Having developed your system, the only thing you seem to be able to do with it is find it in everything.

But it is a system derived from the evidence. It is a system derived by others. It is a system with a pedigree as old as metaphysics itself. It is a system derived as a challenge to the now mainstream system.

You are anti systems. And that has become your system. You certainly haven’t offered any critique of my system as a system.

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. — apokrisis

One question I'd like to raise regards this sense of effectiveness. Effectiveness is task-relative, to start with; there's no such thing as generic effectiveness. What's more, even if a given task slots into some hierarchy, effectiveness doesn't automatically cross those boundaries.

Example: father tells his son he needs to get a job; son goes out and robs a convenience store. When the father objects, the son's defence is that the whole point of getting a job was to get money, so he just got money a different way. Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job.

So I'm wondering what task you have in mind when you reference this pragmatic sense of effectiveness, and whose task it is. Does this task belong to the "we" you reference, or to the cosmos?

there's no such thing as generic effectiveness — Srap Tasmaner

Well there is in physics. You have the principle of least action which pretty much explains everything. Nature is ruled by optimality when it comes to the breaking of symmetries.

So natural selection is an expression of this at the level of biology. And the second law is its expression at the level of thermodynamics.

Along with its complementary causal principle - the principle of locality - it is as basic to the metaphysics of physics as you can get.

Example: father tells his son he needs to get a job; son goes out and robs a convenience store. When the father objects, the son's defence is that the whole point of getting a job was to get money, so he just got money a different way. Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You are taking the Jamesian utilitarian view of Pragmatism it seems - the one Peirce had to disown.

But OK. We can zoom right in on some microcosmic example of exceptional complexity in this Universe. We can take some man, some son, at some arbitrary point in history where there are such things as convenience stores to rob when a desirable job appears hard to find.

Are you saying that I couldn't find any grand metaphysical narrative that would show this to be a particular example of a general principle? Is there something that just rules off this episode from the greater history of the Comos? Or are you too invoking exactly the semiotic/hierarchical distancing effects that I myself have already outlined?

Semiotically, what is going on between father and son - given that this could even be a realistic conversation out in the actual world?

On your version - when forced to provide an intelligible rationale of the context in play - the son says it is all about the least action path to get that money. Jobs and robbery are not meaningfully distinct ... despite social norms that exist because of a larger scale social effectiveness. In the son's view, the father's attempt to draw a distinction is a quite arbitrary one on his own personal scale of being. Jobs or robbery is being claimed as a difference that should make no difference.

So there is nothing about your example that doesn't directly relate to the systems approach I've been taking.

Complexity wants to build up critical distinctions or constraints to provide globally effective order. Simplicity wants to break down any such distinctions that instead stand in the way of a maximal flow.

These kinds of tensions or dynamics are the bread and butter of modern complexity modelling. Stewart and Cohen did a nice little book on it - The Collapse of Chaos - that highlighted the dichotomous or complementary nature of this kind of thing. They said it was about the opposition of simplexity and complicity. These days, for the real maths, you have stuff like constructal theory.

So you could model the prevalence of employment vs crime in terms of global social efficiencies. Why not? Cheaters vs co-operators is a huge field in evolutionary biology. It is an obvious thing that the issue in play is the cost of preventing system "friction" vs that of building the distinctions that would prevent it.

So I'm wondering what task you have in mind when you reference this pragmatic sense of effectiveness, and whose task it is. Does this task belong to the "we" you reference, or to the cosmos? — Srap Tasmaner

Well I am taking the pan-semiotic view that does treat the second law as an expression of cosmic purpose. Or more strictly speaking, I would argue for Stan Salthe's tripartite nested hierarchy of
{teleomaty {teleonomy {teleology}}}.

Or in more regular language, {propensity {function {purpose}}}.

So the "we" that is the global constraint being expressed by the Cosmos is the teleomatic level thing of a generalised propensity or tendency. There is both finality in play - entropification as a "desire" is fundamental. But also the telos is appropriately watered down. The mind that has it as a goal is the very least kind of mind with a goal that we can physically imagine. Nothing weird is being claimed. All that is being asserted is a unity of nature where purpose can be expressed over every scale of being.

Then the "we" that should apply in your example becomes the social norms in play. A son that robs convenience stores is far more likely to come from a family and neighbourhood that robs convenience stores. The choice of a least action path to a goal would not really need much further justification.

But given your scenario, the father would be asserting some larger social norm as the "we" with the view on what is effective for that "we". We are law abiding and employed as that is a desire embedded at a cultural level, representing whatever happens to be functionally effective as a generalised habit.

On your version - when forced to provide an intelligible rationale of the context in play - the son says it is all about the least action path to get that money. Jobs and robbery are not meaningfully distinct ... despite social norms that exist because of a larger scale social effectiveness. In the son's view, the father's attempt to draw a distinction is a quite arbitrary one on his own personal scale of being. Jobs or robbery is being claimed as a difference that should make no difference. — apokrisis

Then the "we" that should apply in your example becomes the social norms in play. A son that robs convenience stores is far more likely to come from a family and neighbourhood that robs convenience stores. The choice of a least action path to a goal would not really need much further justification.

But given your scenario, the father would be asserting some larger social norm as the "we" with the view on what is effective for that "we". We are law abiding and employed as that is a desire embedded at a cultural level, representing whatever happens to be functionally effective as a generalised habit. — apokrisis

Nope.

Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

Full stop. I said nothing about norms, and gave no broader justification for the father's view. I thought of all that, because duh, but none of it is relevant to this single question: did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. The answer to that is quite clearly, I submit, "no".

So I see no reason to give up the idea that effectiveness is tied to the achievement of specific goals, or carrying out specific tasks, and that even if those goals can be subsumed under other goals, effectiveness at achieving the higher goal does not pass through to the lower.

I heard a story once about an overnight shelving crew at a grocery store that knew the president of the company was visiting the next day: they weren't going to be able to finish getting the truck worked, so to avoid getting in trouble they threw a pallet of groceries in the big trash compactor.

The pattern here is similar: reinterpret the instruction to shelve everything as an instruction to leave nothing in the back. Reinterpret the instruction to get a job as an instruction to get money.

In some cases, that's fine. Maybe the instruction was unnecessarily specific. In the cases at hand, it's clearly a self-serving dodge. But none of this matters at all. Even in the acceptable cases, you'd be renegotiating the instruction; there's still no question at all about whether you did in fact achieve the goal you were directed to -- you didn't. Whether that's okay is another matter entirely.

Bonus example: I tell Sid to put his tools away; half an hour later I find little sister Hannah putting the tools away (no doubt because Sid threatened to decapitate her favorite doll unless she did). Sid's defence is "What does it matter who does it, so long as the tools get put away?" But it was his task to perform himself, not simply to make it that the task was performed. That kid's never going to learn how to be responsible ...

none of it is relevant to this single question: did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

You've lost me. How could that have been the gist of your argument?

Are you claiming convenience store robbery is another trade - an actual kind of job, a recognised way to earn money? If so, then - duh. The son is right ... if the social norm indeed doesn't make the distinction that theft is something different from other forms of earning a crust.

But the father wanted the son to earn some money by getting a job. (Well, I'm guessing that as you left it open - the father could have had the more general goal of his son being a responsible and self-sufficient citizen.)

And now the son is justifying his flouting of that norm - respectable paid labour. But is theft truly effective even if the goal is merely money?

Is theft effective simply if you don't get caught? Is theft effective to the degree society can afford to tolerate it as something that doesn't make a difference? Is theft effective in some generic pragmatic sense as your claim, or his justification, is that the only real constraint is some abstract morality that pretends to have an objective base ... and actually, there is no such morality?

...effectiveness at achieving the higher goal does not pass through to the lower. — Srap Tasmaner

That may or may not be the case. Hierarchy theory accounts for both the underlying spatiotemporal continuities and discontinuities here. I've already done a length post on the issue.

So for example, neither the father nor the son can invent perpetual motion machines. The second law prevails on that generic score. But in a complex modern society, living off the free lunch of fossil fuels, the son will have access to the combination of guns, cars and convenience stores.

Locally, the laws of thermodynamics will appear to have no constraint on the son's socially-situated freedoms - until climate change kicks in and collapses the little bubble of modern economic dilemmas that your morality tale is entirely predicated on.

The pattern here is similar: reinterpret the instruction to shelve everything as an instruction to leave nothing in the back. Reinterpret the instruction to get a job as an instruction to get money. — Srap Tasmaner

Sure. This is exactly how humans rationalise their moral choices. As if they were poorly programmed robots.

I will simply note how you were forced to admit to the role of interpretance by arguing for acts of re-interpretance.

Yes. Social engagement is all about this kind of semiotics. It is all about claiming the high moral ground to justify your particular choices of action. So there is negotiation and manoeuvring to create exactly what I have been describing - the larger contexts that frame the local particulars. Do that and the outcomes look natural, effective, optimal, legitimate, worthy, to all concerned.

So you are making my case for me.

The right way to think about all these situations is the natural one of a hierarchical order. We have to show how our individual behaviour - our personal degrees of freedom - fit naturally into a general social context. We have to show how in some generalised way, we are working within the constraints given by our worlds. And our actions are at their best when they can be shown to be a part of continually maintaining and reconstructing that said world.

Which doesn't meant that that also leaves considerable scope for personal actions which are simply contingent or accidental. If I wear red socks or blue socks is the kind of choice that doesn't matter - outside the constraints of a school uniform or other social norms of taste and convention.

So there is stuff we do because we believe it is part of the preservation of the very order that shapes us. We seek to be pro-social, being the products of sociality.

And there is stuff that we do that probably matters to no one because it doesn't matter to society in general. It becomes the random shit.

But your examples seem to want to confuse the two. Differences that matter - like paid labour vs theft - are treated as differences which don't.

And yes, they might not matter. They might be random shit according to social norms. But you haven't shown that in your examples.

You've lost me. How could that have been the gist of your argument? — apokrisis

I posted it twice:

Whatever the merits of that view, and they may be considerable, it cannot be said that he succeeded at getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

And thus the gist of my argument was:

did the son follow a procedure that is effective in achieving the goal of getting a job. — Srap Tasmaner

And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation.

***

My point was that effectiveness at achieving a goal at one level may not always count as effectiveness at achieving a goal on another level. It's a question about how exactly you attach the pragmatist appeal to the effectiveness of a procedure to the hierarchical/holistic/systems science analysis. I'm still not clear on that, which may be my fault.

My point was that effectiveness at achieving a goal at one level may not always count as effectiveness at achieving a goal on another level. — Srap Tasmaner

But you said it as if that was something I needed to give some counter to. So how exactly does that - as something particular - contradict the generality of the pragmatic view?

