I don't think this follows. — StreetlightX

An excellent point. The picture of the world is part of the world. Another argument against the idea that we have a mental model that we refer to, which is distinct from the world it models.

I'm going away for a week, and I don't have time to write what I want to say, so it will have to wait until I return at which time it may no longer be relevant. Oh, well...

...at which time it may no longer be relevant. Oh, well... — Janus

Don't worry. I also often postpone responses for a long time because I want to think things though first or do some more readings about the topic. There is no harm done in resurrecting dormant threads, or revisiting an old point within a thread, with the statement of some new thought. In fact, it's better than keeping up with the flow of the discussion while expressing half-baked or knee-jerk opinions. Also, truly philosophical questions tend to retain most of their relevance for two and a half millennia or more.

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

But the boast of metaphysics is that its providing the ultimate. Everything can be explained and understood by reference to [metaphysical model]. The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety.

[yes, but you're doing the same thing, now, with variety and texture, that your 'metaphysician' was doing with 'otherness'.]

This is the finger pointing to the moon. I can engage in that texture and variety and experience. I can, sitting at my computer, conjure up a whole host of precise, singular, memories etc. I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. I find that what I'm doing, when I do this, is a single kind of activity among many. However, this particular activity has the strange distinction of wanting to say that all the other activities are somehow linked back to this one.

My triadic approach predicts this. — apo, regarding a new and improved neo-bloomian approach

Yes, but you've missed the point of the Bloom example entirely. You asked what your approach leaves out. I used the Bloom example to point out that, given a Bloomian lens, nothing will ever be left out. It will always find that the material it looks at fits into its system, in the same way an engine will always find the same use for gasoline. But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. Tweaking and improving it to make it even better at leaving nothing out is...well, an anticipated response, I guess.



tldr; I think there's something askew with 'the very idea' of metaphysics. 'metaphysics,' I think, represents a useful activity ( recursive cognitive modeling) that has metastasized (other things can do this too though: religion, myth, a photographer who can only see the world as composition etc etc. Group em all together under Midas-ism)

[so romanticism then?]

Nah, I think Blake railing against the demonic mills and all that is well-within a triadic model. The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. A poem about how poems are better than reason is very much prey to the sort of thing you're talking about. A poem that communicates is something else.

[so lets talk about that 'something else', then]

If I do so, on your terms, you'll always be right, because you've set down the rules. e.g. [show me, on this table, something that isn't on this table.] But now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc.

Good point; I think that's a very good approach. I often do go off half-cocked myself, and end up saying some ill-considered things. :worry:

The metaphysician may lay down his metaphysics from time to time in order to engage in life. Yet, when he takes it up again, he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. — csalisbury

As usual, I would point out that you are treating as a bug the exact thing I would call the feature.

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

But I am saying that ideally, the two activities would be complementary extremes. The "doing well" would be doing both well in a reciprocally-defining fashion. So one doesn't ever have to lose sight of the other. Indeed, both knows what it is by keeping its "other" squarely in its sights.

Practically speaking, this might mean being conscious of how a learnt habit of analysis or critique can interfere with "just living life". So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

Can becoming more analytic foster its corollary? Or must it simply replace it?

A balanced life would be where you can live the contrasting extremes of being both on the inside and the outside in a fully expressed fashion. The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance.

The easy trick is to make the irreducible stuff the 'other' which is always-already included as other. However this stroke already misses the varied texture which is experienced as that textured variety. — csalisbury

Again, you have this fixation for either/or and missing my point - it is the dialectic of "possibly either/or" that leads you to the resolution, the synthesis, that is "definitely both".

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

What I am pointing out to you is your fixed habits of thoughts. If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

And that is fine. There is always that corollary. But my argument is that my brand of systems metaphysics incorporates the reaction to every action. I am already including the pluralism that makes my totality the complete one. In Peircean fashion, I am saying contingency and particularity are basic ... and that makes no difference. Even the contingent and the particular - the individuated - makes no sense except in the context of necessary and the general.

Pluralism depends on unity and couldn't just exist on its own. (Or the other way around.)

I can express these in poems and literature, through playing with friends etc etc. I *can't* do that with the other-oriented third of a triadic metaphysics. All I can do is apply that metaphysics to this or that thing where all I find is repetitions of the same pattern. — csalisbury

Poems and literature can be a way to distance yourself from lived reality. They can be bad metaphysics.

