@Nagase

It feels kind of dirty to be arguing about a specific counter-example to a far more general idea, if you'd want to transfer this discussion about how mathematical abstractions work to another thread I'd be interested in it. We're not really talking about Sellarsian nominalism any more, we've simplified to an avenue which the logical falsity of the idea turns on but we're not learning much about the idea through the discussion. At least, if you're similar of mind to me on how to learn about stuff.

Quick thought. When we say 'the apple is red' we don't mean 'the apple is red to me.' — csalisbury

Yes, the statement that the apple is red is not the apple being red and requires intersubjective conditions. As to the apple being red, I probably should have said "a percipient" instead of "the percipient", with the further qualification that a percipient has to be suitably equipped to see red.

You both may very well be right, I'm not sure, but I don't understand the connection between this statement and predication as relation. The way you formatted the post suggests they're related, but I'm missing something. If anything, your discussion of predication-qua-relation seems anti-universals. — csalisbury

The point is that nominalism only covers half the story: what we say, and does nothing to explain what we see. We don't see universals (absolutes) we see resemblances (a kind of relation); it is language which reifies the resemblances as absolutes or universals. As I mentioned in an earlier post resemblance itself becomes absolutized. It is the web of intersubjective experience and expression that provides the context that saves us from an infinite regress. Or to put it another way around; it is forgetting that context that leads to an illusion that there would be an infinite regress without universals to form a terminus and foundation. The salvation of the virtuous hermeneutic circle.

I am contrasting the atomist conception - where for no reason, the world starts with a bunch of balls in motion in a void - with a Peircean-style ontology where there is less than nothing at the beginning. Beginnings are vague - just unbound fluctuation without a relational organisation. There are no meaningful elements to get a game going. These meaningful elements have to evolve out of the murk via bootstrapping self-organisation. — apokrisis

I see you're still clinging to that mouthful of illogical incoherencies. Why don't you just give it up? Obviously this "new physical view of reality" which you profess is nothing but nonsense.

It feels kind of dirty to be arguing about a specific counter-example to a far more general idea, if you'd want to transfer this discussion about how mathematical abstractions work to another thread I'd be interested in it. We're not really talking about Sellarsian nominalism any more, we've simplified to an avenue which the logical falsity of the idea turns on but we're not learning much about the idea through the discussion. At least, if you're similar of mind to me on how to learn about stuff. — fdrake

If you wish to do so, I have no qualms about it. I may not be able to engage it fully, however, since I'm rather busy at the moment (posting here is basically a way of procrastinating correcting tons of undergrad logical exercises...).

I'm a nasty combination of busy and having a fever at the minute. Unlikely to happen. Oh well.

I definitely agree with this, in that I'd hold that most properties that appear simple aren't really simple (I was just agreeing that, even if redness or triangularity are simple, there are other properties that aren't obviously simple). Of course, they can't all be complex, since any theory must have its primitives. So there is a distinction here to be made.

My only disagreement is that I don't think (Carnapian?) explication is what is doing the work here---rather, I think just plain explanation is. We are not explicating a usage, we're explaining the structure of the world.

Gotta show my cards here - I'm fairly ignorant of most analytic philosophy. I've read a little Wittgenstein, and a few papers (Quine, Davidson, Sellars) but, when it comes to AP, I'm more like the guy fixing drinks at the country club and listening in while the others talk. Frege & Carnap (even Russell) quit the club long before I started working, so all I know is what I've heard the others say about them.

All of which is to say: You seem to have a comfy familiarity with the language and customs of AP. I don't, so most of the words I use (like 'explication') I'm just using ordinary-language-wise, and any shades of technical or esoteric meaning will likely be totally accidental.

The point I was trying to make was that, given that any property can be notated simply (has this janus-faced thing of being complex while nonetheless being able to present itself in a single symbol or word) I don't understand the criticism of jumblese on the grounds that it can't handle complex properties.