The very definition of hierarchical levels would require this to be the case. And yet - my earlier point - when we talk about hierarchical order in a fundamental fashion, there are no real internal levels. You have the kind of homogenous interior that is a fractal or scalefree structure.

So even the simplest world - the world without levels - is irreducibly triadic. It consists of its opposed limits, and then the generality that develops over all scales in-between.

That is foundational - Salthe's basic triadic system, Peirce's sign relation. And then complexity arises on that foundation by the marking off of levels by grades of semiosis. We get the kind of subsumptive hierarchies like {propensity {function {purpose}}}, which equates to the familiar divisions of matter, life and mind.

And the answer is "no", no matter what else we say about the situation. — Srap Tasmaner

It is the other way round. You are relying on a highly artificial demarcation that seeks to stop us saying anything else about the situation.

That is why I pointed to the strangeness of your scenario. You want to pretend that this could be a real world dilemma - the smartarse son offering a "re-interpretation" of his father's wishes.

We don't believe the son's rationale for a minute because we wouldn't believe that he believed it for a minute. Bullshit was already being called before it became a problem for pragmatism.

It's a question about how exactly you attach the pragmatist appeal to the effectiveness of a procedure to the hierarchical/holistic/systems science analysis. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So the thing is that the systems view is constraints-based, and hence fundamentally permissive. If it ain't forbidden, it is not just allowed, it has to happen in the long run.

The other way of thinking about causality - the reductionist, materialist, deterministic, atomistic, etc one - would view things as procedures. There is a program, a sequence, a law, to be followed.

But a holistic approach talks of habits and limits. If there is a fence around the paddock, then the sheep will be found inside. But the sheep are not only then free to be anywhere inside, they must be everywhere inside at some time or other.

So the fence encodes a desire. And at the same time it encodes its own degree of indifference. It only has to be effective in confining the sheep in a way that makes a sharp hierarchical distinction between being inside vs being outside.

If the father's constraint is simply that the son must return with money, theft has yet to be ruled out. It thus becomes - by that definition - a matter of indifference to the dad. The son would be right to complain about being told off for robbing the store. That wasn't a no-no under the job description given him.

But if the father's constraint was to find paid labour, that is an entirely different story. Now the son might go out and be a rent boy - and again complain about being told off when his dad seems annoyed at this particular choice.

So that is how it works. If you pen sheep with a fence, they then fill that space with their motion in an essentially free and random fashion - at least from your established point of view. The field of sheep finds its own least action equilibrium state. If you measured some critical parameter, like the length of the grass, it would be trimmed at a steady rate across the whole paddock in an efficient fashion.

Reductionist metaphysics believes in worlds ruled by deterministic procedures. Holism believes in worlds that self-organise due to generalised constraints.

Think about the principle of least action (PLA). It really is the most profound of mysteries for the usual phyicalist view.

Nature has to know all the different ways of getting to wherever it wants to go to reliably find the shortest path possible. The very success of the PLA killed our normal notions of cauality and locality even before quantum mechanics hammered in the last nails of the coffin.

See for example -

Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

the strangeness of your scenario — apokrisis

Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another table. The staff person decides to swap the indicated locations "because it looks better this way." Be that as it may, and whether the event planner agrees, the staff person cannot be said to have done what they were told.

But if the father's constraint was to find paid labour — apokrisis

It clearly was. Leave aside the robbery. Suppose the son just doesn't get a job. When his father asks, here is his answer: "If by 'get a job', you mean, did I follow the principle of least action, the principle of locality, and the second law of thermodynamics, all with an eye to Salthe's basic triadic system -- then 'yes'; if you mean, do I now have gainful employment, then 'no'." The son may effectively be accelerating the heat death of the universe, but he cannot be said to have a job.

You are relying on a highly artificial demarcation that seeks to stop us saying anything else about the situation. — apokrisis

"Did you get a job?" is a yes-or-no question. Humans do highly artificial stuff.

I just bought the kindle edition of Joseph Rouse's recent Sellarsian book: Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image. Here is Robert Nola's review.

@StreetlightX is likely to find the free sample of the book interesting. One of the three stands that Rouse weaves together appeals to Jablonka and fellow 'top-down integrative Darwinians', as I might dub them. StreetlightX may already know Rouse as the posthumous editor of Haugeland's projected book on Heidegger: Dasein Disclosed. I know him also because of his excellent How Scientific Practices Matter: Reclaiming Philosophical Naturalism. (Here is a review).

I had said earlier that I wanted to comment more on left-wing Sellarsians versus right-wing Sellarsians (also sometimes called simply 'left-' or 'right-Sellarsians'. But I'm still busy reading a paper by Michael Williams (on Sellars) and another one by Bitbol (on the Kantian boundaries of the conceptual/undestanding. Are they absolute or relative to a conceptual scheme?). So, I'll keep postponing my comment. Meanwhile, here is a useful summary from one of the footnotes in Rouse's recent book:

"The distinction between left- and right-Sellarsians tracks two loosely defined groups of philosophers, each strongly influenced by the work of Wilfrid Sellars. Right-Sellarsians (exemplified by Ruth Millikan, Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, William Lycan, or Jay Rosenberg) draw especially upon Sellars’s commitment to scientific realism, his thoroughgoing naturalism, his insistence upon accommodating a more sophisticated empiricism and a prominent role for conceptual rationality within a broadly reductionist conception of the scientific image, and in some cases, his retention of a role for representational “picturing.” Left-Sellarsians (exemplified by Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, or John Haugeland) emphasize his rejection of the empiricist Myth of the Given, the irreducibility of the logical space of reasons to causal or law-governed relations, his emphasis upon inferential roles as determinative of conceptual content, and the role of social practice in interpreting and justifying conceptual content while downplaying or rejecting his naturalism, scientific realism, and pictorial representationalism." -- Joseph Rouse, Articulating the World, 2015

