You're calling Plato a mystic.

Well you seemed to be taking a materialist position and that's hardly Platonic form is it? So you make less and less sense here. If you are arguing Plato, say so.

(And it might make more sense if you did that in relation to Plato's own concept of the chora - the material receptacle of his forms.)

I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance.

Again your use of jargon is confusing. Do you mean prime matter? It seems that you mistake Aristotle's hylomorphic doctrine of substance for material cause.

And I don't think Aristotle's prime matter is a concept that works except as another name for vagueness or apeiron.

So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.

But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle.

My notion instead treats it as the limitless, the unformed, the unmaterial. It is not fixed by conservation or locale. It is just pure open-ended possibility. So it is pre-material in any usual sense of matter, just as much as it is pre-form in not yet having undergone the phase transition which is its structuring organisation to become a something definite.

At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?

The change is the beginning of time and space. Those are both aspects of the emergence of a global dimensional organisation. So it is what "happens" in the earlier time, and the higher energy, which would be the "before" of the Planck scale. Except before the Planck scale, there just isn't anything determinate in existence, so talking about the before does't really make sense.

Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?

I'm not interested in poetic visions. So I agree. If vagueness and this general way of thinking can't be cashed out in real physics, its nothing in the end. It has to be a mathematical strength model or chuck it in the bin of metaphysical speculation.

Luckily, it is a way of thinking that is increasingly common in science. There is a lot of maths to support it.

What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today.

Mechanics is not wrong. It has worked splendidly to serve the interest of humans the last 500 years. If you think of existence in terms of the causality of machines, you start to get good at making machines. So mechanics has repaid its makers many times over. And it is not wrong as - in its carefully limited sphere - it works.

But if you are talking about the bounding extremes of our existence - the quantumly small, the cosmically large, the neurally complex - then yes it breaks down and a bigger modelling paradigm is needed.

What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself.

I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron.

Point of order - Plato was indeed a mystic. The dictionary definition of the term is 'initiate into the mystery religions', and Plato, an Orphic, was that.

Point of order - Plato was indeed a mystic. The dictionary definition of the term is 'initiate into the mystery religions', and Plato, an Orphic, was that. — Wayfarer

:) Got to agree there

But if our categories and hierarchies are not merely arbitrary then they do "reflect the way the world that we move through is ordered." Of course, I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary. — John

I think 'refraction' would be my preferred metaphor.

I do think this whole discussion has a tendency to confuse the philosophy of science with philosophy. These purported universals are not just words used in scientific method, so they neither stand nor fall by how useful they are to methodological naturalists (I know, the spirit of Landru has entered me, what can I do?). The debate is about whether such entities, or whatever they might be, exist, and if not, what sort of beast they are. This applies to all the language we use, from sparrows (which I confess I still confuse with dunnocks) to the nature of music to love, sweet love and whether Economics is any kind of a science.

Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.

To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here. — apokrisis

(a) I don't see how my view says 'lucky accident, hey'. My view, to which you were replying, refers to a dialectic between how human understanding works and how the world seems to present itself to us.
(b) The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas. History is much more interesting and hard to fathom than that. The modern era in the West re-started, as I'd see it, in the 16th/17th centuries, and from then on laid claim to a Greco-Latin origin to modern ideas that has to leap across previous chasms of centuries when entirely other metaphysics (it seems reaosonable to presume) held sway.
(c) I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate.

So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.

But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle. — apokrisis

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.

As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being.

I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron. — apokrisis

Apparently you're willing to sacrifice all other metaphysical theorizing though for a vision that is quasi-empirical and belongs more in the field of science than speculative philosophy.

The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas...

I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate. — mcdoodle

You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right.

If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that.

And to remind how hierarchies relate to universals, the problem with universals is they refer to constraints - the forms that inform matter - but they lack hierarchical organisation in most people's minds so it sounds like we are talking about a random Platonic collection of ideas. Anything that has a name - like a sparrow, love, the cosmos, my left toe - has an ideal form.