Even at school I told my teacher I wasn't going to analyse the set texts as it would spoil any enjoyment they might have. I rejected the idea of creating a critical distance.

Of course, I just wanted to avoid any homework. But still, I really do believe if that an author has an important point to make, poetry is the least efficient way to make it.

I love Tarkovsky's films. However I won't waste time trying to extract a concrete message from them.

But what it will lose, if it pretends to be a Literary Theory of Everything, is the poem itself. — csalisbury

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

However, what you frame as either/or, I say has triadic unity. If you have a reason for stepping back from the local level of folk enjoying their culture, then you can start to see the production of meaning in terms of some theory. And that theory will be useful - meaningful at its own meta-level. It will reveal the patterns underlying the mechanics of the human response, the methods used to create.

Yes, if you are operating at the level of an art critic or social anthropologist, you might "lose something" by working at the level of generalised necessity - you will lose precisely the contingent particulars. But why would you lose the complete ability to move between the two levels of experiencing the world?

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic. My semiotic argument is that both are naturalistic and authentic. Or to put it the other way, the lived level is just as socially constructed.

The Romantics qua Romantics were thoroughly infected and inflected by the dialectical. — csalisbury

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Romanticism set itself up as the other of the reductionist/materialist Enlightenment. And so it tried to express that otherness in every possible way.

If the Enlightenment said humans are naturally socially constructed creatures, then the Romantics wanted to get outside of that with both more extreme views of nature (the innocent savage) and of spirit (the sublime self).

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

But Now if I ask you to write a poem in response, or if I ask you do some improv with me etc. — csalisbury

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

Why would that surprise me, given my particular totaliser scheme here?

Even though this comes chronologically late in your post, I think its a good place to begin. I'm trying to understand why you thought I thought this would be surprising to you. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I've seen you make this kind of point before on the forums. What I was trying to do was demonstrate that I agree with you on this point, in order to show that what I was trying to say wasn't that kind of thing. Strangely, you took this as a starting point to remind me of the same structure I had just outlined. so:

So the dialectical manoeuvres of Romanticism are exactly what my systems logic would predict. Everything semiotic always works like that - creating itself by find its otherness to the other.

Of course, I'm well aware. I said the same thing, or tried to, in order to orient us both toward a particular obstacle, to say 'hey we both see this, it's a very real thing, and I don't want to go toward that either.'

As I say, I tend to agree that poetry or art doesn't really need any overarching theory if the issue is finding "raw sensual impressionistic" pleasure in it.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. Art doesn't work that way, for the same reason 'play' doesn't work that way. The pleasure of a poem, or of a work of art, or of a childhood game: all of those are saturated with concepts and myths and associations and memories and knowledge and everything else. The 'raw pleasure' of a picture of some typical scene (say the Annunication) will be a complex mix of tons of things, some of which involve my knowledge of other annunications. "Raw impression" suggests a dude being hit in the eyes with sense-particles. The aesthetic experience is more like: a Scene one must be present to in order to experience, but which is hyper-complex and draws from everywhere else.

The Romantic misstep you may be making is thinking that the lived level is foundational, the metaphysical level is somehow fake and inauthentic.

Not at all. What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. The 'lived level' from the beginning involves all sorts of Concepts. That's why kids playing tend to cast the play in terms of archetypes.

What I'm arguing against is extracting certain patterns or ways of thinking from out of this in order to say that these are the essential patterns which govern everything else.

So if the metaphysical pole speaks of the generality, the necessity, then its opposite pole is that of the particular and the contingent. And that is not an invalid pole of being. It is the "other" pole which gives the metaphysical pole any meaning.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post?

If you hear someone totalising, then out you dash with your counter of pluralism.

Sure, but, again, I addressed exactly this distinction between totalisation and pluralism. Maybe it fails, I dunno, but I addressed exactly this point. You seem to suggest that I'm symptomatically misreading you ("Again, you have this fixation for either/or" ) but, from my perspective, if seems like you're symptomatically glossing over my intentional engagement with this exact thing.

so:

So for you, there is an obvious problem if one or the other is not defended as the foundational (making the other epiphenomenal or otherwise "illusory").