So you are no longer content with the idea that substantial being is definitely both material cause and formal cause? — apokrisis

The idea that substantial being requires both matter and form is derived from a materialist bias. You start from this materialist bias, and when you try to prioritize matter as pure potential, the infinite possibility of apeiron, you realize that this is impossible. The pure potential, prime matter, must have some form or else formal being could never emerge. So you falsely conclude that substantial being is necessarily matter and form. However, if you would release that materialist bias, you might realize that matter is not a necessary condition for substantial being.

"Did you get a job?" is a yes-or-no question. Humans do highly artificial stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

I wish I could follow your leaps. You started making some kind of point about pragmatism’s notion of effectiveness. Now you are talking about mechanical constraints. Any chance of an explanation of the connection?

But yes. Constraints can approach the mechanical limit. We can construct bivalent switches - physically or logically. And that is really basic to semiosis too. It is significant that the digital lies at the terminus of the analog. In the end, dynamical gestures can be fixed and remembered as informational marks.

So in all your examples, there are laid out certain constraints - which presumably are meant to achieve some effective action. And yet the actions look to defy them. A "wrong" procedure is employed to reach the apparent goal.

But the point about constraints is that they don't need to specify the procedures - the precise path taken. This is the physical mystery of the least action principle. Nature manages to find that optimal path ... on the whole ... eventually ... to the degree it matters.

Humans of course do it differently. We construct mechanisms to achieve ends. We take constraint to the point where it becomes logically bivalent or counterfactual. Switch is either on or off. The gate to the paddock of sheep is either open or closed. We take informational steps to control nature.

And we kind of expect that mechanical causal paradigm to apply to nature itself. Hence reductionism. But we know it doesn't. Nature isn't actually a machine. Nature is constrained possibilities. It has an essential holism that our black and white logico-mechanical descriptions do not properly capture.

Here's another: A wedding planner tells one of the staff to put a certain flower arrangement on the dining table, and the ice sculpture on another table. The staff person decides to swap the indicated locations "because it looks better this way." Be that as it may, and whether the event planner agrees, the staff person cannot be said to have done what they were told. — Srap Tasmaner

Right. So in reply to me pointing out the contextual social nature of goal-setting, you keep cranking up the degree of constraint to try and close off the possibility of other routes to some goal. You want a path so fixed, so black and white, that there could be no deviation. But that just demonstrates that what I say is correct.

Now what if the staff person switched the flowers and sculpture, then switches them again.

Did this violate the procedure laid down by the planner? The outcome is the intended one. But the planner might feel a little perturbed about the path by which it was reached.

What if the staff person did this repeatedly a few dozen times? Such a procedure wasn't explicitly forbidden. But it might be considered as tacitly excluded for some more general socially constraining reason. The planner would "rightfully" say, mate, now you're just being weird.

So the point is that there is an unbridgable gap between these two causal views of the world - the mechanically absolute and the Peircean pragmatic. But also, it is not a problem that constraints can always be tightened by the addition of further information. Humans in particular have got very good at constructing machines in this fashion.

That is what semiotics is about - the informational machinery that can construct constraints to bind nature to purposes. And complexity arises by layering up this informational mechanism - the codes and memories that regulate physical dynamics. The evolution of life and mind is the story of a succession of ever more generalised and abstract encoding - from membranes to genes to neurons to words to numbers and variables.

The idea that substantial being requires both matter and form is derived from a materialist bias. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean that the idea that it doesn't is derived from theistic necessity. It is an article of faith that there are gods and souls, therefore Aristotle's hylomorphism must be scholastically rendered in a fashion that permits matter-less substantial form.

Materialism (or rather physicalism, if you accept hylomorphism) isn't a bias. It is a belief derived from rational theory and empirical evidence.

So in all your examples, there are laid out certain constraints - which presumably are meant to achieve some effective action. And yet the actions look to defy them. A "wrong" procedure is employed to reach the apparent goal. — apokrisis

Nope. In each of my examples, the agent tasked with a specific goal chose instead to pursue a different goal, and in each case the initial goal could be taken as a means for achieving the new goal. But since there were other means available too, the agent can achieve the new goal without achieving the one they were tasked with.

The point was to show how the agent's judgment that what they did "works" could be faulty, unless some goal is taken as the goal relative to which a judgment of effectiveness is made.

Yet another example: suppose I'm trying to prepare for an exam, but my roommate decides to have some friends over for a party. When I remind him I have a test and complain about the noise, he says, "Well, you could go to the library, or -- you could come to the party. Check it out! I bought a copy of the test so you wouldn't have to study tonight."

See the difference here? The suggestion that I go to the library accepts my goal of studying effectively and suggests an alternative method of achieving that goal. The suggestion that I cheat substitutes the goal of getting a good grade, which admittedly was what I wanted to achieve by studying, but it bypasses what I have chosen to take as my immediate goal. If you want to judge what "works", you have to settle first what the goal is, and in many cases whose goal it is.