But of course even Plato tried to create some kind of hierarchical order in his realm of perfect ideas. The good stood at the most global level, mathematical truths somewhere further along the spectrum of specificity.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.

As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being. — darthbarracuda

Now here you sound like you agree with my approach, so this becomes very confusing.

To summarise, the argument goes that we patently exist in a world of definite objects. So we start with where we are at. And then we look to what could be different in an attempt to figure out how we could come to be in such a place.

Greek metaphysics started with the idea that form was plastic and so there must be some material principle that is the underlying eternal - an ur-stuff. And as you say, something so unchanging must be ungraspable, unintelligible, as it stands beyond the descriptiveness of formed somethingness. It is like a taste so bland it can't be tasted, or a hue so pastel it can't be seen.

Anaximander gave it a name - the apeiron, or the without-limitation. But Anaximander also realised that while form (or limitation, ie constraints) was plastic, it was also based on a dialectical logic. It had to arise dichotomously as a succession of symmetry breakings.

For limits to arise in the limitless, it could only do this by the apeiron "moving apart from itself in complementary directions". And Anaximander - looking around, being empirical - not so unnaturally struck on the prime thermodynamic idea that the first parting of the apeiron would have to be into the warmer and the cooler. And then as this division proceeded to develop, it paved the way in turn for a division into the dryer and the wetter. Again, empirically, heat dries and cold dampens.

And so we have the start of a natural hierarchy of formed substances. We have the Greek elements of fire, air, water and earth as the four resulting mixtures (the hot dry and the cool dry, the hot wet and the cool wet).

Now later Greek philosophy rather messed up the simple natural purity of Anaximander's vision even as it sought to expand upon it. Obviously, the Athenians tried to work a strong notion of the divine back into it - or at least, some account of the mind seemed necessary. There was also the atomistic alternative - which did have some explanatory advantages, like stressing the notions of composition and the void. And atomism did try to argue for a rational naturalness in giving atoms the perfect shapes of the Platonic solids, or else providing them with hooks and other property-creating features.

So the notion of an ur-stuff did get confused. It became a divine spirit stuff - different from material stuff in a dualistic fashion. And it became a fundamentally particulate stuff - concrete particles rocking through an immaterial(!) void. So again a dualistic conception in that now existence was separated into the concretely material and causal contents, and an a-causal, non-material, non-involved nothingness as its cosmic container.

Thus you can see a parting of the ways from the orginally organic and holistic vision of Anaximander. Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism.

But modern science has returned to a holism where existence is the transformation of simple potential via a succession of symmetry breakings, and the duality of atomism has been repaired because particles are excitations in fields and spacetime has material properties.

So we return to the question of what is the ur-stuff, the hypostatic ground, the apeiron, from which our structured existence could arise.

And as you seem to be saying, we can only characterise it in terms of it being everything our well-formed world of substantial objects is not.

So that is indeed how I would define vagueness, or the quantum roil, or the One, or whatever technical metaphysical term we might wish to give to this critical and logically necessary idea.

The things we can say about it are that it must at least be the kind of thing out of which our existence could arise. And so if our existence is about a succession of symmetry breakings, then it is some kind of perfect symmetry. And that's great, because we have some maths to get a handle on it right there.

So what is the ultimate symmetry state? I've argued the standard understanding that symmetry is about changes that can't make a change (just as symmetry breakings are semiotically the differences that do make a difference).

Absolute nothingness seems one candidate for such an ideal initial state of symmetry. But that's logically out as nothing can come from nothing.

The alternative is instead an initial state of everythingness - a complete lack of limitation on action. So some kind of dimensionless, or infinitely dimensional, chaos. Unbound fluctuation. In a state of wildness, nothing is really happening because everything is happening. And logically it is quite easy to understand how the taming of such a roil by the emergence of symmetry-breaking constraints could produce our kind of hierarchically organised world.

