Thanks, I'll check it out. Don't feel bad about not understanding the Whitehead section. I've been reading him on an off for more than twenty years and I am only really beginning to understand what he was getting at. In general Whitehead is beginning to come into his own only now I think. There certainly seems to be a lot of Peirce in Whitehead (judging from what I have read of Peirce, which has not been a real lot, but just slowly, over the past fifteen or so years, working through two volumes of his selected papers), but he also goes well beyond Peirce in important ways, I think.

If you are interested check out Stengers, Shaviro and Massumi on Whitehead and Deleuze (who is also beginning to come into his own, and seems to have a great deal of commonality with Whitehead).

Local to where, though? — Janus

Well, Australasia. I've had good mates from both Ashburton and Warrnambool. You wouldn't know the difference.

That like anything else drugs open up different possibilities for experience. — Janus

Does that seem enough of an answer to you?

You are claiming a heightened and truer state of experience from what the neuroscience would say must be a faulty misfiring of the brain. Not sure how you resolve that contradiction, until you tell me.

There certainly seems to be a lot of Peirce in Whitehead (judging from what I have read of Peirce, which has not been a real lot, but just slowly, over the past fifteen or so years, working through two volumes of his selected papers), but he also goes well beyond Peirce in important ways, I think. — Janus

Oh please. If you can make any sense of Whitehead and how he goes "well beyond", here is your perfect chance to lay that wisdom out.

Well, Australasia. I've had good mates from both Ashburton and Warrnambool. You wouldn't know the difference. — apokrisis

That's true. I have a few friends from New Zealand, and they are, apart from their lazy way of pronouncing 'i's' pretty much indistinguishable from Australians. The term is believed to have most likely originated in Melbourne, although no one knows for sure.

Does that seem enough of an answer to you?

You are claiming a heightened and truer state of experience from what the neuroscience would say must be a faulty misfiring of the brain. Not sure how you resolve that contradiction, until you tell me. — apokrisis

I am claiming a heightened state of experience, not a "truer one". An ecstatic experience is not necessarily "truer" than a banal one. So, the contradiction is, again, a projection of your own.

Oh please. If you can make any sense of Whitehead and how he goes "well beyond", here is your perfect chance to lay that wisdom out. — apokrisis

Well, Whitehead developed a whole complex metaphysical system which is certainly not Peircean through and through, although there are commonalities. It takes a long time to make sense of Whitehead, which I am beginning to do. I suppose the same can be said for Peirce. I've made less progress on that front.

I am claiming a heightened state of experience, not a "truer one". An ecstatic experience is not necessarily "truer" than a banal one. So, the contradiction is, again, a projection of your own. — Janus

So what follows from it merely being "heightened"? Where does that leave us?

The contradiction still has to be answered. Or are you conceding that it is resolved by accepting the neuroscientific view would say the affective state is an over-excited one?

A well functioning brain with affective states that make cognitive sense - that would actually ground a mental response pragmatically in tune with the world as it is - would only be excited to an appropriate degree. Thus you can have the non-functional affective responses that are either under-excited or over-excited - too flat or too aroused.

Or did you have some other story on how there is no contradiction between how the feeling feels and what it would be for a feeling to be a suitably functional ground to neurocognition?

Well, Whitehead developed a whole complex metaphysical system which is certainly not Peircean through and through, although there are commonalities. It takes a long time to make sense of Whitehead, which I am beginning to do. I suppose the same can be said for Peirce. I've made less progress on that front. — Janus

Right. So you have made your judgement. But you can't give the grounds for it.

I guess it's just a gut feeling. So at least you are being self-consistent then.

I have been able to function as well, if not better, than normal when in such states of heightened feeling, so I don't see them as necessarily being "over-excited", disordered or dysfunctional.

Right. So you have made your judgement. But you can't give the grounds for it.

I guess it's just a gut feeling. So at least you are being self-consistent then. — apokrisis

Nothing to do with a "gut feeling".

