I'd rather have a conversation with you, so that when you write this:

Again either abstractions are a real possibility and thus exist, or abstractions are not a real possibility and do not exist.

If you agree that abstractions exist then in some sense you are acknowledging that abstractions are real.
It is really that simple. — m-theory

In response to me saying that I don't buy that there are real abstractions, we can clear up whether you're understanding what I mean by the term "real" contra how you may be using it differently.

I certainly have been to philosophical talks for instance where people bandy about phrases like 'logically impossible' rather readily — mcdoodle

Perhaps it makes sense to understand that the ambition of classical logic is to establish a rigorous syntax in which to speak about the world. The world, in the end, is irreducibly semantic, so logic can in fact only approach this ideal. And yet still, logical laws can be framed which reduce the scope of semantics to pretty much binary, yes or no, answers.

The formal theory says existence reduces logically to these two options. Then it becomes a matter of observation - the informal act of measurement - as to what reality replies.

So logic is all about a syntax that - by application of rules, the modelling of constraints - can reduce our questions about existence to their most telling form. Slipping now into the subtleties of the Peircean view, logic forces us into the realm of pure sign. Instead of looking about the world and taking it in any old way, we get shifted into the mode of seeking the signs that logic says are indexical of the noumenal.

It's the number on dials story. The real world is irreducible semantic - vague, entangled, messy, continuous. But logic gives us the grounds to ignore the real world and focus on the numbers or other "truth values" we can attach to it. We can convert reality back into a series of symbols, a collection of counterfactually definite measurements, that allows us to get on with a computational level of thought.

So we construct the two world relationship described by triadic semiosis. We have the logical world of a clean syntactic play of symbols and the real world of messy entangled dynamics. Measurement - the act of transcribing one reality into the other - is then made as constrained as possible. As fast and simply as we can, we read off the numbers that we can accept as indicative of reality.

The less we are actually caught up in the world during this tricky act, the better. Smash and grab. Get in and get out. And that is why good logical syntax wants to reduce our observations of nature to simple binary ticks. Hanging around in the realm of the thing in itself means getting energetically entangled and losing the modeller's detachment from the modelled. You don't want to start merging with the world you measure. So logic gives you the rules to form the fastest binary dial reading. That way you can return to the realm of thought and get back to the security of its syntactical rigour.

Anyway, the point is to show that the practice of logic has this inherent problem. It cannot afford to tarry in the world of the real,too long. It's goal is to maximise syntactical order, and so even measurement or observation must be made as syntactically constrained as possible.

And - as your reference describes - the problem for the acceptance of modal logic was that it didn't seem sufficiently distant from messy real world semantics. That is what necessitated work on constructing a suitably syntactical notion of possible worlds. Logic needed its Procrustean rack to ignore the reality of reality and trim it to fit as the kind of reality with which it could compute.

The result is too simple for doing actual metaphysics. But hey, the technological success of computers and digital thinking means that syntactic mechanism has become the dominant Metaphysical paradigm over the past 50 years. It has become irresistible to project the manifest image of modal worlds back on the reality from whence it was derived. The map becomes what we believe the territory to actually be.

Would you say it's a triadic system of constraints?

I just did.

And you earlier proved my case in seeking the choice among the interpretative options given in the OP that could function as the sign, the big tick, your nominalistic ontology demands.

You could point to 2 - abstraction - tell us all it was close enough, get in, get out fast, and say once again the world is exactly as you expect it to be. Prejudice confirmed by unassailable logic.

I wonder if you talk like that when you're just hanging out with friends and drinking beer or whatever.

Was it a very long time ago you did a course or two of philosophy at uni? Did you get your high grades because you answered your exam questions like you were down at the pub discussing random shit? 8-)

LOOOL >:O you know mate that Terrapin not only "did a course or two of philosophy at uni", he taught philosophy at fucking uni - maybe if you had attended his class you would have failed ;)

I didn't have many professors who gave bonus points for poetic bullshit. Did you go to UT Austin or New School or something? Who is giving you bonus points here, anyway? It's a message board.

Terripin is pretty much right here.

The possible world is not an manifestation of constraint, but rather freedom or radical contingency-- the possible world defies the constraint of actuality, to remain true no matter what's happening in the world. Logic does not constrain the world (that would be what exists, not the logical rule or semantic sign), but rather is expressed in the constraint of existing states.

Sometimes states of existence express on logical rule, at other times it's another; one possible world expressed here, a different possible world expressed there.

For me, a possible world refers to a physically performable experiment that can be performed or simulated at some future time and location within our observable universe to a level of approximation that is considered acceptable by the modal argument under consideration.

For example, to speak of a possible world in which Donald Trump lost the 2016 presidential election to Hillary Clinton is to consider the potential outcome of a future scientific experiment in which the state of planet earth immediately prior to the conclusion of the election is approximately reproduced either here on earth or elsewhere on another planet such that the counterfactual result follows. The required precision and accuracy of this experimentally reconstructed copy of the past state that produces the counterfactual result depends on what information is demanded by the modal argument.

Obviously such a formulation of possible worlds means that neither "Trump" nor "Hillary" are designated rigidly, with "trump" and "Hillary" in the "possible world" referring to mere stand-ins for their original counterparts that are judged to be playing their respective roles "well enough" for the modal argument under consideration.

Great. I will be sure to address him by his correct title of Professor Terrapin when I have to explain to him how to go Google all these long words he doesn't seem to know.

For some reason I doubt this is true.

The possible world is not an manifestation of constraint, but rather freedom or radical contingency-- — TheWillowOfDarkness

You are jumping ahead to the claimed result and not thinking about how the framework is developed. The OP article in fact is a very good one. It makes the issues explicit.