It seems like the argument would be not that jumblese can't handle complex properties, but that it can't handle explanation. That may be true, I'm not sure, but it seems like a significantly different thing. And my first, gut-level thought, is why can't it? It seems like explanation is just a concatenation of different 'moves'. Something like: I ask you to hold this thing in mind. all the moves I make will be a way of expanding our communal understanding of that thing. And then you make the moves. Predication is one convenient convention for doing that, but making use of that convention doesn't commit one to any sort of metaphysical or ontological truth. That's at least how I understand it.

Unless you just mean on a typographical level, like how if we're bolding a word, or changing its position etc, how is it typographically possible, in jumblese, to do represent all these moves?

Yes, the statement that the apple is red is not the apple being red and requires intersubjective conditions. As to the apple being red, I probably should have said "a percipient" instead of "the percipient", with the further qualification that a percipient has to be suitably equipped to see red.

Are there any properties, in this relational scheme, that wouldn't require a percipient/sapient? Property-as-relation, as you've outlined it, feels like it tends, as if by some innate propensity, toward a kind of transcendental idealism (which is fine, I just don't know whether you'd agree with that characterization.)

The point is that nominalism only covers half the story: what we say, and does nothing to explain what we see. We don't see universals (absolutes) we see resemblances (a kind of relation); it is language which reifies the resemblances as absolutes or universals. As I mentioned in an earlier post resemblance itself becomes absolutized. It is the web of intersubjective experience and expression that provides the context that saves us from an infinite regress. Or to put it another way around; it is forgetting that context that leads to an illusion that there would be an infinite regress without universals to form a terminus and foundation. The salvation of the virtuous hermeneutic circle.

I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. I don't mean that in the sense that you're saying one thing, but what you're really implying is another. I mean that if i came across this paragraph and read it on a surface level, just for what it intends to say, it would strike me as being anti-universal. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here - I'd have to think about it - I'm just confused as to how you intend it to be read.

So I got salty, apo, and I hope you'll forgive me that. I have this personal struggle with Theories of Everything where I'm sometimes drawn to them, sometimes frustrated with them, sometimes [everything else]. You're such a perfectly archetypical TOE poster that I think I sometimes skim over what you're saying and want to grapple with you on the benefits/costs of TOEs in general. I did that the other night, skimming over the particulars you'd brought up.

So I do regret that. But stilll. I mean if i see your name pop on on any thread, despite the subject, I'll have a hunch about what you'll say, and I'm usually right. I may not get it, quite, but I'm in the ballpark. You never come out and play - you always bring it back to peirce. The scope is limited, I mean. If the whole world is an x-partite thing, why do all your posts have to carve away illusions until they fit in that x-partite scheme? If your posts distill everything, then isn't there another dynamic which is the world undistilled-versus the world brought back to the distilled-core? And isn't that dynamic itself a core part?

Sometimes, talking with you, I imagine a hyper-smart guy on the stoop who wants to frame everything on the street in terms of the stoop. Whereas its more like - come out here and tussle man! we like you, lets have some fun! Its not a matter of Peirce is right or wrong here. It's more like - to what extent does wrapping up this - and any - conversation into the same peircian thing further or enrichen the convo? Your posts didn't enlighten me on Sellars, I mean, but they did remind me of what you believe. I could apply that to any convo tho. Just come and tussle!

I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. — csalisbury

What @Janus says, in the post that you quoted from, rather reads to me like a form of pragmatism. Janus had insisted that nominalism only provides one half of the story. This is also how I view the Sellarsian thesis that kick-started this thread (as merely advancing one half of the story, that is). The advocacy of nominalism is prompted by a rejection of a correspondance theory that reifies the intentional content of the predicates of a language. However, neo-pragmatism, as I conceives of it (in a rather neo-Kantian sort of way) doesn't rest content with objecting to the reification of universals and rather seeks to account for their disclosure (of 'situated-' or 'pragmatized-universals', as we might call them) within a web of embodied practices (scientific or otherwise) that language can never be disembroiled from.

Ah, ok, so I guess what threw me is that what you and Janus are talking about ( feels to me) like exactly the kind of thing that Sellars is gesturing toward. I think he's kind of outside the nominalist/universalist net. To me the stuff in the OP feels less like an erection of a nominalist metaphysics (or an attack on a realist one) than a clearing away to make room for a less constrained approach. (Your quick sketch feels very close to what I think as well)

So I got salty, apo, and I hope you'll forgive me that. — csalisbury

Never a problem.