Are you denying that Whitehead has produced a complex, comprehensive and systematic metaphysics that owes something, but by no means everything, to Peirce?

Are you denying that Whitehead has produced a complex, comprehensive and systematic metaphysics that owes something, but by no means everything, to Peirce? — Janus

I just don't see any important similarities. So I would welcome you explaining what they might be.

Every time I try to delve into Whitehead, it just seems maddening rubbish. Every time I take another dip into Peirce, it feels the opposite. So please tell me what I'm missing.

In the meantime, here is how others have summarised the connections between the two....

Lowe writes "Whitehead knew Peirce's logic of relatives when he wrote Universal Algebra, but there is no evidence of substantial knowledge at any time of anything else that Peirce published."

Although it has been common for readers of Peirce's metaphysical writings to notice a considerable similarity to some features of Whitehead's philosophy, a study in depth of each one shows wide differences between them.

According to Lowe, "the more likely picture is of paths which, though touching at certain important points, were for the most part so separate that whoever thinks to make further explorations must choose the one and reject the other, and as he looks back at Peirce and Whitehead, he must then be ready to reconsider the significance of those similarities"

http://www.unav.es/users/PeirceWhitehead.html

I don't haver time to respond much now, and would need to spend a lot of time to try to construct a coherent account of the similarities and differences between Whitehead and Peirce. This is really a job for the Whitehead and Peirce scholars. Anyway, this is from the article you linked:

Also some key notions of Whitehead were fully anticipated by Peirce. On one hand, much of the characteristics of Peirce's category of Firstness strikingly anticipate Whitehead's 'eternal objects' (Stearns 1952, 200; Hartshorne 1983, 82); Peirce's Secondness is equivalent to Whitehead's 'prehension', or feeling of (previous) feeling, or sensing of (previous) sensing, and Peirce's Thirdness includes Whitehead's "symbolic reference" or more generally, "mentality". As Hartshorne concludes this comparison, "Whitehead is in some respects clearer than Peirce, in others less clear" (1983, 85). On the other hand, when Peirce stresses the rational nature of the universe he is anticipating Whitehead's emphatic protest against the "bifurcation of nature", the sharp Cartesian division between nature and mind which "has poisoned all subsequent philosophy" (Stearns 1952, 196). In contrast to many modern and contemporary philosophers since the time of Descartes, the thought of both Peirce and Whitehead can be interpreted as largely successful attempts to break out of the imprisonment 'within the circle of our own ideas', to transcend pure subjectivity (Platt 1968, 238).

Perhaps any similarities are merely fortuitous, and not a matter of Whitehead being influenced by Peirce at all; again that is a matter for the specialists. I may have gotten the idea from something i read in Buchler whose 'ordinal naturalism' was influenced by both Peirce and Whitehead (and Dewey). So, perhaps I was wrong to say that Whitehead owed much to Peirce, but whether you like his system or not, I don't think it can be denied that Whitehead's ideas go well beyond Perice's in the scope of development.

...but whether you like his system or not, I don't think it can be denied that Whitehead's ideas go well beyond Perice's in the scope of development. — Janus

And why can't that be denied? Only because you won't spell out how exactly Whitehead goes beyond Peirce in your estimation.

I think every supporter of Whitehead I've ever come across only is so because he said "experience is basic". He rejected the logicist project and turned to God and universal mind. He mixed in quantum physics too. So he sounds like the sort of guy one should proclaim as a metaphysical genius.

But I've yet to meet anyone who believe they understand Whitehead well enough to stop and explain him in ways that makes sense - especially in relation to Peirce and other structuralist thinkers. Funny that.

I'm not sure exactly how God functions and is necessary in Whitehead's system, but I think it as the universal prehender of 'eternal objects" which he understands to be all the ways in which actual occasions (processes) can form or relate to one another. God is seen as the lure to feeling towards "creative advance". There is no "universal mind" in Whitehead as far as I have been able to tell. He is no idealist, he advocates a kind of dynamic structural realism which consists in endless change (process). God, for Whitehead, if it exists, is an empirical, processual entity like any other.