The classic example of such a dissipative structure is a Benard cell where global hexagonally shaped convection currents form to organise the previously chaotic thermal motions of oil molecules being heated in a pan. The many directions that the molecules are going in are reduced to the particular directions of the convection flows. The universality of a global form is imposed on the material chaos and the convection cells become a real feature of the oily world.

So we can revisit the notion of the apeiron armed with all the maths and empiricism we have gathered over the past 2300 years. If we have a clear metaphysical model of what has come out of the apeiron, we can in negative descriptive fashion now also say something scientific about the "indescribable" nature of the apeiron.

So that is why I talk about it in terms of things like unbounded fluctuation. We now understand the concrete world of substantial objects in terms of bounded fluctuations. So it is simply logical that the apeiron would be the "other" of that.

Whatever is our current best theory of fundamental being, we can reverse that out dialectically to speak about what must then be the best possible theory of the cosmic fundamental potential - the possibility that must have grounded the actuality of our Universe.

Being a metaphysical debate makes it the realm or philosophy, not physics.

Physics will no doubt understand different forms in 400 years, just as it has changed throughout human history, with the discovery or loss of knowledge about how parts of the world work--understandings of empirical states not metaphysics.

Apo's problem, and the problem of "universals" in any context, is in trying to define the presence of states of the world in terms of metaphysics.

Supposely, logic imposes "constraints" on existence, such that one state is present over another. The "universal" is literally the idea that the meaning of thought creates states of existence. In knowing it, we supposedly have the rule which tells what states the world must be.

Eager to say we know how the world works, we have reversed the role of logic and the state of existence. We forget it's the empirical state which defines what is present in the world. Our "physics" becomes prescriptive. They start say the meaning of the world must always conform to them, rather than doing what physics should, identifying the meaning of present states of existence. The meaning of physics is subordinate to what the world does. It's never "universal," only specific to the states of the world which work that way.

The "rules" of physics are not a constraint on the world. They are an expression of what it happens to be doing at a moment.

For me the point is that nature contributes to our categorial perceptions and judgements; more than contributes: categorial perception and judgement is itself an expression of nature, just as we are. The further point is that we are, by no means, all there is to nature.

Methodological naturalism is just the tendency to discount supernatural interventions that contravene natural law. But then I think it's also necessary, when trying to understanding the more indeterministic spiritual side of things, in relation to both the animal and the human, not to abandon naturalism, and devolve to supernaturalism, but rather to greatly expand our conceptions of what is both natural and possible.

Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism. — Apokrisis

See Heisenberg's essay The Debate between Plato and Democritus.

Supposely, logic imposes "constraints" on existence, such that one state is present over another. — Willow

If logic wasn't universal, then you would never be able to prove an inference, or to say 'because of this, then that must be the case'. You can only say that, because thought itself, and language itself, relies on abstract universals in order to predict and declare. (Loyd Gerson paraphrasing Aristotle: 'if materialism were true, you literally couldn't think'; because each 'brain state' would only correspond to a specific moment of experience, there would be no general truths.) Thinking itself is an abstracting process; it is by virtue of this that the rational intelligence can see equivalences and make the inferences that makes discourse, and science, possible.

The problem for methodological naturalism, is that the basis of the order which makes logic possible, must always be prior to, or assumed by, naturalism, in order to create any explanation whatever. Which is why, again, logic and metaphysics have to be more general, and more 'vague', than any specific science - because they belong to a different order of experience than whatever we observe in the empirical domain.

Make logic possible? How is that a coherent idea? Logic is necessary. With the universal there can be no question of whether “it is” or “is not.” Universals are always true.

Aristotle is the one who doesn’t believe in the universal here. He is the one who says, in response to me telling him that it’s necessarily true that a tree means tree, that I’m talking nonsense unless I suppose some specific force of the world which makes logic true, as if the tree began without the meaning of tree. Logic supposedly isn’t enough on it’s own. Logic is thought be defined by states of the world or else fall into incoherence.

