benefits.

Your intuition is that anything that exists must have boundaries, must have some limit in order to be an existence. But the modus does not meet this criterion, as it cannot be fully named in all its aspects. Therefore, the modus is again a construct of the mind, rather than something that actually exists. However, consider the universe as an example. It cannot be fully defined yet, but that does not mean that it does not exist. 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, a single definition may not be sufficient to call something something, and as I have mentioned in other topics, it is necessary to introduce multiple characteristics that complement each other and are revealed during the process.

As I have already mentioned, the modus is what is contained in the hammer itself, while the properties are what is created through the interaction of various participants, and our knowledge is our understanding of these properties. In my opinion, this approach does not involve excessive metaphysics and is focused on the process. Without the process, there are no properties. The author's description is a clever way of expressing our understanding (rather than the properties) through sets. Whether this approach is good or bad is a matter of personal opinion.

Maybe this approach will allow us to see more, understand more, or maybe not. We'll see.

That's an interesting point. Yet even in modern "building block ontologies" where things "are what they are composed of," I doubt that you would find many advocates for the idea that properties are "inside" things. They normally say the fundamental building blocks just are their properties, plus some individuating principle.

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.

It's interesting because the original argument for the "primacy" of substance runs something like this:

In the world, we can see red things, red light, but never just "redness." Dogs or trees can be living, tall, fast, but we never have "nothing in particular" that lives or is tall, or a fast motion with nothing moving.

But then substances, originally at least, aren't building blocks. They are the wholes in virtue of which being is many and not only one (although it is also one in another sense). They undergo corruption and generation, and so they are themselves processes in a way. Round substances change. They can cease to be round. What isn't changing would appear to be roundness. But if roundness only exists where there are round things and in the minds that know them, there is a bit of a puzzle here. A process metaphysics still needs unchanging regularities by which to identify processes that are similar, no?

If one considers this from the perspective of a deflationary information theoretic process metaphysics, where all of the universe is something like a changing mathematical "code," it can be helpful. That this is too deflationary is no problem for the example. Within the universal code are subsections of "code" that are more or less intelligible in themselves and self-determining. These are beings/things. There are also accidents, actions preformed by things, properties like color, relations like "being to the left of," etc. The accidents that are not "substance" and so cannot appear except as embedded in or related to some other "thing-unit" of code. They need a substrate to inhere in. The thing-units more fully have essences, in that they do not have a wholly parasitic existence in the way the accidents do. But accidents still have some sort of "essence," in that all instances of roundness, redness, rapidity, etc. will share some sort of morphisms by which they are the same (on pain of equivocation).

I think a key difficulty here that led to a sort of corruption of notions of substance that brings the difficulties you mention, as well as others, is that the term tended to be used in two related but diverse ways. From the perspective of metaphysics, organisms are most properly beings, being organic wholes. Break a dog or tree in half and you get a corpse; break a rock in half and you just get two rocks. Unity and multiplicity are contrary, not contradictory opposites, akin to light and darkness or heat and cold, so we can have greater or lesser unity in metaphysics. But for logic you need univocal terms. With the rise of nominalism and the demand for univocity, you cannot have any play in the terms of substance, leading towards the reductionism that attaches properties to some sort of unchanging building block.

Anyhow, on your point re the relationally of redness; it is worth pointing out that this holds for all properties, not just those involving minds. We can say that 'salt is water soluble," but it only dissolves in water when interacting with water, etc. While modern thought began to center on the epistemic consequences of something akin to the old Scholastic dictum that: "Everything is received in the manner of the receiver," this focus tended to make "the receiver" only a mind, when originally it was anything (likewise the "subject" was originally the "subject of predication" not exclusively the "experiencing subject."

Properties like charge, mass, etc. reveal themselves in interaction. Hence, "properties in themselves" would be epistemically inaccessible but also irrelevant to the world. "Act follows on being."

Of course, terminology evolves, but I call these corruptions because they introduce many of the problems process metaphysicians are often trying to address. But process metaphysicians still need a way, it would seem, to separate substance and accidents, or else there would just be one monoprocess, and a black cat would become a different thing when it fell into brown mud and became brown, etc.