Anyway it's a complex, interesting (to some) metaphysics. Is it "true"? I don't think that question makes much sense. Perhaps it is "more true", meaning 'closer to the mark' than traditional substance metaphysics is. Whitehead himself said that no metaphysics can capture reality adequately. So metaphysical systems can only be more or less adequate, more or less rich in concepts that may lead to creative new insights or ways of thinking about things.

Commonalities with Peirce (off the top of my head):

Tychism=creative advance indeterminism meaning a genuinely open future).
Firstness= universal and primordial feeling or "everythingness" (in your terms)
pan-semioticism (although I'm not sure Peirce himself advocated that) = pan-experientialism ( and that is a matter of interpretaion :wink: )

It seems to me that these ideas are central to both thinkers. Hey, I'm no expert on either thinker so I'm just taking a stab at it. Feel free to critique and point out the differences between the two, since you have read both and read Peirce way more than I have. I'm here to learn which means obviously changing my mind if necessary.

That is the usual vague reply on Whitehead. His system is a system that successfully absorbs all categorical differences ... which would be why I consider it a failure.

Are we talking about processes or actual entities, transcendence or immanence, material things or mental things, creativity or constraints? Whitehead. He say yes!

(Redundant; deleted)

Are we talking about processes or actual entities, transcendence or immanence, material things or mental things, creativity or constraints? — apokrisis

I would say Whitehead accounts for all of those. He doesn't "absorb" oppositions or contrasts and explicitly rejects any kind of Hegelian synthesis or sublation where they are resolved through absorption or subsumption, rather than being maintained and upheld as contrasting relations And what do you say?

Tychism=creative advance indeterminism meaning a genuinely open future). — Janus

Peirce says initial free spontaneity becomes regulated by globally developed habits of constraint. That is a very general systems science statement.

Whitehead says the human mind seems creatively spontaneous in pursuit of their wishes, so why not fundamental particles too? That is mystic woo.

Firstness= universal and primordial feeling or "everythingness" (in your terms) — Janus

Yes, Peirce said such things and I say that is OK in a metaphorical way that gets at a basic unity of nature. If we accept phenomenology as our necessary epistemic starting point, then that is what Firstness looks like from that descriptive position. Then we move to what it looks like once we have developed a more general scientific and cosmological framework. Now it becomes what we would understand by spatiotemporal fluctuations. We would understand Firstness through the lens of quantum theory.

But at times Peirce also looks to have slipped into mystical woo. How much that was due to social circumstances - like his financial dependence on religious benefactors - is an interesting biographical question.

However my position is that the woo is completely dispensable. The epistemology and ontology doesn't depend on some undefined notion of "experience" as it does with Whitehead.

pan-semioticism (although I'm not sure Peirce himself advocated that) = pan-experientialism — Janus

Peirce's speculative cosmology is pretty well advertised. You wouldn't call it pan-semiotic?

And again the difference is between spelling out a structuring mechanism - semiosis - and simply saying everything has experience as an inherent property, even when there is no measurable support for that vague claim about nature.

It is not even controversial in science that life and mind have semiotic structure. Nor I guess that they all support grades of experience. Organism have the organisations that give them lived points of view of their world (via an Unwelt, a mediating system of signs).

So what would be speculative in science is saying the Universe also is semiotic structure all the way down. Except this is what quantum physics and a general information theoretic turn in physics suggests.

And it would be non-experiential semiosis to the degree it did not have "a point of view". Semiosis at the cosmic level becomes just a developing set of boundary conditions. A totally generalise or objective state, not one that is locally individuated and particular to some subject.

So I am happy that pan-semiosis can account for the similarities and differences of the levels of nature's complexity as they are actually measured and observed.

I don't see any of this in Whitehead except from the very superficial gestures towards a contextuality and holism in his direction of thought.