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations.

finally

So when one goes on holiday or to an art gallery, does one document everything with a camera, try to relate it to some wider metaphysical theme. Or instead, is there a fruitfully contrary mode of simply becoming as mindlessly immersed in the sensual experience as possible?

I don't accept this distinction and find it strange that you ascribe either/or thinking to me while reflexively trying to make sense of what I'm saying int these terms. Thinking or mindless immersion in sensuality? The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think outside of a simplified thought/feeling model.

I would gag. I couldn't fake that "encounter group" level of earnestness. :)

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. It's not that humiliating to do poetry and improv, though it will be if you assail yourself for being repulsive for even engaging in it. I struggle to understand how you engage with poems in the way I'm talking about, if the idea of an exchange of poems makes you gag.

he'll nevertheless claim that his metaphysics are the ground for all the things in which he was, temporarily, unreflectively engaging. If such a claim is to be taken seriously, as the metaphysician intends it to be, then the things which he was doing un-metaphysically are things that can, in principle, be brought back into his metaphysical ambit. However he can only do so by reducing them. Yet its that very irreducibility that makes up the substance and texture of reality. — csalisbury

To me this is almost the criticism of theology metaphysics. For me this is tied up with the idea of God becoming flesh. Words like 'flesh' point toward the irreducible texture you mention.

apo mentioned pragmatism. That's a good ism. I like understanding 'theologies' as tools that we carry into the jungle of real life. I'm grateful to the earnest 'theologians' and the itch that compelled them to build tools for the rest of us. Some of them wanted to make all other tools obsolete with their own. They wanted to have personalities big and/or strong enough to engulf and/or cancel all others. In some ways it's a likable trait. On the other hand, we've all been (?) trapped in a pair of word-goggles or trapped with someone trapped in a pair of word-goggles. These 'word-goggles' can obscure the immediate social reality especially.

The best choice is always both ... to their extremes ... in an overall resulting balance. — apokrisis

This sounds good, but it's hard not to doubt the extremity of these extremes. The theoretical physicist can get down to some hip music, but presumably without putting a needle in their arm or living in poverty in the name of the art of the future or just the holy, mortal moment. And the reverse. The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is 'fragmentary.'

I know. An acute sense of ridiculousness and softness and disgust seems like it underlies your whole approach. You systematically bleed things of those features, to find the skeleton, again and again and again. — csalisbury

Wrong analogy. I did biology and found the dissecting of dead things a chore. I stopped going down the psychology/neuroscience path once I found what was expected in an animal lab. My natural interest was in understanding the living and dynamic - the ecological and anthropological story.

So yes, that is about seeing through to the hidden structure. But - to draw attention to your cheap rhetorical devices - the opposite of thinking the structure that matters is the dead and lifeless anatomy of the bled corpse. The structure I am interested in - the semiotic/systems one - is the "mathematical-strength" one that animates even physical existence itself.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csalisbury

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

To the realist, the pragmatist points out that all scientific belief rests on the reading of dials. Numbers replace the thing-in-itself.

And to the idealist, the pragmatist points out that science does read dials. It is materialist only in that semiotic sense of fully cashing out the phenomenality involved in being in a knowing relation with the world.

So here, the pragmatist does say that all phenomenology is simply a play of signs of this kind. It is all an umwelt. And that then becomes the new triadic relation (of interpretant, sign and world) that becomes the generic departure point for our pluralistic metaphysical excursions.

What I'm saying is that the 'lived level' is hyper-varied and composed of all sorts of things, including Big Concepts. — csalisbury

So it is still "composed"? We are thus still in the land of the reductionist, the atomist.

My argument has been the systems' one of constraints matched by degrees of freedom - so constraints and constructions.

Our lived level is not hyper-varied, as that is just going back to the pluralism that is the direct consequence of atomistic contingency - the world constructed by degrees of freedom. Our lived whole is triadically structured. It divides dialectially into the globally generic constraints and the locally particular accidents.

If you just want to talk about concepts, they would still have this triadic structure - coming in various shades of the three basic dimensions, the general, the particular, and the vague. So there are our most general organising ideas (like reductionism, or holism). There are our vast variety of particular impressions - our concept of what is significantly different or indifferent about some passing conscious moment. And then there is also the vagueness where the lived experience is ambiguous, confused, or otherwise ill-developed and ill-defined. Neither general nor particular, as yet.