But stilll. I mean if i see your name pop on on any thread, despite the subject, I'll have a hunch about what you'll say, — csalisbury

Of course. I have a TOE - a holistic one. And it stands in opposition to other TOEs - like standard issue reductionism and standard issue pluralism (which are essentially the same thing anyway).

So yes, the same basic battle repeats. Why not?

You never come out and play - you always bring it back to peirce. — csalisbury

That is ridiculous. I will always come out and play if people can muster their own moves.

And Peirce just happens to have done a surprisingly thorough job of tying it all up in a bow. There are hundreds of others I can cite on a systems approach to metaphysics, and indeed do cite. But why shouldn't I choose a pivotal modern philosopher as the anchor for discussions? Be reasonable.

The scope is limited, I mean. If the whole world is an x-partite thing, why are you always leaving out the non-peirce part. — csalisbury

What is this non-Peirce part then? What is being left out exactly?

Remember that the triadicism incorporates dualism (as the dialectical or the dichotomous) and the monadic (as the vagueness which is the pure potential, the ground of being).

So it is holistic in that it incorporates all the standard arities of metaphysics. If you can show that reality is quadratic, or polyadic, or whatever, then go for it. But there are good arguments for why three dimensions are both the irreducible minimum for analysing reality, and also thus the most you need.

The simplest possible world has to be triadic or hierarchical - that is complex enough to be contextual, relational, or constraints-based. But then also, those three dimensions are enough. Four or five would be unstable.

Its a mathematical fact. You can tie a knot in three dimensions, but it will unravel in four.

Whereas its more like - come out here and tussle man! — csalisbury

I'm baffled. Having worked so long and hard to achieve some clarity, you think I should abandon it? You are saying perhaps I would make more friends that way. But what if I'm actually really lazy and I need that hostility to motivate me to keep working on the arguments long after I am already satisfied with them? :)

What is this non-Peirce part then? What is being left out exactly?

Remember that the triadicism incorporates dualism (as the dialectical or the dichotomous) and the monadic (as the vagueness which is the pure potential, the ground of being).

From the point of view of triadicism, nothing at all has been left out. There's the stoop, the non-stoop, and the third thing. You don't have to leave the stoop to understand it. Heck, there's war, non-war, and the third thing. Lazily explain that to the soldier going by, 'oh no, i get it, trust me'

Or to take another metaphor (cringe). You can create a theory of literary criticism that goes like this: All literature is three part: It's the struggle against the father (the canonical author who precedes you), the refusal to struggle with the father (a rejection of the struggle), and the underlying thing (where the struggle comes from, what causes us to either struggle or refuse to struggle. ) (this isn't just metaphoric, this is Bloomian criticism, a real school)

The very structure of this criticism ensures that, if I'm committed to it, nothing will fall outside it. Eliot struggles with Whitman. Pynchon struggles with Melville. Ashbery appears not to struggle with anyone, but thats just the flight from the struggle, which is its own struggle. The structure is such that I can recode anything within the structure.

"you're leaving something out' says the doe-eyed writing major. "ok, what" says the professor. "Well, the, um, like that bit in josh's story, it loses something if" "No, it falls well within. So. Josh talks lyrically about this, but its exactly the thing that Cheever, Josh's favorite, would never talk about, so he's clearly evading the struggle, ok, so...""

But what if I'm actually really lazy and I need that hostility to motivate me to keep working on the arguments long after I am already satisfied with them? :)

If you're satisfied why keep working? And why would you be lazy if you didn't? And why, god help you, is hostility the crucial ingredient?

That is ridiculous. I will always come out and play if people can muster their own moves.

No way. You'll come out and play if you recognize their moves as something you can beat with your own. This is how it gets rewritten in the mind 'their moves aint shit, less they're moves that i can countermove to'. lo and behold: Everyone worth moving against, can be beaten.