He doesn't "absorb" oppositions or contrasts and explicitly rejects any kind of Hegelian synthesis or sublation where they are resolved through absorption rather than upheld as contrasting relations And what do you say? — Janus

I didn't say he resolves them. I said they sink without trace in his ambiguity.

Hegel at least saw it as a hierarchical spiral where each level of synthesis makes the ground for a fresh bout of symmetry breaking. We can understand what is suppose to be happening in terms of a metaphysical mechanism.

Whitehead talks about stuff getting stuck together to form more complex arrangements. If you look for a mechanism, it is just the same old bottom-up composite story. Bits of experience replacing bits of matter. With - as you note - something vaguely Platonic about God as a possible source of the global something or other.

It might be good to learn about Whitehead through Rorty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iAWTYcwlEg

We tend to think of all change as occurring in time and creation ex nihilo as occurring like an event. I think contemporary metaphysics realizes that it is creation ex nihilo cannot be a temporal event - or if there is one, then it is not ex nihilo in the sense that it is meant.

Creation ex nihilo is the creation "of time" not "in time".

This turns on the word "before". It does not refer to time but rather is more like the steps in a mathematical proof whose validity is eternal. Becasue of natural causality (not ex-nihilo) we can set up causal chains extending infinitely backward or at least for some period of time but those proofs fail to take into account the fact they they are contingent and therefore not ex nihilo. They just happen to be..

The real question is why there is the existence of anything at all. To make it hader the question is not answered in the same way as a regular question. The "answering", if you can call it that, is more like a awareness of the eternal deficiency of all contingent being and is more like the awareness of a question than an answer. Sometimes we refer to that as mystery.

No "cause" is posited as a contingent being for that would, in religious terms, make God a creature and require a further cause of God. Instead there is a kind of question that becomes and a realization of the superfluousness of nature itself. The very existence of being is the "answer" but it is not like being was there and created beings. Rather being is an awareness of the facticity, the emerging and enduring in the eternal sense of all contingent beings.

In human being this question is not superficial. It engages the survival instinct in unusual ways and reproductive intimacy becomes involved.

The very existence of being is the "answer" but it is not like being was there and created beings. Rather being is an awareness of the facticity, the emerging and enduring in the eternal sense of all contingent beings. — Justin Truth

If we consider existence as the 'thereness' of the eternal void and being as life, creativity, consciousness we can see that existence (which is a substance, the substance) emerged into being.

The real question is why there is the existence of anything at all. — Justin Truth

Or why existence is. See last post.

It might be good to learn about Whitehead through Rorty. — schopenhauer1

A very nice talk, but I'm puzzled by what you would see as its take home message.

I would say it clarifies something important as far as I'm concerned. And that is some language games are better than others ... from a metaphysical point of view. Rorty says Whitehead's approach is poetical. And I would say that's the problem. Peirce's approach is at another level because it is mathematical.

So when it comes to language games, there is this rather vast step up from ordinary language (and its own highly refined forms in terms of poetry, music, art) to mathematical-strength language (as in logic and other universally abstract grammars).

Metaphysics has always depended on mathematical-strength language - principally the dialectical argument that speaks to symmetries and their breakings. So while I agree with Rorty's Wittgensteinian point - philosophy is a self-evidential language game designed to disclose "worlds", or metaphysical umwelts - we can also recognise why some metaphysics is at another level. The mathematical beats the poetical as the mathematical is designed to talk about universal abstractions while the poetical is very much about embodied sociocultural meaning - the umwelt that happens to be defining what it would mean to be human at some moment in the story of human development.

So it is not that the poetical is wrong, or inadequate. It is the right tool for the particular task being done - the invention or social construction of the world that humans "find themselves living in by learning to live within it". The poetical can sketch out the map of what is culturally meaningful, and we become structured by that to the degree we can use this map to navigate a life.

But then mathematical language is a different order of semiosis. It has a larger ambition in terms of being a way to construct maps that disclose a world. It wants to go beyond a merely human identity to "see reality as it actually is".