That is what I've been asking you to clarify. How your occasional appeals to a pragmatic "this, because it works" slot into your system. Works to do what? To study effectively or to get a good grade? And whose goals are we talking about?

The point was to show how the agent's judgment that what they did "works" could be faulty, unless some goal is taken as the goal relative to which a judgment of effectiveness is made. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't get you. Sure, the definition of an agent, of autonomy, would be the freedom to do something contrary or "other". But that freedom is still contextual. You still have people giving some kind of justification, as if that justification matters.

If they did the wrong thing by mistake or misunderstanding, that is one kind story - please ignore my accident. And if they did it for deliberate reason, then it becomes the something else of whose understanding is correct.

But what does any of that have to do with anything here? It certainly doesn't pose a problem for my holism.

If you want to judge what "works", you have to settle first what the goal is, and in many cases whose goal it is. — Srap Tasmaner

Again, so what? How does that change anything for my point of view?

That is what I've been asking you to clarify. How your occasional appeals to a pragmatic "this, because it works" slot into your system. Works to do what? To study effectively or to get a good grade? And whose goals are we talking about? — Srap Tasmaner

I am putting forward a completely general scheme. That was the whole point. I am defending a totalising metaphysics.

And you seem worried about the variety of possible particular expressions of that general semiotic machinery - even if every case might be an expression of those general principles.

I've said nature itself is irreducibly telic. There is always finality or a goal in play. And there will always then be some best route to the goal. Nature has no real choice but to follow the path of least action.

So that is the general scheme. And I've explained how it would apply in your various suggested examples.

What else is there to clarify?

I've said nature itself is irreducibly telic. There is always finality or a goal in play. — apokrisis

And that's just not enough to start talking about what "works".

Here's the last part of the quote I started with:

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. — apokrisis

Work to do what? Are we talking about the cosmos's goal of observing itself, or maybe its goal of reducing free energy? Wouldn't not making this projection accelerate the heat death of the universe just as well as making it?

You might have said such a leap is permitted -- no constraint prevents it -- so it's inevitable that we do. But instead you said it's justified insofar as it works. And again I ask: what's the goal here that grounds this talk of what works? And whose goal is it?

Work to do what? — Srap Tasmaner

In the context of what I said, it would be about working for those of us with the totalising metaphysical project of having a workable Theory of Everything.

Neither the goal nor the agent were concealed in what I wrote. I was arguing quite explicitly for the possibility of such a metaphysical ToE. I was dealing with the "paradox" of how we could advance a totalising scheme in such a way that it didn't then just blindly assimilate every possible fact to it.

It is a problem if a totalising metaphysics in fact offers no counter-factuals. It couldn't then discover itself to be wrong.

But I replied suck it and see. Pragmatism says "wrongness" is to be expected. The question then becomes whether the wrongness observed as the general is advanced to explain the particular is a case of signal or noise. Is there something significant not being explained? Or are all the inevitable exceptions to the rule just meaningless noise? A constraints-based ontology does give the grounds for making this very distinction. That is one of the key ways it is "better".

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

I strongly agree with this.

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. — apokrisis

Right. For analysis, I agree. But it seems that the role of serious analyst still has a poetic foundation. Why be an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher? How do we decide that it's better (for us) to accurately model existence with words than to blow on a saxophone and create an ecstasy without words?

If a person makes their living that way, then we have (among others) economic motives. But Schopenhauer, for instance, was not financially dependent on philosophy. It seemed instead to be his pride and joy. And even many of those who were paid seem to have been quite passionate about their work. I can imagine a thinker who presents an ugly truth of existence, but even here it seems that this thinker would have to find accuracy itself beautiful. Or why immerse himself in a otherwise optional ugly perspective?

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. [1] I agreed that modelling is modelling. [2] 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. — apokrisis

I think I know what csalisbury was getting at. It's a thought that I've had myself, so I'll try to reply to this in my own way.

Any philosophical theory, no matter how grand or successful, is still a mere conceptual piece of reality as a whole. It exists among toothaches, beautiful faces, and screams in the distance at night. It exists among other grand theories, equally plausible or implausible, at least until further investigation.

So (as you may well understand), it's not about opposing abstract thought to sensuality but rather about opposing abstract thought to the richness of an experience that includes all abstract thought, and not just that grand theory.

It seems to me that theories are useful because they are reductive. They ignore the right things. They collapse elements into equivalence classes, for instance. Presumably you'll find all of this obvious. It's trivial, really. Of course a theory isn't life itself, right?

But if a theory isn't life itself, then what exactly remains of accuracy? A theory can't catch the wind in a net, but it can help us decide what to do. Our grand theory and the plurality of little theories it organizes are one part of reality that helps us navigate reality/existence as a whole. Concepts are tools in a realm that includes but transcends concept.

In the quote above, I don't see how [2] cancels [1]. Are you offering a model, a useful perspective? Or something more? Do you grant that theories are not life/existence itself? That all theories are 'smaller' than existence?

You mean that the idea that it doesn't is derived from theistic necessity. — apokrisis

What's "theistic necessity"?

It is an article of faith that there are gods and souls, therefore Aristotle's hylomorphism must be scholastically rendered in a fashion that permits matter-less substantial form. — apokrisis

No, that's incorrect. It's a simple fact that Aristotle's cosmological argument, which appears to be derived from aspects of Plato's Timaeus, permits matter-less forms. The temporal relationship between universals and particulars, and the subject of how the forms, or ideas, which were until then supposed to be eternal, could interact with the temporal (material particulars), was extensively investigated in the Timaeus. That Christian theologians saw these principles as acceptable to their religion, though it attests to the acceptability of these principles, is really irrelevant to the logic of the argument, which needs to be interpreted and understood by the individual, interested, human minds.