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).

That makes sense. Artifacts seem like a particularly hard place to start. It is debatable if anything used to hammer is a hammer, or if it is just being used for hammering. However, it is simply not the case that everything that is used as a sheep is a sheep. If you try to breed a male pig to your female sheep, you will starve. If you try to get cats to pull your dog sled you will get scratched and go nowhere. But more to the point, not only will the "tool" not work, but the living organism is itself its own goal-directed whole and this is not altered by our use of it.

I suppose though that this could be considered a matter of degree. A volume of water or air never makes for a good hammer. When Rorty debated Eco, he said that what a screwdriver is doesn't necessitate (or even "suggest") how we use it, since we could just as well use it to scratch our ear as turn a screw, and yet in an obvious sense this isn't so. A razor sharp hunting knife is not a good toy to throw into a baby's crib (at the very least, for the baby) because of what both are, and this is true across all cultural boundaries and seems that it must be true. You can use a PC tower as a door stop, but you cannot run Widows or check your email on any other sort of doorstop.

OK, thanks. I have some reactions to that but gotta run now. I'll circle back later.

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

I agree, in that I have the concept of Poland even though I have only visited four of its towns. My concept of Poland is necessarily bounded by my personal experiences, and I infer my concept of Poland is only a pale shadow of its true reality.

However you distinguish between the "modality" of something, objective and inaccessible, and its properties, dynamic and contextual.

I have the concept of a hammer in my mind. My belief is that objects such as hammers don't exist in the world, but what does exist are fundamental particles and forces.

In my terms, the "modus" of the hammer are fundamental particles and forces, which are objective and inaccessible, enable Realism, and do exist in a mind-independent world.

These fundamental particles and forces are the indirect but real cause of my concept of hammerness.

I can explain this property of hammerness as a set of events in which a hammer participates, such as hitting in a nail, hitting a rock, being an art object, being a weapon. A property may be understood by its extension.

The property of hammerness = {hitting in a nail, hitting a rock, being an art object, being a weapon}.

These events are dynamic and exist within a context, in that a hammer in the context of carpentry is a tool for hitting in nails and in the context of war is a weapon. The Context Principle has played an important role since Frege's 1884 Grundlagen der Arithmetik.

As you say "Even though we know that the hammer is unknowable, we can still use it to drive nails, right?".

All we need to know is appearance not the cause of such appearances. All we need to know are the properties of the hammer, not any hypothetical modus of the hammer.

We drive along a road and stop when we see a red light. The fact that colours don't exist in the world but only in our minds as concepts has no bearing on the fact that we stop when we see a red light. In our daily lives we are only interested in the properties of an object, such as the property of redness. We have no practical interest in any hypothetical modus of an object (though we may have a philosophical interest).

By Occam's Razor, there is no reason why we cannot remove the concept of modus altogether, as it serves no purpose. As you say "My fascination with the processual approach to ontology is a kind of response to speculative ontology (object-oriented ontology and so on). "

My modus of the hammer are fundamental particles and forces that I believe do exist in a mind-independent world (accepting that even fundamental particles and forces are concepts).

But is what you mean by modus different to this?

My modus is not a static thing-in-itself. — Astorre

It's unclear to me if Kant thought noumena were static in this sense. I don't see why they would have to be. At any given moment of perception, we have the noumenon and the ensuing phenomenon. "Noumena" is a kind of placeholder, a way of expressing the fact that we don't have access to whatever it is that lies beyond our perceptions. As such, it could be a "different" noumenon five minutes earlier. "Noumenon" is not a name for some essence or quiddity.

I am defending the subject, but not to the degree of anthropocentrism seen in Kant, whose phenomena are an act of cognition. — Astorre

Yes, to adequately compare your schema with Kant's, we'd have to go back to my question:

"We require apple, light, and observer in order for the redness to manifest itself; do you want to say that this happens in or to the observer?"