Now we can both recognise the Quixotic nature of that ambition, and appreciate how unexpectedly and surprisingly powerful that next level of semiosis actually is. We can achieve much more than might have been thought - even if it all remains a (mathematical) language game.

This is why Platonism, Logicism and Computationalism seem to have something to them. They are only mathematical umwelts - the worlds disclosed in a language game. Yet they are a clear step up from the sociocultural boundedness, the subjectivity, of a poetical umwelt.

Again, poetry is fine. But maths and poetry are tools with different goals. They aim to disclose umwelts of essentially different kinds. And metaphysics is about mathematical-strength umwelts. Peirce was playing that game. Whitehead did and then dropped out.

Whitehead's process theology is a comfortable fable that tells a lot of people the sociocultural message they want to hear. Hey buddy, you live in a world that is fundamentally experiential and divine. Therefore experience and divinity do make meaningful sense. Like all good theories, a formal closure is achieved by reading everything in nature to be essentially "human", from the smallest event to the super-human scale of being represented by the Cosmos itself.

From this point of view - an umwelt contructed by a poetical use of language - you can actually wall yourself off from all that nasty mathematical metaphysics. That becomes scientistic baggage to be left at the door of belief. Welcome to the cosy world of pan-experientialism. Take off your work boots. You are home again.

I didn't say he resolves them. — apokrisis

If you read carefully you will see that I didn't say that you said he resolved them. In any case the Whitehead you caricature is light years away from the Whitehead I read. It makes me think that you may have read (some?) of his work, but didn't understand it at all, or perhaps better, failed to engage with it, since reading any great philosopher is always going to involve one's own interpretation.

In all the time I have participated on this forum and the old one, I have never seen you show any interest in any philosopher other than Peirce (with the exception of perhaps Kant, Hegel, Aristotle and Anaximander insofar as you believe they agreed with or anticipated Peirce) or any approach other than semiotics. It seems you think Peirce was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that no thinker who comes after him said anything worthwhile unless it was something that had already been said, or implied, by Peirce.

I don't read philosophy in order to discover the One True System. I read it to diversify my ideas and familiarize myself with creative new approaches. I don't believe in ideas so much as entertain them if I find them interesting and enriching. It seems to me that you suffer from an anxiety, a horror even, that you might entertain any idea which does not correspond to Reality as it is portrayed by science, Good luck with that; I don't share such anxiety or proscription.

You are home again. — apokrisis

It's true that the human cannot find a home in your "mathematical strength umwelt" which means that it is not really an "umwelt" at all, but an ivory tower construction. Your preoccupation seems to be with making it taller and more impregnable than any other! Size, and hardness, it would seem, really does matter to you.

It's true that the human cannot find a home in your "mathematical strength umwelt" which means that it is not really an "umwelt" at all, but an ivory tower construction. — Janus

Such pedestrian ad homs. Not worth a response.

In all the time I have participated on this forum and the old one, I have never seen you show any interest in any philosopher other than Peirce (with the exception of perhaps Kant, Hegel, Aristotle and Anaximander insofar as you believe they agreed with or anticipated Peirce) or any approach other than semiotics. — Janus

So what? I've always said my interest is in systems thinking. That is the particular philosophical issue which I want to track through its historical development. It is the one relevant to naturalism as a metaphysical project.

It seems you think Peirce was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that no thinker who comes after him said anything worthwhile unless it was something that had already been said, or implied, by Peirce. — Janus

Such hostility.

I agree it is a little surprising that Peirce sums up so much in pivotal fashion. But read it as a fluke of historical circumstance - a case of being in the right place at the right time.

If you listen closely, you would also see how much I say Peirce left rather muddled. If you want hero figures, I would point to Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe as two contemporaries who have added a hell of a lot of polish to anything Peirce was in a position to say.

But this is a philosophy forum. So talking about the philosophical legacy makes more sense in the context provided.