So it appears like your rejection is based in an anti-theism bias. Instead of approaching this issue with a mind open to the possibility that immaterial forms are real, in which case you might proceed to understand and accept the necessity produced by the argument, you approach with a mind closed to this possibility. Faith in such entities, as you describe, is not required. All that is required is faith in one's own ability to understand, and an allowance for the possibility. The cosmological argument, by means of the necessity of the logic, transforms that faith in one's own ability to understand, into a faith in the existence of such immaterial forms, through the means of "understanding".

Materialism (or rather physicalism, if you accept hylomorphism) isn't a bias. It is a belief derived from rational theory and empirical evidence. — apokrisis

You're wrong here. I have pointed out to you, over and over again, the irrational parts of your theory. Your physicalism is based on empirical evidence along with the rejection of rational theory. Such rejection of rational theory can generally be attributed to bias.

A peculiarity about modern art is that color becomes separated from objects. The blue you see is not exactly of the table cloth. But of course you could say the blue is of the paint, or it's of the canvas. You're missing the point if that's all you see, though. With Rothko, the color seems to float off the canvas.

Now, see, that sounds largely reasonable, in the way that pragmatism always does, if a little empty. What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity of your position, and it's probably just the Peirce thing.

On the one hand, there is this sort of messianic quality to your system. From earlier in the post I responded to:

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. — apokrisis

That doesn't look like the sort of instrumentalist version of pragmatism that this does:

Pragmatism says "wrongness" is to be expected. The question then becomes whether the wrongness observed as the general is advanced to explain the particular is a case of signal or noise. Is there something significant not being explained? Or are all the inevitable exceptions to the rule just meaningless noise? — apokrisis

The procedure by which we model our world is the same procedure the world is using to be.* Where is pragmatism here? Is reality also getting it wrong the way we do? In which case, the noise in our models is also signal, and what sense now can be given to "wrong"? If you put "wrongness" in scare-quotes, is this still pragmatism?


* What's more, projecting this structure onto nature was the "leap of faith" that was said to work. Why does it all look a bit like Anselm's ontological argument?

What I'm struggling to get across is the oddity of your position, and it's probably just the Peirce thing.

On the one hand, there is this sort of messianic quality to your system.... That doesn't look like the sort of instrumentalist version of pragmatism that this does: — Srap Tasmaner

That's quite right. There is the epistemic version and the ontic version. There is pragmatism and then there is semiosis. So there is the Peirce that is just a story about scientific method or theories of truth, and then there is the Peirce with an architectonic system, a process philosophy theory of the Cosmos itself.

In a nutshell, Peirce starts from phenomenology. He gives an account of how a mind could even know a world. So that gives us the semiotic modelling relation. It is a story of the psychology.

That then lays the basis for a pragmatic epistemology. The reason why minds can work to know a world is abstracted so that it becomes a generalised theory of truth or well-founded belief. It becomes a tripartite system of world, sign and habit of interpretance. The scientific method.

But then this same abstract structure can be generalised ontically to be the story of creation or being itself.

It already starts with a foot in ontology. Semiosis is how minds know worlds and so it is what is the case about actual psychology. It is the theory of how that has to work in a basic way. (And that is also what psychology has agreed, at least in the kind of enactive, embodied, ecological and naturalistic models that have come to the fore once we got over the hump of cognitive representationalism.)

Now also a semiotic ontology is sweeping biology. Theoretical biologists like Howard Pattee, Robert Rosen and Stan Salthe always were taking a basically semiotic view. But these days it is being explicitly recognised by the rise of biosemiosis as a distinctive field of research.

So it is not hard to see the linkage between epistemology and ontology when it comes to life and mind. They are "knowing processes". So a theory of semiosis is about both how life and mind can even be the case, and also what it is that works best if we want to keep stepping up the game through reasoned inquiry.

But then comes the speculative metaphysics. And I quite openly call it that. Like Peirce, the next step seems obviously to consider whether the physical world in general - the Cosmos - is created and organised semiotically. Is the thesis of pan-semiosis true?

I, of course, think that yes, this looks like the final theory. I have a lot of fun arguing for it. And if you pay close attention to current fundamental physics, you can see how it is basically pan-semiotic. It just happens to call itself something else - information theoretic.

In which case, the noise in our models is also signal, and what sense now can be given to "wrong"? If you put "wrongness" in scare-quotes, is this still pragmatism? — Srap Tasmaner

You have answered your own question. I use scare quotes to show that noise - being "other" - is also part of any signal in being the background to that signal. It is what is ignored - the void, the meaningless backdrop - so that what matters, some event, can be seen as individuated and distinct.

Meaningfulness - a signal or sign - is created by the discard of information. The more you can afford to ignore, the more preciously you are treating what you allow to remain.

Why be an analyst, a scientist, a philosopher? How do we decide that it's better (for us) to accurately model existence with words than to blow on a saxophone and create an ecstasy without words? — syntax

Well yes. I do what I do because it has extraordinary beauty for me. It is thrilling to grasp the true mathematical structure of existence.

And it is not a merely word-based understanding - some kind of formula to incant. It is about actually being able to see and feel this structure in the mind's eye, recognise its form in every encounter with the world.