What I'm trying to say @apokrisis is that reality is irreducibly polyvalent. The triadic thing is what the mind tends towards, often to great effect. But it's still just following a comfortable tendency to its terminal point. Life is weird. Entropy is comforting. Maybe we can trace everything back to the three parts. But just, like, hanging out a cocktail party (or looking at a good painting, or reading a good novel) if you bring it back....you lose something. And maybe you can recast what you lost (you can) but that doesn't mean it wasn't lost.

To me the stuff in the OP feels less like an erection of a nominalist metaphysics (or an attack on a realist one) than a clearing away to make room for a less constrained approach. (Your quick sketch feels very close to what I think as well) — csalisbury

That's possible. I've located a copy of Naturalism and Ontology but I haven't had the time to dig into it. There are conflicting strands in Sellars's thinking. Brandom and Rorty like to portray him as a heir of American pragmatism and a progenitor to them, but he also appears committed to viewing the ontology of the natural sciences as being foundational in some sort of way. Sellars's own students Paul Churchland and Alex Rosenberg appear to have inherited the scientistic foundationalist strand of his thinking. John Haugeland, however, credits Sellars's neo-Kantianism (and Heidegger) as a main inspiration for his own account (with his 'beholdenness theory of truth') of the comparatively greater generality of scientific ontologies with respect to more mundane ones, while disclaiming any foundational priority to the former. The gain in generality is paid for in loss of specificity.

See, so. I see Sellars as one of the few AP guys who 'gets', really 'gets' Kant. And also has time for Hegel (a tradition carried on, of course, by Brandom.) Heidegger is the natural outcome of all that. (Anyone can say what they want about Heidegger, but he 'got' the tradition. I think that's beyond dispute. What's open for dispute is what he did with that tradition [i agree with the poetry stuff, not so much with the nazi stuff. and i think he wasn't quite ummm he was right about the poetry stuff but limited in poetic receptivity.) I think Sellars, like any good drunk, was chasing a vision that eluded any of his pupils. Call him the F Scott Fitzgerald of AP

Will return to this thread soon but Haugeland's reading of Heidegger is seriously one of the most interesting and just flat out facinating that I know. It basically reads him in Sellars' terms, and the audacity of it is just so cool.

Are there any properties, in this relational scheme, that wouldn't require a percipient/sapient? Property-as-relation, as you've outlined it, feels like it tends, as if by some innate propensity, toward a kind of transcendental idealism (which is fine, I just don't know whether you'd agree with that characterization.) — csalisbury

I would say percipients are required to experience, judge and formulate relations. This is the old question; do the processes we observe in nature exist without us? I would say they do, but as perceived they are both something more and something less than they are as unperceived. Perception and conception obviously adds a (tremendously rich) dimension, and yet at the same time is not exhaustive.

I still don't really understand. Everything you're saying here reads like a defense of nominalism. I don't mean that in the sense that you're saying one thing, but what you're really implying is another. I mean that if i came across this paragraph and read it on a surface level, just for what it intends to say, it would strike me as being anti-universal. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here - I'd have to think about it - I'm just confused as to how you intend it to be read. — csalisbury

@Pierre-Normand expresses very well, and probably more clearly than I would have, pretty much what I want to say in answer to this. :smile:

One thing I want to add, though: My criticism is of nominalism, not of Sellars. It seems that @StreetlightX has characterised Sellar's thoughts on predicates as being (more or less?) nominalistic. I'm not sure whether that is an accurate characterization or not. I haven't read much of Sellars.

But just, like, hanging out a cocktail party (or looking at a good painting, or reading a good novel) if you bring it back....you lose something. — csalisbury

Aren’t you confusing life and metaphysics? I don’t lose one by doing the other. They get to take turns.

All literature is three part: It's the struggle against the father (the canonical author who precedes you), the refusal to struggle with the father (a rejection of the struggle), and the underlying thing (where the struggle comes from, what causes us to either struggle or refuse to struggle. ) (this isn't just metaphoric, this is Bloomian criticism, a real school) — csalisbury

Surely Bloom is working at the dialectical level - the production of individuation - rather than seeking the final triadic or hierarchical state of stable resolution?