I don't read philosophy in order to discover the One True System. I read it to diversify my ideas and familiarize myself with creative new approaches. — Janus

Fine. You have your projects too.

It seems to me that you suffer from an anxiety, a horror even, that you might entertain any idea which does not correspond to Reality as it is portrayed by science, Good luck with that; I don't share such anxiety or proscription. — Janus

Don't you feel embarrassed by this level of insult? It is pretty clear which one of us is being thrust into a state of high anxiety by being confronted by their "other".

Again, do you think I should be apologetic for pursuing naturalism as a metaphysical project, going wherever it seems to lead? Am I being such a bad boy? Why are you shaking such a worried and angry finger now?

(Although I can appreciate that you view me as an alarming intrusion on your own chosen familiar umwelt. Your taste for intellectual diversity has its limits, after all.)

Don't you feel embarrassed by this level of insult? It is pretty clear which one of us is being thrust into a state of high anxiety by being confronted by their "other".

Again, do you think I should be apologetic for pursuing naturalism as a metaphysical project, going wherever it seems to lead? Am I being such a bad boy? Why are you shaking such a worried and angry finger now?

(Although I can appreciate that you view me as an alarming intrusion on your own chosen familiar umwelt. Your taste for intellectual diversity has its limits, after all.) — apokrisis

LOL, no I don't feel embarrassed because it is not intended as an insult but as the expression of a genuine impression. I honestly think your thinking is mired in reductionism inasmuch as you think that everything can be explained by science, and that any thinking which is not scientific is therefore pretty much worthless.

I have no argument with "pursuing naturalism". I am interested in Whitehead's ideas and he also pursues naturalism, for example. You should know from my exchanges with @Wayfarer that I do not hold with any supernaturalist thinking simply because I don't believe such thinking has any inter-subjective provenance.

And I am not "shaking a worried and angry finger" at you. My criticism is not on account of what you pursue, but on account of your polemical tone and tendency to re-interpret what others say in order to attack it on your own terms, rather than just recognizing that you and your "opponent" are really talking past one another, or concerned with very different things, and that the time has come to just agree to disagree instead of insisting on the superiority of your own views, and continuing to insult those you are supposed to be engaging in discussion with.

I don't view you as "an alarming intrusion on my umwelt". Insofar as I understand what you are getting at I mostly agree with what you say, as far as it goes. But I believe that your perspective can only encompass the scientific image of the world, and fails when it comes to the manifest image, to use Sellar's terms. So, I don't believe that you have demonstrated that your ideas are cogent when it comes to the 'humanities' aspects of human life.

If you listen closely, you would also see how much I say Peirce left rather muddled. If you want hero figures, I would point to Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe as two contemporaries who have added a hell of a lot of polish to anything Peirce was in a position to say. — apokrisis

Yes, and it is interesting to note that they are both scientists, not philosophers (and of course Peirce was also a scientist as well as a philosopher).

You say it is fine that I have my own projects; and i agree; it is fine that you have yours too. I am more interested in the phenomenological, humanities side of philosophy, and you are more interested in the scientific side of philosophy. I don't pretend that the scientific project is subsumed by the phenomenological; but you do behave as is if you think the phenomenological is subsumed by the scientific. And yet you have never convincingly demonstrated that it this is so. It's puzzling, perhaps you just like to disagree for the sake of it?

I honestly think your thinking is mired in reductionism in the sense that you think everything can be explained by science, and that any thinking which is not scientific is therefore pretty much worthless. — Janus

So you "honestly" think that. Thus you call me a liar when I explain otherwise.

Last time I checked, I seemed a functional member of society. I past the cultural tests even on a "poetical" level of expression. I have a life that seems worth the living.

I'd agree that I also live a highly abstracted life as well - the one that exists in that mathematico-scientific space. But again, more than most who do that, last time I checked, I actually manage to bridge the two umwelts in a way that many appreciate. I get well rewarded for the insights that result from being able to do that.