Yes buttttt. Didn't I address exactly this in my earlier post? — csalisbury

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account.

Maybe you are thinking it is enough to accept the logic of the dialectic as a qualification to the simple basic approach of atomism/compositionalism, whereas I am arguing for its upfront replacement by a causal holism?

Exactly the opposite! I'm trying to indicate that I have problem with 'foundations' in general, not trying to usurp the throne of the-one-who-has-the-right-foundations. — csalisbury

Again, I don't see how this can be your position if you are arguing so hard against the kind of holistic foundationalism I am advancing.

So there are foundationalists. Then there are anti-foundationalists. But where is your own next move to the synthesis - the one that puts the totalisers and the pluralists accurately on complementary ends of the larger thing of a connected spectrum?

The Peircean point is that this can only be done triadically - as in the form of a hierarchical relation.

So if you reject triadicism, then you still haven't transcended the simple opposition of totalisers and pluralisers. You don't have an actual metaphysical model that speaks to this situation in a manner that is a mathematical theory that could make specific predictions.

The only way I can make sense of someone who approaches art (or other stuff) as something involving 'mindless immersion' is someone who can't think out of triadicism. — csalisbury

So are you taking proper note of the quote marks here? Remember this is a meta-theoretic account now.

Whatever "mindless immersion" could mean would of course be culturally and historically conditioned. And so of course the analysis - at the meta-social level of the anthropologist - would be triadic.

Fer fucks sakes, who else first embraced structuralism as a mode of analysis? Although I agree that the sad history is folk went for the dyadic semiotics of Saussure over the triadic semiotics of Peirce. Or alternatively, the half-baked material dialectics of Marxism.

But my argument is that a holistic view of sign relations has to be triadic - for all the reasons Peirce pointed out.

So it is not that I can't escape the pit of my own triadic presumptions. I can think like a reductionist as good as anyone else. It is that I chose this triadicism as the best explanation following a pretty exhaustive search.

And if you mention any human cultural activity - poetry, coin-collecting, tennis - then I would consciously apply this particular theory of semiosis to the analysis.

It is not because I don't have other choices. It is not because I am trapped in an unthinking habit. It is because a triadic structuralism is the best way to be a holist. It is as simple as possible, without being too simple.

The species casts us off in different directions, and some of us do what we can to assimilate as many fragments of this splintered god as we can. But even this goal is a 'fragmentary.' — syntax

Yes, society is now large enough that we must all become some kind of specialist. We must all inhabit niches.

This is in fact another direct prediction of the hierarchy theory approach I take - my earlier posts on Stan Salthe's work.

Simultaneously we become both more general and more particular as culturally individuated beings. Everyone knows far more about the Kardashian clan than makes social sense. And every one of us also has narrower interests than can be shared with our immediate social group.

So increasingly, exponentially, we all diverge in these opposing directions as individuals. We have more in common with the world and less in common with each other. We go hard out in both ways - leaving us wondering about the "me" who has to be found in the middle, still holding the extremes of selfhood together in some coherent, integrative, fashion.

Well, again this speaks to the essential differences in viewpoint being expressed here.

Personally, I want to be integrated and whole. I don't want to become a pluralistic bricolage of conceptual fragments and varied impulse.

And that sets me against the kind of PoMo celebration of foundational diversity which doesn't, in turn, recognise its own roots in a totalising notion of humanity - the highly questionable foundation provided by a "one world" Romanticism.

As a psychological model, it just doesn't fly. Instead, my holist approach takes you to places like positive psychology that understand the socially constructed nature of "the self".

The only way to be integrated as a self is to understand the disintegrative forces at work.

Thousands of years ago, poetry and improv were at the heart of personal identity within a tribal social setting. They were the right technology for an oral tradition.

But thousands of years on and we are not in Kansas anymore. That is why I find them inauthentic if taken out of that tribal context and advanced as a viable modern mode of analysis.

Marxism had its analytic moment. Post-modernism had its analytical moment. So lets keep moving right along swiftly.