Recall the informal picture that we began with: a world is, so to say, the “limit” of a series of increasingly more inclusive situations. Fleshed out philosophical accounts of this informal idea generally spring from rather different intuitions about what one takes the “situations” in the informal picture to be. A particularly powerful intuition is that situations are simply structured collections of physical objects....

So the informal picture is that worlds are constructed by going from the particular to the general - recognising the increasingly generic constraints that can still bind a set of parts as a whole.

This is just the reverse view of how particularity develops - by the world becoming increasing crisply formed as it gathers ever more localised or specific states of constraint.

And then to keep the game going, Lewis had to argue for the notion of counterpart likeness.

Roughly, an object y in a world w2 is a counterpart of an object x in w1 if y resembles x and nothing else in w2 resembles x more than y.[19] Each object is thus its own (not necessarily unique) counterpart in the world it inhabits but will typically differ in important ways from its other-wordly counterparts. A typical other-worldly counterpart of Algol, for example, might resemble her very closely up to some point in her history — a point, say, after which she continued to live out her life as a stray instead of being brought home by our kindly dog-lover John. Hence, sentences making de re assertions about what Algol might have done or what she could or could not have been are unpacked, semantically, as sentences about her counterparts in other possible worlds.

So the argument is that what constraints don't care about can be treated modally as accidental rather than universal properties. If a difference doesn't make a difference, then what it "actually is" becomes logically a matter of indifference.

If you are applying this to individuation - the prime target of predicate logic - then it says we know Algol well enough not to mistake her for any other dog even if we were to encounter her in some entirely different world. There is something essential about her that defines her.

Or at least - reductionism being desperate to cash out nominalism - there is so little different about her (our "mental" idea of her, heh, heh) that we are content to take this counterpart Algol as a token of a type. I mean, a sign of a thing.

Oh dear. I seem to have slipped again into the semiotic account that reveals the full extent of the semantic games being played. :-O

Well Terrapin is saying something reasonable - I don't see it identical with the point YOU are making in this post however. Apokrisis is just re-stating the same things he always says and he always tries to apply to everything without discrimination almost. Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting perspective but definitely a lot more limited than apokrisis takes it to be.

Did someone mention limits?????

Did someone mention limits????? — apokrisis

??

Systems science has been critiqued by a few philosophers - the problem with a system which starts from vagueness (everything) and differentiates down to particulars is that it can't ever fail to explain anything. The fact that by logical necessity it cannot fail makes it problematic, because it loses all powers of discriminating between what will actually be the case, and what may be the case. It can look in the past at all events, and it will find an explanation for all of them - and necessarily so, because it's just logically structured to include everything, and therefore nothing.

But this is all for a different thread called "What is an abstract object?" — Mongrel

Maybe you should read the OP.

That's nonsense because it says what conflicts can't exist. So histories lock in destinies.

That's nonsense because it says what conflicts can't exist. So histories lock in destinies. — apokrisis

What conflicts can't exist?

Draw me a square circle.

:s How does knowing logical impossibilities have any significance? We didn't need systems science to know what is logically impossible anyway.

Great. I will be sure to address him by his correct title of Professor Terrapin when I have to explain to him how to go Google all these long words he doesn't seem to know. — apokrisis

Yeah, the reason your writing is incomprehensible is because you're using words I don't know. Haha.

That's just the same way the random pomo essay generator works. It triadically employs a systematic constraint of semiotic ninethness.

For some reason — m-theory

A combination of projection, arrogance and assumptions rooted in stance and disposition biases.

Before the invention of computers computation was only an abstraction.
If that abstraction did not actually apply to reality then computers would not exist and would not even be possible. — m-theory

Yes, and not only can a Turing machine be instantiated in Reality, but that Turing machine can instantiate another Turing machine abstractly. But then that's what Turing machines do - they abstract!

And, as you point out, if Reality did not have this ability to instantiate abstractions, computers could not exist. But taking your argument a little further, computation (as performed by humans) would not be possible, the same goes for language and thought.

Again either abstractions are a real possibility and thus exist, or abstractions are not a real possibility and do not exist. — m-theory

Some entities are purely abstract, and I see no reason to describe them as "possibilities". Take the set of non-computable numbers. How could they be described as "possible" when they are explicitly not.

If you agree that abstractions exist then in some sense you are acknowledging that abstractions are real.
It is really that simple. — m-theory

It may be that simple, but it does get interesting.

And, as you point out, if Reality did not have this ability to instantiate abstractions, computers could not exist. — tom

As you don't point out, but I keep asking you, what's an example of something that a computer does or has that's an abstraction?

As you don't point out, but I keep asking you, what's an example of something that a computer does or has that's an abstraction? — Terrapin Station

Here's a rather striking example of the literally trillions of possible examples that could be chosen:

http://www.nature.com/news/two-hundred-terabyte-maths-proof-is-largest-ever-1.19990

Now I've got a couple of questions for you:

1. What is the special physics that exists only in the human brain that makes it the only place abstractions can be instantiated?

2. How do computers work - perform proofs, play games, simulate reality, if they don't instantiate the abstractions upon which they are operating?

Here's a rather striking example of the literally trillions of possible examples that could be chosen: — tom

Are you saying that the computer formulated a concept? (And so you believe that we've already created artificial consciousness?) Or are you meaning something else by "abstract"?

1. What is the special physics that exists only in the human brain that makes it the only place abstractions can be instantiated? — tom

It's rather the exact matter and dynamic structures that make the difference.

Before I answer your second question, I just want to clear up (as I asked above) how you define abstractions. Do you agree that they're just concepts that we formulate?

I think uncomputable numbers can still be said to exist in the sense that there is a formal abstraction that defines them.
I see your point though and it is interesting.

I still doubt that you have ever taught philosophy professionally.