Any philosophical theory, no matter how grand or successful, is still a mere conceptual piece of reality as a whole. It exists among toothaches, beautiful faces, and screams in the distance at night. It exists among other grand theories, equally plausible or implausible, at least until further investigation. — syntax

I disagree. As I say, it is instead like learning to see. Except that rather than just seeing the world of everyday appearances, it is seeing through to the very pattern of existence itself.

You know something abstract is right when suddenly everything that was fuzzy or confused clicks into sharp focus. It all connects up logically in a self-explanatory way.

So (as you may well understand), it's not about opposing abstract thought to sensuality but rather about opposing abstract thought to the richness of an experience that includes all abstract thought, and not just that grand theory. — syntax

But that is why I disagree. The richness of experience is the immersive view, the subjective pole of being. I know what it feels like to live in the world. And so by contrast I know what it is like to be living in the world of the abstract.

As I say, it is not about simply having a theory. It is about being able to experience the abstract realm that is the territory for which the theory is the map. It becomes a place that you can go.

Of course, if your knowledge of maths and science is a bunch of fragments with no metaphysical structure, then you can't have it as this internal Platonic realm that you experience. You actually have to spend a long time building up that integrated picture that brings it fully alive.

In the quote above, I don't see how [2] cancels [1]. Are you offering a model, a useful perspective? Or something more? Do you grant that theories are not life/existence itself? That all theories are 'smaller' than existence? — syntax

I answered that more fully in the reply to @Srap Tasmaner a post ago.

And no, I see life/existence as the world of mere appearances - at least in being the foreshortened subjective view of what it is to be me, some bag of flesh and prosaic needs, in some highly particular moment of the here and now. And then the Peircean theory is the map of the abstract or objective reality of which my immediate pressing existence is a tiny accidental shard.

So yes. A theory is just a theory. A map is just a map. Screw one up and draw another.

But then what could really drive me? It is only that you can get to experience the wholeness of reality as it comes alive gradually as a living structure in your thoughts.

Isn't that what everyone seeks from metaphysics? And so, that makes the best metaphysics such a worthwhile journey.

Well yes. I do what I do because it has extraordinary beauty for me. — apokrisis

I can relate. I also like what I understand of your view. Reality is (among other things) something that makes sense of itself. It is self-exploring, self-describing.

It is about actually being able to see and feel this structure in the mind's eye, recognise its form in every encounter with the world. — apokrisis

I relate to seeing and feeling a structure when in the theorizing mode. Philosophy strikes me as a blend of art and science. Maybe a good theory just has the beauty of efficiency, of bang for buck. On the other hand, a good theory also allows the philosopher to either peer into the 'mind of God' or even host this mind (or more believably co-host the self-knowledge of 'the divine.')

I'm not particularly attached to this vocabulary of 'mind of God' and 'divine,' but I do think it captures the secret thrill of philosophy. The fantasy or just goal (or just one of a family of goals) seems to be to view the 'machine' from outside and beyond it. The hero is maybe dialectically evolving conscious crossing some end-of-history thresh-hold or (alternatively) maybe just braver than all who came before and therefore able to tolerate the grimly beautiful truth. Or even just lucky, even in his own eyes, to be shaped by circumstance into a lens of the perfect shape.

You actually have to spend a long time building up that integrated picture that brings it fully alive. — apokrisis

I still think that we are dealing with a useful and/or beautiful grid placed against the fullness of reality (or rather the grid is an isolated piece of this reality understood as its essence.)

I see life/existence as the world of mere appearances - at least in being the foreshortened subjective view of what it is to be me, some bag of flesh and prosaic needs, in some highly particular moment of the here and now. And then the Peircean theory is the map of the abstract or objective reality of which my immediate pressing existence is a tiny accidental shard. — apokrisis

I can relate to the distance from the 'bag of flesh and prosaic needs.' I can relate to becoming bored with one's tedious idiosyncrasies and the sense of one's life-story as a tiny shard. But the point that I would make is that the grand theory (god's self-consciousness, let's say) is part of an experience that engulfs it. The sense that one's life is a tiny accidental shard is 'within' that shard. Experience is sorted and 'non-essense' is thrown into the no-longer-fascinating merely-subjective bin.

But then what could really drive me? It is only that you can get to experience the wholeness of reality as it comes alive gradually as a living structure in your thoughts.

Isn't that what everyone seeks from metaphysics? And so, that makes the best metaphysics such a worthwhile journey. — apokrisis

I agree with all of this. And of course I'm trying to do metaphysics even as I theorize its limits or delineate what all metaphysical visions have in common. If reality is largely sense-making itself, then I'm interested in modeling this modeling. Of course to do so I have to throw away detail. 'Tool' is another master word or skeleton key. Others may be as good, but I haven't found any that are better, I don't think. That theories are tools suggests motivated tool-users. And the word 'tool' isn't as loaded with the 'sentimentality' that inhibits a distancing from whatever vocabulary one happens to have used successfully in the past as circumstances demand a fresh invention. Of course it's nice to feel done with all that distancing too. We want consummation and closure. 'All theories are tools, including this one' is one flavor of that closure, and more traditional metaphysical visions is another.

'All theories are tools, including this one' is one flavor of that closure, and more traditional metaphysical visions is another. — syntax

But all theories are the same kind of tool - a map by which to navigate the territory. So while - like blind men feeling an elephant - that might result in many partial mappings, there is still that single territory being explored.