So he is in the ballpark in being dialectical. But it is different in a key fashion. The assumption is that individuation - the young poet managing to be seen as original and distinct from what has gone before - is the terminal goal. And Bloom lists six dialectical manoeuvres to achieve such individuation.

But my hierarchy story is about the final overall resolution of a dialectic. It is about the further thing of a dichotomy going to equilibrium in being expressed evenly, homogenously, fractally, over all possible scales of being.

Hence in this case, it is the view of the whole poetic system as it develops in time. Thus if the point of individuation is to disturb - actually disrupt the old order - then equilibrium becomes the state of development where new poets no longer really disturb much by their presence.

One way of doing that is if all potential poets - that is every person in a population - is trying to be a poet. And modern civilisation, with its universal literary education and self publishing, goes along way towards that. There are so many individuals trying to individuate in Bloomian fashion that you wind up with the scalefree statistics of a hierarchically organised statistical equilibrium.

They call it the fat tail effect in publishing. Tons of individual authors with tiny readerships and a few with truly outsized success.

So a hierarchy theory/dissipative structure theory analysis makes specific statistical predictions of the world. Literature output looks to conform. Once you have a crowd trying to individuate, you get a world where success has the characteristics that the maths of a triadic metaphysics predicts.

So Bloom was on to something. But like Hegel needed to be completed by Peirce - oh how Bloomian! - Bloom is only talking about the first step of individuation. The second part of the story is how disruption itself gets homogenised and normed.

We all end up thinking we could be young gun poets, or instagram stars, or scriptwriters, or whatever. But unlike the first Romantic poets, any actual disruption these days has a truly vast legacy of influence to overturn. Individuation has become both more equal opportunity, and also way more challenging due to the weight of all that has already been achieved.

My triadic approach predicts this. It’s maths has arise out of observation of the way the entirety of nature must work.

Sounds a bit like the "end of history". :nerd:

So - and I've just started catching up on this thread, so this might have become apparent in other posts - his point is that predication is something we do, and hence predicates are not something we find but something we use?

As Austin?

So - and I've just started catching up on this thread, so this might have become apparent in other posts - his point is that predication is something we do, and hence predicates are not something we find but something we use?

As Austin? — Banno

Here is a relevant paragraph from the SEP article on Wilfrid Sellars:

"Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic linguistic structure, predication itself, involves a commitment to abstracta, for common explications of predication make essential mention of properties, relations, and such. Sellars argues that this gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact, misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic correctness. Sellars offers a different explication of predication, according to which the focus is not on any relation between an object and some abstract entity, but qualifying and arranging names to suit them for certain linguistic purposes. So understood, the Platonist’s treatment of predication seems, again, to be an elaborate and misleading way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. At the most basic, atomic level, predication is a matter of endowing the names with counterpart characteristics of the objects they purport to name, enabling some true atomic sentences to ‘map’ or ‘picture’ objects in the world. Predication thus commits one only to natural objects potentially correlated with each other. See NAO, chapter 3, for the most complete statement of this view."

This is a bit of a head scratcher since, although it betrays a clear resistance to the reification of abstracta, it still seems to express a commitment to "real" material objects ('substances' or 'continuants',) seemingly individuated quite appart from our individuating practices. I guess there is no shortcut but to delve into chapter three of Naturalism and Ontology (or pay closer attention to the excellent earlier contributions in this thread ;-)

I don't know what Austin's view on predicates or properties is.

Banno I hope the above also clarifies why X being above Y does not indicate the predicate, but rather indicates the general function which the predicate contingently happens to fulfil. — StreetlightX

Interesting - and subtle.

“The extralinguistic domain consists of objects, not facts. To put it bluntly, propositional form belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders” — StreetlightX

So we might have a world of objects, and a language consisting entirely of proper names? AM I on the right track?

Cheers. I'll keep reading.

I don't know what Austin's view on predicates or properties is. — Pierre-Normand

Roughly, that there is nothing had in common by, say, red things, but instead we just use the word "red" in a way that suits our purposes. The meaning of "red" is nothing more than it's use to refer to those sorts of things. To pick the red sports car from the yellow one; the red of the sunset from the grey of the associated clouds.

