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.

So, by way of checking my understanding

• Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game.
• To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility.
• This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error?

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. That is, the judgement that such-and-such is true commits one to denying that it is false; but it doens;t commit one to saying that it is true in all possible circumstances. Yet this is what would be required in order to move from "such and such is true" to "such and such is necessarily true".

That is , this "unconditional" truth is a step further than is justified by the commitment to such-and-such being true.

That is “If everything were conditioned, final truth is undermined” - perhaps; I'm not sure what final truth might be. but not truth per se.

:up:

Modal semantics can only function as semantics if it is embedded in practices of judgment that distinguish getting things right from merely playing a consistent formal game. — Banno

Yes.

To say of some sentence, that it is true, is to make a commitment, to take responsibility. — Banno

Yes.

This commitment is to something's being the case, and not otherwise. That given what I take to be the relevant conditions, denying p would be an error? — Banno

Yes.

But "Given the conditions, it cannot be otherwise" here is not modal, so much as epistemic. — Banno

The move to the unconditioned is not made by upgrading epistemic necessity into modal necessity, It is made by reflecting on what judgment itself presupposes in order to be truth-apt at all.

If our operating notion of reality were such that reality is conditioned all the way down, then for any claim, further conditions could always be demanded such that no fact, state of affairs or claim could ever be counted as truly settled.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised.

Now consider what it means to assert that the denial of a claim is truly wrong. It means something like “even given all relevant considerations, ¬p fails to answer to how things really are”. That requires an implicit commitment to (1) their being such a thing as “all relevant considerations,” at least in principle and (2) that p is settled by how things really are, not just by where we happen to be currently situated within inquiry.

If we say that there is always a further relevant condition that could overturn p, then we must also accept that denial is never truly wrong, but only premature. But this implies that denial can never be truly incorrect in the robust sense that we all presuppose when we tell someone that their claim is really-and-truly wrong (much as we all are constantly doing to each other in this very forum).

To give a concrete example, suppose we judge that “Water is H₂O”, and suppose someone here on the forum denies this. Why do we treat the denial of this claim as wrong, not just awaiting further data. It’s because we take ourselves to have reached a point where all the relevant conditions have been satisfied and no further conditions would overturn the claim. By contrast if our operating notions of reality and truth were radically unconditioned, we could never say that the denial is wrong in the robust sense, because we would have to presuppose that every fact always depends on further, undisclosed conditions; indefinitely.

One might respond “Okay, maybe ‘final truth’ disappears, but why does ordinary truth go with it?”. The robust notion of truth implicit in the act of judgment is not just “what we currently accept”, “what fits in a framework” or “what is best so far”. Implicit within the robust notion of truth is the idea that “this is how things really are, and denying it misrepresents reality”. But if reality itself is understood to be such that it can never settle anything without remainder, then the very notion of “misrepresenting reality” has no determinate content, and the robust notion of truth itself becomes indistinguishable from provisional endorsement.

But this is not an apt characterization of what we are doing when we engage in authentic inquiry. The way we talk about such things betrays the fact that very act of judging claims to be true or false carries within it an implicit commitment to robust notions of truth and reality and, thus, to reality itself being unconditioned (and intelligible) without remainder.

This is not the same as saying merely that we are finite and fallible, or that inquiry is ongoing. It implies something much stronger - namely, that there is no fact of the matter that could ever settle a judgment as finally correct, because any purported settlement is always relative to a context, stage or set of conditions that could always, in principle, be revised. — Esse Quam Videri

This is a valid concern. Forgive me if you're already replying to my last post. I figured this would be a good summary.

1. That we discretely experience is an actual truth. The act itself, not what we think about it. Factually, there is nothing more that can ever be discovered that would undermine it.
2. There is always a question about our application using discrete experience. Its unavoidable as we are applying one experience and truth we directly have, to something else that we do not have full control or potential comprehension over.
3. In theory, one could arrive at the truth of everything if one had full context. So if we could sense it all from a bird's eye view, and be able to perceive and sense everything that was possible to perceive and sense, what is deductive and what is reasonably inductive would be true, but it would still be within the context of a perceiver.

So, the only context of truth which we are privy to discover is that we discretely experience. Everything else is built on this, and the fact that our application of them can be contradicted. Thus full knowledge is a blend of a true foundation, and rational approaches to attempting to understand the world outside of that true foundation. This would not change given more information or findings, this is also a truth. One way to think of it is, "I can be me. But I can never be anything else. And to know something else in itself fully, I must actually be that thing fully."

I don't think there's any possible way to know what is true outside of ourselves, but it is true to know our own experiences in themselves. I hope that summarizes the point I was trying to make in my last post.