This is why Aristotle understands the world to be defined by general categories. To fill the supposed “gap” he relies on observed states of the world. On observing an human, he sets out a standard which supposedly tells us when human are present. We can supposedly tell when a human is present by these “general, universal properties” which define the existence of a human.

But this creates a problem. Now there is a restrictive standard. At what point does a thing qualify as human? What if it’s missing an arm? A leg? Certain states of consciousness? Or what if someone has an extra finger, limb or hair? If these “general universal properties” were to define the meaning they would have perfectly account for the meaning of any possible human. Clearly, this is untrue. Many possible humans do not fit these meanings.

Aristotle is a reductionist who eliminates the meaning expressed by many states just to get the (supposedly) “universal truth” which describes everything in one moment. Like the person saying “consciousness” is just a brain, Aristotle equivocates a vast array or states and the meaning they expressed with something else entirely.

Thinking is not an abstracting process. It is a specifying one. Each thought picks out one specific meaning, one which is no other, a universal. For metaphysics to be more general or vague destroys this. What are unique expressions of meaning get reduced to the presence of some other thought— “Humans are necessarily X,Y,Z ”, “Experiences are brains.”

The sort of inference you are talking about is reductionism. Supposedly, by having one thought (humans, experiences) we must mean another (X,Y,Z, brains) and there's is no room for these meanings to occur on their own terms.

In terms of metaphysics, one could not get more wrong. It’s the equivocation of the order of the empirical with the logical, which goes both ways. We end up in the absurd situation where the logical is read as empirical (a caused truth, the meaning of properties X,Y,Z=existing humans, the meaning of experiences=existing brains, etc.,etc.) and empirical is read as logical (supposedly, empirical states are necessarily by logic: first cause, PSR, God, "constrained by the universal,"etc.,etc.). For these metaphysics, "vagueness" is a requirement because the universal nature of every logical truth is rejected. For them any truth is "vague" because is it has to have its logical meaning given by a different meaning.

Universals are always true. — Willow

'Universal' is not a reference to "universal truths'.

Indeed, and that's the problem with "universal" as used by you and many others in this thread.

The "universals" are suggested to meet the standard of that which is true regardless of the empirical world. The sort of truth which obtains regardless of the flux of empirical states (which is how they are a different order than empirical states). Something that is true regardless of space/time.

Only universal truths are this. A "universal" which might or might not be true, which is defined by a force drawn against states of the world, lacks this necessity. Your "universals" are a contradiction.

You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right. — apokrisis

I don't think you did say that. But if that's what you meant, then fair enough, that's what you meant. But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think.

If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that. — apokrisis

I don't see why I would need or wish to make either of these arguments. My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated.

The "rules" of physics are not a constraint on the world. They are an expression of what it happens to be doing at a moment. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote in your post, although I would say 'what it appears to be doing to thinkers of a certain place and era'.

For me the point is that nature contributes to our categorial perceptions and judgements; more than contributes: categorial perception and judgement is itself an expression of nature, just as we are. The further point is that we are, by no means, all there is to nature.

Methodological naturalism is just the tendency to discount supernatural interventions that contravene natural law. But then I think it's also necessary, when trying to understanding the more indeterministic spiritual side of things, in relation to both the animal and the human, not to abandon naturalism, and devolve to supernaturalism, but rather to greatly expand our conceptions of what is both natural and possible. — John

You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethics and the social sciences? 'Naturalism' is an irrelevant category in the arts, for instance, or refers to something quite different in artistic creation and judgment than it does when the scientific method is involved.

In ethics, how shall we make judgments? By finding something appealing in evolutionary biology? Not for me.

In short: I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism. But if we circumscribe science to the realm of methodological naturalism, then we can do science together and apply it all over the shop and have a whale of a time.