Cheers. I'll keep reading — Banno

I actually meant that primarily as a self-admonition since there appears to be some good contributions that I either skipped or only read very obliquely.

Cool. Good to see the thread growing, though.

Not too happy with the analysis of truth in the Stanford article. so

‘Rot,’ in German, means red
as

‘Rot’s, in German, are •red•s.

“According to this analysis, meaning is not a relation for the very simple reason that ‘means’ is a specialized form of the copula” (MFC: 431).

Hm. x is rot, in German, iff x is •red• ?

then

[F]or a proposition to be true is for it to be assertible, where this means not capable of being asserted … but correctly assertible; assertible, that is, in accordance with the relevant semantical rules, and on the basis of such additional, though unspecified, information as these rules may require… . ‘True’, then, means semantically assertible (‘S-assertible’) and the varieties of truth correspond to the relevant varieties of semantical rule (SM, IV, §26: 101).

This is described as a pragmatic approach, but looks to me more like a redundant approach - "P is true" just means P.

Roughly, that there is nothing had in common by, say, red things, but instead we just use the word "red" in a way that suits our purposes. The meaning of "red" is nothing more than it's use to refer to those sorts of things. To pick the red sports car from the yellow one; the red of the sunset from the grey of the associated clouds. — Banno

In what text did Austin express that?

Earlier in this thread, @Nagase and @fdrake had an interesting exchange regarding the the sorts of constraint that the references of our predicates might have on our predicative judgements. Nagase was focusing on the case of so called natural kind terms (while appealing to the sort of semantics developed by Kripke and Putnam), while fdrake was stressing than even in the case where we may appear to have cut nature (or the quasi-Platonic realm of mathematical entities) at its joints, there always remain the liability that may arise unforeseen particulars that aren't neatly sorted by our extent predicates. So, it would seem that the sort of pragmatism advocated by fdrake is close to the form of pragmatism that you are attributing to Austin.

However, while I like my pragmatism to be "radical" in the sense that it doesn't leave any room for a residual core of self-individuated natural kinds (entities, that is, that are individuated as they are in themselves quite appart from our interests in sorting them out and reidentifying them in specific ways), I also seek to resist the sort of linguistic-idealism that attends to some forms of social constructivism. The trouble with this idealism, on my view, isn't that it's too radical but rather that it is not radical enough. Through picturing us as being entirely free to sort out bare particulars into whatever kinds we might deem useful to sort them into, it tends to portray us as purely intellectual subjects who are encountering them passively in experience rather than as embodied agents who are dealing with them in our Umwelt and our social worlds. Hence, a truly radical pragmatism must seek, in my view, to account for the efficacy of the concrete practices of individuating objects and their properties in such a way that the issue of capturing us in the process of individuating them from sideways on (to use McDowell's phrase) -- that is in such a way that we can make sense of the separate existence of (material) objects, on the one side, and of (intellectual) subjects, on the other, prior to the existence of embodied practices of individuation -- is entirely dispensed with as an unintelligible possibility.

This is described as a pragmatic approach, but looks to me more like a redundant approach - "P is true" just means P. — Banno

In the wake of Davidson't work on truth and 'radical' interpretation, disquotational theories of truth have come to acquire quite a bit more substance than the redundancy theory of truth. That's because while the claim of redundancy still applies to individual instances of Tarski's T-schema, the whole theory that generates the schemata, and which rest on a substantive (and pragmatic) interpretation of the language as a whole, has a richer content than could accrues from merely providing any finite bunch of those schemata in extension.

In what text did Austin express that? — Pierre-Normand

Are there a priori concepts?

The argument proceeds by showing that understanding a concept is no more than understanding how to use the associated terms. So understanding the concept red is just being able to use the word "red".

Are there a priori[/i] concepts?[/i]

The argument proceeds by showing that understanding a concept is no more than understanding how to use the associated terms. So understanding the concept red is just being able to use the word "red". — Banno

Thanks! I see it's the second chapter in his Philosophical Papers, and only 22 pages long. I'll read it. Austin is one of my favorite philosophers.