Sociology now roots itself in biology, and biology in thermodynamics. It is the new ontic structural realism - the theology of dissipative structures. :)

It may be too sciencey for many. But science has only really cracked the back of complexity in the past 30 years or so. So it will be another generation of philosophy perhaps before there is that general catch-up.

It gets tiring that you keep trying for these cheap oppositions - you fun-loving artistic type, me sterile reductionist - no matter how many times I explain how that is not it.

But as I say, you need me to be that other here to justify your own contrasting "metaphysics of value". I have to be as simplistic as you to make your simplicism admissible.

But I'm not fun-loving. I'm often moody and paranoid and mean - just look up my post history here. I'm well aware that I can be a total asshole. Again, what strikes me as strange here is you reflexively interpret me as giving myself these qualities in opposition to yourself, as though that were the underlying motivation for everything else. It isn't.

In other words, apo: You want me to be, for some reason, someone for whom life is a spray of roses. I'm not and never have been.

so:

"raw sensual impressionistic' pleasure is a construct born out of an opposition of theory and experience. — csal

Hence the self-conscious quotes. That was the point I was making about authenticity.

Right, but the point of those quotes was, quite explicitly, to impute to me a particular stance and then show why it was wrong. What I was doing was to show how that imputation, to me, was incorrect. What i was saying was: You were trying to frame my approach as something already accounted for in your metaphysics, and I was rejecting being slotted into it. Then: sketching out why the approach you were imputing to me was not my own.

So:

I'm really not sure if you just can't see how your writing keeps trying to manifest a standard issue reductionist account. — apo

I don't see it that way. I feel like I'm very aware of the 'totalising pluralism' you impute to me. I think I've done yeoman's work to show that I recognize what you mean by that and to show that what I'm saying is something else. I know, in my head, that I anticipated everything that I think you're saying now, and tried hard to show I understood that and to maneuver around it. But maybe I should just sit back and let you demonstrate what you mean and why I fit into that mould.

From my perspective, it feels like all these binary either/or things you're accusing me of are things I explicitly addressed, very consciously addressed, and tried to sketch a way around. You may very well be right, ultimately, but I feel like I haven't actually been heard. I feel like I quickly became to you yet another romantic who wants to make you feel lacking in order to make me feel good and artistic. So quickly, and so in spite of my anticipatory points to the contrary, that I feel like I'm being mistaken for something else.

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them.

@apokrisis I ask you to think about all the ways you've characterized my position and then re-read my post, the one that began 'but the boast of metaphysics.' I quite sincerely believe I've addressed almost everything you've said. I'm not the thing you keep wanting me to be.

I wasn't doing that. I'm trying to understand why you think I'm doing that. It feels, frankly, weird to be accused of all these binary either/or things when the explicit triple-underlined purpose of my posts has been to find a way around them. — csalisbury

Well, tell me what it is that you accept about a global, triapartite, holism exactly. Give an example of how it applies here.

What I've been addressing is this:

So, for instance, the whole Pierce triadic thing .... what stops me from saying this procedure is as infected, at heart, as the atomist thing? It wants to find the base of everything - then it thought a while and said, well, not the base, but the engine. But it still is driven toward the central thing, even if the central thing is a weird triadic relationship. — csalisbury

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why?

Do you see that right now you’re asking me to characterize my position in terms of yours?

And that the move youre making is exactly the one I tried to show is flawed? Now i can accept that my characterization is wrong and my anticipation of this move is misguided. What i cant accept is being met with this move as tho i hadnt considered it. I did. What you need to do now is show why my consideration was wrong

Do you see that right now you’re asking me to characterize my position in terms of yours? — csalisbury

LOL.

What you need to do now is show why my consideration was wrong — csalisbury

Double LOL.

As far as I can make out, your position is that you have no position. Hence pluralism is your position.

And that somehow makes this gambit of a position that ain't a position somehow unassailable by the very fact I take a position on position-taking as an epistemic process.

So you get to curl up tight like a hedgehog and complain that I won't come out to play.

Probably run its course then?

yeah you got me apo. I tried to say.... and I thought I said....but I was swimming against the current. Everything tends toward: Apo is strong and capital LOLing and the rest are scared curled-up hedgehogs. People who disagree are saying apo is cold and dessicated, and that they are fun and loving. What happens then is: apo shows how they are wrong and apo is strong and they are hedgehogs. I did engage in earnest, Apo, and I wish you could see what I was saying. Unfortunately things were quickly interepreted, after a certain point, as who is Good and who is Bad. It seems like, right now, there is no way around this way of looking at things.