So, I don't believe that you have demonstrated that your ideas are cogent when it comes to the 'humanities' aspects of human life. — Janus

If you want to dispute their cogency, that is what I'm here for. If you just want to attack me as a person, then maybe take a closer look at your insecurities.

So you "honestly" think that. Thus you call me a liar when I explain otherwise. — apokrisis

No, I don't want to call you a "liar" at all. But, you agreed earlier that your thinking is reductionist in this, but not in the 'mechanistic', sense. And I have never heard you say you found anything of interest or value in, for example, Deleuze, Heidegger, or Whitehead, or in fact any 'unscientifc' thinker, for that matter. You always seem to be dismissive of such philosophers.

But you do express yourself poetically. I have really enjoyed some of your expositions, and have said so on several occasions. And I haven't said there are no insights, phenomenologically or humanistically speaking, to be found in what you say. The value in what you say does not exclude the value in very different kinds of discourses, though. It's not a matter of it being a contest between competing attempts to produce a theory of everything. I don't agree with Peirce's formulation of truth as being what the community of enquirers would at the end come to agree on; for me, this seems to be a very scientistic notion of truth.

Anyway I would apologize if you felt insulted, but I know there is no need, because you, like me, do not take anything said on here personally, or at least so you have avowed on several occasions if my memory serves. :smile:

But, you agreed earlier that your thinking is reductionist in this, but not in the 'mechanistic', sense. — Janus

Sure. Reductionist in the sense that modelling, and cognition, are about forming the umwelts that successfully distance "us" from the "thing-in-itself".

So reductionist in the way that forms the autonomy of being a self in a world. Hence reductionist in a way that speaks to "being human" as an example of that relation.

And I have never heard you say you found anything of interest or value in, for example, Deleuze, Heidegger, or Whitehead, or in fact any 'unscientifc' thinker, for that matter. You always seem to be dismissive of such philosophers. — Janus

Yeah. To the degree they are meant to be saying something interesting about the metaphysics of nature, I find them not wildly exciting. They are peripheral figures, rather late in the day, at best. And Whitehead not even that.

But I can't remember you saying much about Deleuze or Heidegger either. So I'm not sure what missed insight you mean to draw my attention to. What would repay that investment of my time?

The value in what you say does not exclude the value in very different kinds of discourses, though. It's not a matter of it being a contest between competing attempts to produce a theory of everything. — Janus

What do you want? If you think I ignore different discourses, that's bad. If I make posts giving my reasons for dismissing them, that becomes insufferable.

And if I go about my project of tracking the history of metaphysical theories of everything, you get on my case with your own theory of everything which is a rival theory of everything in wanting to reject every totality by fragmentation, implode every constraining unity by asserting creatively unbound pluralism.

Do I just impose all these dichotomies on you, or instead reveal the dialectics tacitly in play?

You really are sounding so bloody hard done by.

I don't agree with Peirce's formulation of truth as being what the community of enquirers would at the end come to agree on; for me, this seems to be a very scientistic notion of truth. — Janus

OK. You don't agree. Next step, you justify that if you think I should care. Why is it wrong?

And it is more than just "very scientistic". Peirce was trying to define science as an inquiry into truth - forever rooted in phenomenology and pragmatism.

So it sounds like you are accusing him of being "overly" correct. What you see as the bug was the feature.

Anyway I would apologize if you felt insulted, but I know there is no need, because you, like me, do not take anything said on here personally, or at least so you have avowed on several occasions if my memory serves. — Janus

I don't take it personal. But I will respond in kind. And finding people to disagree with is what it should be about. Who wants to be surrounded by the like-minded all the time? That is why I ask you to actually set out some concrete arguments when we have the luck to stumble into an area of basic disagreement.

If you could show me Whitehead said something I simply couldn't afford not to understand, that would be terrific. So ball in your court.

A very nice talk, but I'm puzzled by what you would see as its take home message. — apokrisis

Yes I didn't watch it all the way through until after I posted it. I still think he had some interesting ideas about language games.