When we do, we find categories there, and sub-categories of categories, and so on. Is that categorical forking resident in what we find, or in how we undertake and understand the finding, or a mixture of both? I'm arguing for a mixture of both.

But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think. — mcdoodle

And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?

If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.

My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated. — mcdoodle

Why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

And yes, human thinking in "any given place and era" is indeed historically situated - that is, you just gave a definition of being historically situated, not an argument.

So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy.

The point is the world is a construction. At any given moment it is constituted by itself. Not only is human thinking historically situated, but so is every state of the world. Gravity is only so by the measure of states that exist at a given point at time. At any moment it is possible the world might work differently and the gravity we know is no longer expressed.-- tomorrow the world might wake up to every object speeding into Earth as if it were a black hole. The "rule" of gravity only describes so long as the world acts like that. The logic of gravity is, therefore, not a constraint on what states of the world are possible, but rather an expression of only the particular states which exist.

I can't agree to that. It equivocates the being of the world with the being of the of our theories, treating the construction of our thoughts as the same as the construction of the thing we think about-- as if hypothising the world worked in some way was required for it to do so. This is inconsistent with observing events of the world which have yet to be described.

You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethics and the social sciences? — mcdoodle

I would say they are more or less part of the more indeterministic, spiritual side of things. Even animal behavior would be to some degree. Science deals with strict causation and mathematical modeling; these are not adequate methods outside of a fairly narrow range of enquiry.

'Naturalism' is an irrelevant category in the arts, for instance, or refers to something quite different in artistic creation and judgment than it does when the scientific method is involved.

In ethics, how shall we make judgments? By finding something appealing in evolutionary biology? Not for me.

I would say that in both the arts and ethics we make judgements using our natural moral and aesthethic intuitions. Of course these can be cultured, but there is nothing that could rightly be called supernatural or even artificial in such processes of enculturation. To say there is would be to artificially separate us from the rest of nature, which I think is a bad idea. But then even such artificial ideas are part and parcel of human nature, which in turn is part and parcel of nature.

In my view the category 'naturalism' is a perfectly natural, but undesirable, category which grows out of and contributes to misleading views of humans as being radically separated from the rest of nature.

In short: I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism. But if we circumscribe science to the realm of methodological naturalism, then we can do science together and apply it all over the shop and have a whale of a time.

When we do, we find categories there, and sub-categories of categories, and so on. Is that categorical forking resident in what we find, or in how we undertake and understand the finding, or a mixture of both? I'm arguing for a mixture of both.

Can you tell me exactly what "metaphysical naturalism" consists in. Landru was always going on about it, and yet when challenged he could never come up with a coherent definition. It turns out, as far as I could see, that he was talking about scientism, the idea that everything can be adequately, even exhaustively, explained in terms of causal and mathematical models, which I agree is a very narrow-minded idea. But Landru, because of his apparent inability to think beyond polemic, could never countenance the idea that science might have anything at all of interest to tell us about ourselves. I think it can, but this is very different than claiming that we could ever understand ourselves exhaustively in 'hard' science terms.

I agree with you that our categories are a "mixture of both", and that is what I have said from the start. But I think it also "resident in what we find", because what we find is obviously determined in part by "how we undertake and understand the finding". I really cannot see how this could be considered controversial or that there is any conflict between these three ideas.

And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?

If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.
....
So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy. — apokrisis

I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. I come late to all this philosophical stuff, but I try to be scrupulous in my judgment, and rely on a little more than Google searches. I've worked outwards from Aristotle and Plato to the Stoics and Epicureans then backwards to the pre-Socratics in the last year, but I don't claim to be well-read in this stuff, just trying to understand it.

I certainly don't accept laziness as one of my faults, nor that I'm a social constructionist. I can't say I exactly know what my 'position' is, I'm on something of a journey, and rather a Wittgensteinian in temper. Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument.