So, I'll give it to you

I am a scared hedgehog and I recognize your strength. You won baby!

You're ad homing me again rather than addressing my arguments.

These are the direct questions which you failed to respond to....

Do you accept that it is right in seeking a foundation in an "engine" - a core relational structure?

Do you accept that the very thing of a core relational structure must be - in its simplest possible form - a triadic and hierarchical organisation?

Is this relationship still "weird"? Well why? — apokrisis

So first you diverted to the old switcheroo - I have to characterize my position in terms of yours ... to the degree that you do or don't have an expressed position.

And then you retreated to the comfortable histrionics of playing the victim.

What you didn't do was take the opportunity to show where this supposed agreement between us has emerged.

I mean the personal comments are fun and all. They spice it up. But they are not the main dish are they?

I'm sincerely confused, apo. I don't know what you mean about the supposed agreement between us in relation to the the quote about engines. I don't know how ironically talking about being a hedgehog after you yourself introduced the image is me histrionically playing the victim. It seems, if anything, a ironic undermining of your setting the scene as you versus a victim. I literally just lifted what you already said and said it again.

I have the uncanny sense of being accused of everything you are doing. I don't mean this rhetorically: I think a sober look at the exchange would bear out what I'm saying. I expressed my position very clearly in my post that began: "the boast of metaphyics." I don't know how to engage with you until you've engaged with that post. I feel that I've been identified as some sort of figure you already know and I'm being systematically rewritten, in your head, as that thing, to the extent that the things I've already said that undermine that idea are being passed over.

For instance: All the stuff I said about responding to poetry viz-a-viz softness, etc came from something you said about gagging and earnestness. You introduced this visceral emotional response, I responded in turn, and then you got very upset about being called out on an emotional level as though I introduced this line. I didn't. Again, I implore you to read back and look at the exchange soberly. I have addressed all your points, but they were covered-over, quickly, by making me a Figure. I anticipated this happening and tried to prevent it early on. I don't know what else to say, man

so let me be cheeky, then: I do believe I've touched a chord.

Finally, the engine quote. I was clearly, I thought, suggesting that the search for a foundation is flawed, substrate or engine. I wasn't avoiding responding. Again, I'm just confused. What did you think I meant by that quote? Your questions about it don't make sense to me. I was saying that the search for an engine is just a refined - but equally misguided- version of the search for a foundation. I thought the quote itself expressed that, I still do, so I didn't know how to respond to your questions about it

so let me be cheeky, then: I do believe I've touched a chord. — csalisbury

I can see you hoped to, but honestly I was hoping for a better organised challenge to my position.

Again, you didn't make an argument against a triadic metaphysics in terms of some definite alternative. You didn't make an argument against my version of anti-foundationalism - one that founds itself on the commonality of a core (semiotic) structure or relation. Etc, etc.

Finally, the engine quote. I was clearly, I thought, suggesting that the search for a foundation is flawed, substrate or engine. I wasn't avoiding responding. — csalisbury

Yeah. So I replied that "engine" is right in the sense that semiotics is a core structural relation. And then I was waiting for the argument of why something I claim makes a metaphysical difference, doesn't in your view make a difference.

We can both agree that there ain't the kind of material foundation that reductionism/atomism needs to presume. But if everything is bound and totalised by something as "insubstantial" as a common emergent structure, then how does your pluralism - in all its ill-defined glory, of course - fare against my totalising project there?

Where did semiotics and its triadic sign relation fail precisely? You never said.

What you did repeat was that any bid at abstract totalising must by its own lights fail to capture the wholeness of an actual world.

Well again, I made the arguments on that. I agreed that modelling is modelling. But then the larger Peircean story is that modelling constructs its own world. And so the actualised wholeness is itself an emergent from the core semiotic process that is the engine producing any reality.

It should be a familiar line - Plato's allegory of the cave. But rather more sophisicated - not least in taking quantum mechanics seriously. The Cosmos only appears to be solidly there because it is - in some literal sense - observing itself. It exists as a globalised matrix of constraints on undirected local possibility.

