Yet, any memory is but one moment of experience. All the "build-up" of memory is given in an instance of experience. The story of the world is not given outside time, but within one moment, no matter how much study or memory it involves. A moment which renders us without knowledge and understanding if it ceases to occur (see Alzheimer's Disease).

Radical contingency is not in conflict with anything you've stated there. If the world behaves in a similar way, then that's what it does. If the sun rises every morning, than that's what it does. The same is true of any instance of similar events.

Unrestrained possibility does not prevent the world staying "the same." Indeed, part of the point of radical contingency is the world just might stay the same. Repeated sunrises are possible states.

Any regularities we observe are still expressed-- gravity isn't different or changed becasue something else was possible-- but they are just a function of states themselves, rather than a constraining force which sits outside them. That things are themselves is not dependent on a basic nature which forces them to be what they are. It's a feature of a thing itself-- things will be (e.g. similar events occurring regularly) until they are no longer (a different possible outcome occurs).

Yet, any memory is but one moment of experience. All the "build-up" of memory is given in an instance of experience. The story of the world is not given outside time, but within one moment. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think this is obviously false. The "build-up" of memory, if it is a true build up reflecting temporally occurring actualities, is obviously given across time, even though the culmination or conclusion of that buildup; if it is simple enough, might seem to be given almost immediately in a single moment, as it were. If the build-up across time were a mere illusion of the moment, so to speak, then that would be radical contingency at work. In that case all our discourse would be meaningless; or at least its apparent meaning would not refer to, or be the outcome of, any actuality.

It's not clear even what we mean by moment, in any case. A phenomenological moment cannot be a dimensionless 'point instant'; so what is a moment, and what are its boundaries? Wouldn't a phenomenological moment 'contain' both past and present, insofar as we can conceive it at all? I mean, if a moment is not a dimensionless point, or boundary, if it has duration; then some parts of it must be prior to, and anticipatory of, other parts, which would mean it is like a microcosm of 'macroscopic' time embodying past, present and future. This would mean there is no pure present to our experience at all, even though when we think about it, it seems as though there must be.

You still misunderstanding radical contingency. It's not an actor on the world. There aren't a set of laws which constrain the world until, at some point, radical contingency acts to make the world "weird." Radical contingency is necessary. It is true regardless of what happens in the world. Anything might happen.

In any instance of the world, whether things stay the same or a constantly changing, radical contingency is true. In the moments where the expression of the world fits the "laws" we know, radical contingency is just as true as when the world breaks those "laws."-- the actual world is one of many possible states. Radical contingency is the dissolving of determining "laws," not of states of the world with logic expression. It has no impact on how our discourse refers.

It's not clear even what we mean by moment, in any case. A phenomenological moment cannot be a dimensionless 'point instant'; so what is a moment, and what are its boundaries? Wouldn't a phenomenological moment 'contain' both past and present, insofar as we conceive it at all? I mean, if a moment is not a dimensionless point, or boundary, if it has duration; then some parts of it must be prior to, and anticipatory of, other parts, which would mean it is like a microcosm of 'macroscopic' time embodying past, present and future. This would mean there is no pure present to our experience at all, even though when we think about it, it seems as though there must be. — John

I'd say the dimensionless nature of the present is exactly why my argument applies. A "phenomenological moment" can be as simple as recalling the colour red or as complex as remembering an entire text. Our "moment of memory" often refers to many linked experiences because we are recalling complex events involving the meaning of more than one experience.

All the relevant meanings of experience get subsumed into that "moment of memory," which is the difference between knowing and not. Let's say I'm trying to tell the whole story of Macbeth. I memorise every word so I can tell it exactly. If this "moment of memory" does not occur again, I have lost the knowledge. I won't tell the story exactly. All it would take to wipe out the knowledge was for me not to have the "moment of memory." Lose the "phenomenological moment" and the knowledge will not exist.

You still misunderstanding radical contingency. It's not an actor on the world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I haven't said "it is an actor in the world" so you are misinterpreting again. Radical contingency is the postulated antithesis of necessity, of the latter being conceived as 'laws of nature'. It is thought as the total absence of laws of nature. But Laws of nature are not conceived to act in the world, either; instead they are thought as what governs any acting in the world.

In any case, against your apparent assertions that radical contingency is necessary, there is no way of knowing which of 'radical contingency' or 'laws of nature' is necessary or even true. All we can do is try to draw out the logical consequences of either one or the other of them being true.

The point is if radical contingency were true then it would be the only truth, just as it would be the only necessity, because there could then be no reliable stability such that we would be warranted in claiming that anything else were true. We could have no justification for believing that things do "remain the same" from moment to moment, regardless of appearances, that is.

I hope this clarifies it. — John

Thank you, it does. I tried hard to see what Meillassoux was getting at, but my resistance to the 'absolute' is such that I never managed it.

Laws of nature are not conceived to act in the world, either; instead they are thought as what governs any acting in the world — John

Nancy Cartwright's take on this is that so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions. I always think 'laws' is an odd analogy/metaphor, since human laws are after all made to be broken, or I'd never have smoked dope or parked on the pavement.

Nancy Cartwright's take on this is that so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions. I always think 'laws' is an odd analogy/metaphor, since human laws are after all made to be broken, or I'd never have smoked dope or parked on the pavement. — mcdoodle

Yes, I think that's right, that "so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions"-the "certain conditions" being something like 'the totality of what has been recorded of human experience'; which seems a lot, but on reflection is an infinitesimal fraction of what we might imagine is and has been, the sum of everything at all times and places,

But, from the human perspective, since the sum of our experience is all we have to go on, and since there have been no believable recorded contraventions of what we think of as the 'laws of nature', and since we have created a remarkably unified and predictively successful body of theory based upon the newly acquired ability to look much further into space and time, and into the macroscopic and the microscopic; it seems justifiable to believe provisionally that the laws of nature are universal and that they, unlike human laws, cannot be broken. Of course it's true that we cannot ever be absolutely certain of that in the way we might be of some deductive result. My tendency is to believe in the efficacy and veridicality of human thought that has been tested and retested against both personal and intersubjective experience; after all, thought is as natural a 'flower' of the universal nature of things as, well, a flower is.

Yes, I think that's right, that "so-called 'laws' are useful descriptions of what is in play under certain conditions"-the "certain conditions" being something like 'the totality of what has been recorded of human experience' — John

Well, the Cartwright view is more limited. She takes 'capacities' as real, as inhering in nature, but laws as how we describe the enactments of such capacities within certain conditions, and the conditions are very much narrower than yours. But it would take us off into a quite different debate about the philosophy of science to debate that. Most of our scientific results are inductive, not deductive, and the practice of science (as she sees it) is not to declare that natural laws hold sway everywhere, but to investigate whether and if so how the laws work within certain defined and repeatable conditions. She does this via what she refers to as a 'nomological machine', a concept to describe just such a set of defined and repeatable conditions - which might be a lab in Stanford (with the observer's presence accounted for) or the solar system (with the disturbances from the rest of the cosmos accounted for) - or wherever. (There are always conditions in brackets, it seems to me) Her example in 'The Dappled World' is to drop a feather from the second floor of a villa into a windy piazza: it is more difficult, in fact probably impossible, even to know which 'natural laws' to use to predict its movement - even when we're capable of getting little Juno to Jupiter with such amazing precision.