Can you tell me exactly what "metaphysical naturalism" consists in — John

Well I think of it as applying the category 'naturalism' to all, I mean all sorts of philosophical discussions, including those where it either is inapposite, or reductionist. One example: I remember sociobiology getting going in the 1970's, and feeling my blood boil at the attempt to explain things like gender differences or ethical arguments by supposed derivation from 'evolution' when feminism or ethics needs, to me, to be approached on different terms altogether. Landru talks about these things as different forms of 'discourse' and that's what the sociological and Continental approaches call them: the disciplines have their own histories and conventions. To try and derive ideas about them from a 'naturalism' that in turn derives from scientific realism is to try and play Go with chess pieces: it can be done but it's foolish because they are different games.

I'm doing a grad course in mostly analytic philosophy at the moment, and another area where this 'metaphysical naturalism' has struck me forcibly is something I'm interested in: what music is about. There is a strand of thinking, for instance, in talking about 'the ontology of music' that a score or a recorded musical performance is the basis of 'ontology', and that seems to me a dreary and belittling way of approaching one of the arts (and indeed the arts in other cultures where 'music' has a different importance and relevance) as if they were a branch of the natural world, as if the same sorts of issues apply in the same sorts of ways as they do with science - whereas to me they are a whole different sphere – 'discourse' when we talk about it – to which quite different concepts apply.

Sorry this is a distance from universals but you asked so I answered!

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'.

Would you go as far as to say, though, that science has nothing interesting to tell us about ourselves?

I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. — mcdoodle

(Y) I cannot and will not stand arguments. I enjoy discussion, not flame wars.

I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. — mcdoodle

And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.

Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy.

Be honest here. Did you know that there was only one recorded fragment of Anaximander's writings before you read the Wiki page a couple of days ago? Have you read Kahn or any other of the careful critiques?

Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument. — mcdoodle

You are welcome to speak for yourself. But you insult me in saying that my position is not grounded in rational scholarship.

And to remind again, the question was: why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

There are strong mathematical arguments that hierarchical organisation is inevitable in nature - even when contingency appears to rule that nature.

If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale, then that very uncontrolled freedom throws up the big slow global processes that become the context, the potential constraints, on the small fast local processes.

So scale randomness produces hierarchical order as a simple mathematical fact. But to know about this, I guess you have to have studied modern hierarchy theory.

The point is hierarchical organisation is a misapplication of logic to casualty. One which mistakenly views logical expressions (e.g. gravity, "laws of physics," etc.,etc.) as the source of existing states. Supposedly, things on one level order the presence of things on another, such that various outcomes are inevitable in the world-- there is this "universal" idea that constrains the world.

What is at stake is not whether we know how the world works (we do, to a large extent), but the means by which it works in this way. Rather than springing from logic (a "universal" constraint), states of the world are existing things in themselves-- they have to be. So instead of states of the world being defined out of the universal or the semiotic, they are logically their own things. There is no hierarchy. Just a whole lot of things swirling around each other. We can't reduce the meaning of the world to a nice set of "universals" which give an account of everything.

The semiotic is driven into an expression of states themselves. The gravity relationship between the Earth and the sun, for example, no longer needs defining by the "universal" or the semiotics of human language. It a feature of those two states themselves, until such time (if any) they work differently. The same is true for any meaning of anything in the world.

Thus, there is no "vagueness" to any state of the world. All the way up, all the way down, and all the way around, there are infinite specific states and relations. "Vagueness" is just the realisation of the connection of the world without knowledge of any specific state.

If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale — apokrisis

This is incoherent becasue no process is capable of unfolding over any spatiotemporal scale. Processes are states of the world in relation or working together. They are tied to their own spatiotemporal moment. We can't have our Big Bang, for example, which unfolds outside its time. My body can't replace its cells outside its space and time. And so on. And so on.