This is why Platonism, Logicism and Computationalism seem to have something to them. They are only mathematical umwelts - the worlds disclosed in a language game. Yet they are a clear step up from the sociocultural boundedness, the subjectivity, of a poetical umwelt. — apokrisis

At least you admit it is a language game.

And metaphysics is about mathematical-strength umwelts. Peirce was playing that game. Whitehead did and then dropped out. — apokrisis

How is this not a bias for mathematical totalizing? Also, Whitehead's philosophy was very structured and internally coherent.

From this point of view - an umwelt contructed by a poetical use of language - you can actually wall yourself off from all that nasty mathematical metaphysics. That becomes scientistic baggage to be left at the door of belief. Welcome to the cosy world of pan-experientialism. Take off your work boots. You are home again. — apokrisis

You over-characterize my view to make your point. That isn't necessary. I am not a devote of Whitehead, but rather, I saw similarities with his philosophy to your Peircean semiotics, and thought that it included a kind of semiosis that had the ghost already in the machine and organic, rather than the ghost popping out of ex nihilo. And by ex nihilo, I don't mean that it has to come late in the game, but it is coming out later nonetheless (i.e. wherever you decide that it should on your emergent scale). It's less to do with my romantic longing for things to be human and more to do with the Problem of Mind itself. It's easy to beg the question as you are doing and have the answer waiting by handwaving the question at hand, but I first want to grapple with it, and see it for what it is without bypassing the very hard question I am trying to answer. You do have holes in your theory. You have newborns with no experiential qualities. You have animals with no experiential qualities. You have not convincingly connected matter with mind. Rather, you skipped a step from the physical to the mental by using a lot of word-games related to "modeling". Despite your arrogance, condescension, and general uncharitableness, I am still willing to engage with you and see if you have something to fill in the major gaps. Notice, I try not to do this back to you. Perhaps you think I should, but unless provoked, I see no need for it. Thus, my bias against some of your approach does not negate me from being open to the ideas you present, but with the obvious gaps closed more convincingly.

Yeah. To the degree they are meant to be saying something interesting about the metaphysics of nature, I find them not wildly exciting. They are peripheral figures, rather late in the day, at best. And Whitehead not even that. — apokrisis

I don't have much time, so just a couple points. Whether they say something interesting about the metaphysics of nature is akin to whether you find a particular poet interesting. This is of course, from my point of view. From your point of view it might hinge on whether what they say is consonant with the latest science. Two very different points of view there!

And it is more than just "very scientistic". Peirce wastrying to define science as an inquiry into truth - forever rooted in phenomenology and pragmatism. — apokrisis

So, Peirce allowed that there might be other kinds of 'truths'; aesthetic truths, spiritual truths, that the community of enquirers would never come to agree upon?

If you could show me Whitehead said something I simply couldn't afford not to understand, that would be terrific. So ball in your court. — apokrisis

See, I could never do that because you're not interested in Whitehead's ideas and any exegesis of them would be too much trouble. The point is that I'm not trying to convince you that Whitehead's ideas should be interesting to you. Are you saying they should not be interesting to me? Because if you're not, then we have been talking past each other and effectively arguing about nothing.

At least you admit it is a language game. — schopenhauer1

Yes, a semiotic one. And by that I mean a triadic Peircean one and not a dyadic Sassurean one.

How is this not a bias for mathematical totalizing? — schopenhauer1

It is that bias. That is its point.

Also, Whitehead's philosophy was very structured and internally coherent. — schopenhauer1

So is Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or Toy Story. That is a requirement of poetic worlds too. That is what makes them realities which our imaginations can inhabit.

You do have holes in your theory. You have newborns with no experiential qualities. You have animals with no experiential qualities. — schopenhauer1

Huh? To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent.

Despite your arrogance, condescension, and general uncharitableness, — schopenhauer1

Feel free to fuck off anytime you like.