And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything.

In regards to the contrast between lived life and metaphysical maps, a map is created by abstracting away the accidental to arrive at the necessary.

So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. Chance and unpredictability are basic to actual existence. And inexplicable to the degree they are just accidents.

So I - as with Peirce - in fact take the particularity of individual existence to be ontically fundamental. Unlike other brands of metaphysics, chance is treated as basic. We can't say why some radioactive atom actually decayed at precisely that moment. It really was uncaused and spontaneous.

My approach is thus far more generous to that other side of the story. It treats chance happenings as irreducible. They are not going to get explained away by hidden variables, or still more microscopic nudges.

But then the other side of the coin is that Peircean semiotics is founded also on the growth of global habits, the emergence of structural-level necessity. Peirce called it the spontaneity of tychism vs the continuity of synechism.

And metaphysics - as the mapping of the grand synechectic structure of existence, the very shapes of habits - derives its model of the Cosmos by abstracting away all that is just the accidental or particular about the actual world. The map metaphysics produces is of what is structurally - mathematically - necessary in terms of a globally-organising set of constraints.

It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. The metaphysics wants to boil away the unneeded detail. It wants to create a picture of the world that doesn't tell you what kind of trees grow on that there hill this year, or the colour of the front door that Mr Smith chose a few months back. Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.

So to call a metaphysical model a tool is too general. There are many kinds of tools.

The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details.

And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything. — apokrisis

You'd then have to have the map being part of it all.
Or, in other words, the map would have to include itself as a proper part.
A bit fractal'ish I suppose, infinite in depth where the map maps itself.
While not impossible, it would give a peculiar structure of it all.

The map would be the view from nowhere. It stands outside the world it describes. So that would indeed seem a problem.

But I am defending Peircean internalism. Now the map is part of its world in being map of one of its complementary bounding limits. It is the view from the inside - while the whole shebang is still developing - of its structure as it will be frozen at the end of time. That is, its Heat Death.

And then as I said, the Peircean view treats chance or contingency as real. That is the other bound, the other limitation on being, that can be seen from the inside.

In terms of a developing cosmos, the most absolute state of chance is that which prevailed at its beginning. The hot and quantum Big Bang in other words.

So Peirce provides a map from inside the whole. In one direction, flattened to its descriptive extreme is our view of the Universe’s Heat Death. The ultimate structural outcome. And flattened in the other direction is our map, our scientific view, of the beginning of the Universe in a state of absolute potentiality or chance.

It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. — apokrisis

This is just a metaphor, so whatever, but there are other kinds of maps.

the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths — apokrisis

And that might be simplest for the kind of map you're talking about. But your idea seems to be there is a purest sort of map, a perfectly general and generic map, and that's just goofy, since what you choose to include in your map is obviously driven by your purpose in drawing it. The stuff you talk about leaving out is the stuff other people want.

In regards to the contrast between lived life and metaphysical maps, a map is created by abstracting away the accidental to arrive at the necessary.

So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. — apokrisis

And right there -- if you want your analogy to be to "getting around" maps rather than some other kind, you want the current state of accidental history. Is that bridge still up? Does this surface street go under the new freeway or just dead end there?

In fact I can't think of any kind of map that isn't based on selecting certain accidental states of affairs to mark and the rest to ignore. There's never any essential/accidental distinguishing such as you describe.

Sorry -- this just seems like the worst analogy for what you're after.

But all theories are the same kind of tool - a map by which to navigate the territory. So while - like blind men feeling an elephant - that might result in many partial mappings, there is still that single territory being explored. — apokrisis

Your position is reasonable, but I'm not convinced that chiseling the tool metaphor down to the map metaphor is the way to go. Of course I do see that theories are especially used as maps, but I think it fair to emphasize how theories create or become and do not merely reveal reality. What I have in mind is especially the long human conversation about who humans are and who they should be.

And there could also be the most complete map possible map. The Map of Everything. — apokrisis

That does seem to be goal. As desirable as such a map is, it's hard to imagine reality standing still long enough to be mapped (or to 'map itself'). Of course I don't think anyone will deny that some of our maps/tools have gotten better and better, at least for certain purposes.

So actual life is rich because it it rich with a history of accidents, fluctuations, contingencies and particulars. Chance and unpredictability are basic to actual existence. And inexplicable to the degree they are just accidents. — apokrisis

I also see things this way.

But then the other side of the coin is that Peircean semiotics is founded also on the growth of global habits, the emergence of structural-level necessity. Peirce called it the spontaneity of tychism vs the continuity of synechism. — apokrisis

As I understand physics (not my specialty), we have chance at the very small scale but a kind of law-of-large-numbers pseudo-determinism or determinism-enough at the scale of everyday life. Do you mean something like this?

It is just like real maps - the kind you use to get around. The metaphysics wants to boil away the unneeded detail. It wants to create a picture of the world that doesn't tell you what kind of trees grow on that there hill this year, or the colour of the front door that Mr Smith chose a few months back. Instead, the simplest map just tells you where are the obstacles, where are the paths. That is, where are the constraints, where are the degrees of freedom.

So to call a metaphysical model a tool is too general. There are many kinds of tools.

The kind of tool we are talking about here is a map. And maps are interested in the global structure of an environment, not its inessential details. — apokrisis

This is a great way to develop the map metaphor. But I'm not sure that humans are only mapping human nature. Does a fiction sometimes become the truth in a way that threatens the distinction itself in some cases?