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'. — John

Yep. LGU promotes a confusion here. While anyone can coin their own definitions of naturalism, there is a real history of something called natural philosophy that tries to stick to Aristotle's holistic naturalism, and so usually stands against reductionism, mechanics, and scientism.

So naturalism in this tradition is about four causes, immanence, hierarchies, organicism - all those good (pre-scholastic) Aristotelean things. And you can find it popping up all through history in various guises, but, in modern times, particularly in holism, hierarchy theory, systems science, complexity theory, second order cybernetics, semiotics, neural networks, ecology, dissipative structure theory and condensed matter physics.

A confusion is that this organic naturalism doesn't actually reject mechanical reductionism. Instead, it seeks to incorporate it as its natural "other" - organicism being true to it own dialectical reasoning in this way.

So the mechanical view is not wrong. Nature does come to regulate itself in a very simple and mechanical looking fashion. Newton's laws show how the habits of the Universe can become so strongly developed that the Universe looks to run like clockwork - until quantum mechanics comes along to show that such a mechanical determinacy, such a suppression of spontaneity, is only emergent and not fundamental.

Anyway, the reductionist view really works because it is so simple. In a nutshell, it is the view that drops formal and final cause - the universals - out of the picture, and just tells the story of things in terms of material and efficient cause. This really works from a human technological point of view, because of course we are planning to impose our own formal and final causes on nature. We are going to come up with our own desires and designs. Thus we don't need to care about what nature itself might have in mind. Scientism can rule.

But then natural philosophy is meant to be stepping back to take the full holistic view where nature itself is granted as having formal and final cause in a full physicalist sense. They are real causes and not some nominalist fiction.

Now this immanent holism then treads on the toes of theistic and transcendental metaphysics - the same dualism and romanticism that informs the (muddled) Continental conception of the world.

So natural philosophy often attracts the mystic fellow travellers. Its organicism and holism can sound rather woo, so it attracts woo lovers. It has overtones of eastern philosophy especially. And in many ways, it is very much related to eastern "hard" philosophy, especially the doctrine of dependent co-arising, scholars like Nagarjuna, schools like Kyoto. So systems thinking has mushy edges. But within modern theoretical biology (naturally), you have a rigorous and mathematical tradition.

And there, scientists like Stan Salthe (a great friend) call themselves now natural philosophers to openly distance themselves from the scientistic mainstream. Aristotelean naturalism is a banner to rally around.

So I divide the camps into three.

There is material reductionism - the mechanical philosophy of material and efficient causes.

There is romantic dualism - the claim that material reductionism can't touch formal and final cause, these being aspects of the transcendent mind/spirit/value.

And then there is the holism of naturalism - a full four causes approach where the world immanently self-organises into being in organismic fashion.

The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes. That problem was solved by semiotics. Peircean semiotics shows how the world can be divided into matter and symbol, and then interact and develop as a result of its causality being divided in this very fashion.

So three ontologies. And philosophical naturalism is the hardest to understand because it is intrinsically the most complex. It is not monistic like reductionism, nor dualistic like romanticism, but triadically self-intertwined.

This is why people always complain about the opacity of Hegel and Peirce. And yet they are the metaphysicians that really thought things through in systems fashion.

Yet although you can draw on Hegel and Pierce for elements of naturalism, I think both were actually 'romantic dualists' in some respects (at least, according to your classification, although I don't think that they would have used the terminology themselves):

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws.

C.S. Pierce

Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.

The latter is clearly descended from the (neo)platonic conception of 'the One' in my view (albeit considerably elaborated and re-interpreted by Hegel.)

Aristotle was a naturalist - many would say the first! - but he also argued for a first cause or unmoved mover, etc, which was an essential premise of his philosophy.

Semiosis certainly does offer a non-reductionist account of the processes of life, but at the same time, I don't think it recognizes that behind the idea of the sig an implicit idealism.

There is never any point arguing against you WoD as your confused posts always do such a great job of arguing against themselves.