Now the rejoinder is obvious. Quantum mechanics doesn't account for human feelings.

But I made the argument there too. Semiotics originated in phenomenology. It is rooted in the mechanics of human intelligibility. So it doesn't exactly leave the phenomenal out of it. Instead it accepts the full Kantian force of that and then builds back out so as to recover the noumenal - rescuing it via this idea of a core relational structure that acconts for intelligibility itself.

I can see the vulnerability that creates. Yes, we are projecting a view of ourselves as rational beings on to the apparent rational structure we see in the world. That is quite a leap of faith.

However - pragmatism again - suck it and see. Leaps of faith become justified to the extent they appear to work.

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.

Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.

But I pointed out that is itself still a position. So why even pretend to engage if you want to be self-consistent to your position of not holding a position?

(Prediction: by now your position has become that you don't have a position on whether you do or don't hold positions ... and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.)

((Yes, in all earnestness, I really am having a laugh by now.))

All good! I move on pretty quickly from one subject to another, and will take whatever good input I can get :)

Again, you have this fixation for either/or and missing my point - it is the dialectic of "possibly either/or" that leads you to the resolution, the synthesis, that is "definitely both". — apokrisis

This is not good at all. The attempt to reduce the possibility of one or the other, to "definitely both", is obviously a mistaken approach. In the vast majority of either/or questions, such a reduction is impossible. To approach such a question with the attitude of "definitely both" is nothing other than a mental laze. That lazy habit is just an unwillingness to take the required steps, necessary for understanding and proper decision making.

So you are no longer content with the idea that substantial being is definitely both material cause and formal cause? It would have to be now either the one or the other?

Curious.

Correct, the cosmological argument demonstrates that substantial being may be solely formal. That's why the Neo-Platonists posit independent Forms.

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.[/apo]

So I have challenged it and was pretty straightforward about what the challenge was:

Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything. Again, I can count on any of your posts to neatly ignore everything in the discussion except some minimal bit which can be used as kindling to fire up yet another recapitulation of the story you've already told - I don't know how many times now. As far as I can tell the only thing your system does is find itself. It seems to be a conceptual machine the purpose of which is to seek self-confirmation of itself. I base that on what I observe you do with it.
— apo

So I've put forward a complex but self-consistent metaphysics. And I can't recall a single substantive challenge that you have made to that so far.

Your reply again may be that it is unwarranted for me to expect you to frame your response in terms that might appear to legitimate my framing of the issues in that fashion. Your actual position here is the position against all positions.

No, I do have a position. It's the one above, and one that I've already outlined throughout my posts. It's not a position on everything, it's a position on your system. It strikes me as a kind of cognitive trap, something to be avoided, because look what the results are. And it's characteristic of the trap that someone who's fallen into it can only see people who walk around it in terms of the trap itself. So: my not having a theory of everything is, to you, its own theory of everything - a totalising pluralism as you put it. & you're absolutely right, from within your system. This is why: There is almost never a moment where you're not recapitulating your system. If you're talking to someone, you're talking to them about your system. Any suggestion that that approach seems flawed is immediately read as a position on everything, as, for you, your approach is everything. When that person leaves and does other stuff, not involving your system, they're not doing so in opposition to your system. But, for you, they have to be. (the city outside is read as non-stoop, for example, as though everything either was stoop or something related to the stoop) For example: my posts about romanticism etc weren't disagreed with, they were misread in a very specific way, without you seeming to be aware you were doing that. In fact they were misread in a very specific way, despite their being peppered with neon signs saying I was aware of how they could be misread in that way, and why I wasn't saying that. Now, that's not to say you couldn't have challenged me on whether I really avoided the pitfalls I signalled loudly that I was trying to avoid. But that's not what happened. You didn't even see the signs.

and so we have arrived at the utter vagueness that is also foundational to my anti-foundationalist position.

Yes, I think you're right that this is the endpoint of our conversation. I disagree with this characterization, but I cannot show you why, because the only ways to show you why are not considered by you to be legitimate or substantial. I believe they are legitimate and substantial. But how I could show you, using your criterion, that they are? We're at the heart of the thing I consider a trap, and you consider [valuable in some way]. There's nowhere left for us to go. And so I wander off into the vagueness and give you your laugh.