I'm not quite following.

Is the idea to drop the idea of instantiation?

But what are you going to do with universals if not instantiate them?

If that model has issues you want to avoid, then you just go for predicates (which you're already keeping) and their extensions.

The idea of *starting* from resemblance and building everything from that might be worth pursuing. (@bongo fury has some ideas about how to police the borders.)

But then you won't start out talking about universals.

Is the idea to drop the idea of instantiation?

But what are you going to do with universals if not instantiate them? — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, the idea is to drop instantiation and replace a universal with a resemblance relation.

So the question is (1) whether resemblance, or similarity in some respect, or something like that, gets us everything we want from universals, and (2) whether such an account is coherent, non-circular, doesn't need to smuggle in universals somewhere to work.

Yes?

Yes, although some circularity or primitiveness in the resemblance relation may be necessary as it is in the idea of the instantiation of a universal.

Right. And I assume we're talking about this logically, not psychologically. An account of, I guess, properties, rather than how we come to learn them, or think them up, and so on.

A theory of universals presumably has something to offer, is supposed to explain how something works or what something means. I haven't thought about universals in a long time (having gotten accustomed to predicates and such) but it would appear to be in the neighborhood of where you started, two numerically distinct objects both being red, for example.

We have to first see how this is a problem, right? The objects are distinct. Anything you pick out to describe a concrete object is a bit of that object, is that object minus almost everything about it except some particular aspect you've chosen. (Passing over how we do that, for the moment anyway.) At least, that's how I presume abstraction works.

So you take a ball and you imaginatively delete its location, its mass, the texture of its surface, everything but the light it radiates and you call that its color. (This is no good, of course, since it needs to be a propensity or a disposition, but we don't know whether we need to bother yet.) We do the same thing with some other object, maybe a car. If this is how we 'create', as it were, colors of things, by taking a particular and leaving out everything else, we still end up with just a partial particular.

What you get is still two numerically distinct abstract objects rather than concrete ones, yes? No matter how similar the abstract objects are, they are distinct. What could possibly entitle us to say that they are in any sense the same thing?

Now we might think — identity of indiscernibles to the rescue! And now that we come to it, how did we imagine the sort of partial particular I described being a numerically distinct entity? It's not, after all; it's only an aspect of a 'genuine' concrete entity. Not even a part of it, but something that, obviously it seems, cannot exist on its own, but only as an aspect of something concrete.

No problem; we knew that as soon as we said we were creating an abstract object (the red of this ball) from a concrete object (this ball). But if it's no real objection that these things can't exist on their own, then we can't rely on their individual existence to underwrite their being numerically distinct. Maybe abstract objects can be numerically distinct, but if they can it's not the way regular concrete objects are.

Which leaves us where? We want to head toward saying these two abstract objects are the same or similar, but now it's not even clear in what sense they are objects at all, or whether they can be distinguished in order to be compared or identified. If these are objects, it's not clear what use they can be to us. We're in a muddle.

Abstraction looked so straightforward, but it seems to leave us nowhere.

So what do you think? We want an account of properties of objects, and we expect to be able to say that two objects have the same property, or that they have properties that are similar but not identical. But how do we fix our account of properties? Was my account of abstraction all wrong? Or are we in a better position than it seems?

What would be the difference between a universal and a multi-place (potentially infinite-place) resemblance relation? — litewave

I would say that the resemblance relation is dependent on the instances of a given general property - if there is no or if there is a single instance of such property, for example, there would not be a resemblance relation. The universal, on the other hand, I think, is independent of there being any instances of it. In the case of instances of red, for example, these instances are not found everywhere in space, and in addition their distribution in space changes; that is, the resemblance relation, although invariant relative to the total instances of red* is not invariant relative to instances of other properties, meaning that it cannot be potentially infinite-place (if I understand what you mean by this, correctly) since it is possible that in a given moment in time a point in space will not be red, excluding any chance of it being red**. In the case of redness, it is the fact that any point in space (or that there are points in space that) has/have the potential to be red. Thus, the resemblance relation requires that there are points in space that are red, and since their number and distribution is limited (not all points in space are red), the resemblance relation is also limited; on the contrary, redness requires that there are points in space that have the capacity to be red, independent of there being any red points.

*No matter the number or distribution of red instances, they will resemble each other in the fact that they are red.

**A potentially infinite-place resemblance relation, as I understand it, would mean that any point in space at any given time would have the potential to become red and part of the resemblance relation, which I do not think is the case since it is possible that any point in space at any given time is not red or will not be red - if a point in space is not red at a given time it is because at some previous time it was potentially not red. So, that a point in space has the potential to be red is not equivalent to a point in space having the potential to be part of the resemblance relation of red. A point has the potential to be red and never be red and thus never be part of the resemblance relation.

And now that we come to it, how did we imagine the sort of partial particular I described being a numerically distinct entity? It's not, after all; it's only an aspect of a 'genuine' concrete entity. Not even a part of it, but something that, obviously it seems, cannot exist on its own, but only as an aspect of something concrete. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually, I would say that the partial particular, for example the particular redness of this ball, is a concrete part of the concrete whole (this ball). A concrete object is a collection of other concrete objects and there are various overlapping collections inside this collection. In the case of this ball, one of those overlapping collections is a particular red color because the structure of that collection is such that it reflects certain wavelengths of incoming light. Other collections inside the ball constitute the texture of the ball, the mass of the ball (the structure that interacts with other objects via gravitational force), and the ball as a whole (regardless of its internal structure) is a collection that is a sphere (a particular roundness). So I would say that the particular properties of a concrete object are overlapping parts (collections) of that object; their existences are mutually dependent on each other and the existence of the object as a whole is dependent on its parts. Perhaps even the object's location could be argued to be a particular property that is identical to the whole of the object (including its complete internal structure), because the whole constitutes the object's unique identity and thus determines its place in reality - all of the object's relations to all other objects. (And all relations between objects are resemblance relations determined by the objects' parts/particular properties.)

.....take a ball and you imaginatively delete its location..... — Srap Tasmaner

Just curious. Where did you get the idea for doing this?

I would say that the resemblance relation is dependent on the instances of a given general property - if there is no or if there is a single instance of such property, for example, there would not be a resemblance relation. The universal, on the other hand, I think, is independent of there being any instances of it. — Daniel

I think that a general property without particular instances is an oxymoron because it is inherent in the meaning of "general" property that it is instantiated in "particular" instances. Also, a general property with only one particular instance seems to be an oxymoron because if such a property is instantiated in only one particular instance, why call this property "general" and not simply identify it with the particular instance?

Thus, the resemblance relation requires that there are points in space that are red, and since their number and distribution is limited (not all points in space are red), the resemblance relation is also limited; on the contrary, redness requires that there are points in space that have the capacity to be red, independent of there being any red points. — Daniel

The resemblance relation I am talking about holds timelessly, among all similar objects that exist, have ever existed and will ever exist. (Actually, I would say that reality itself is timeless, in the sense that time is a special kind of space, as described by theory of relativity.) Also, I don't think that a non-red point of spacetime has a "capacity" or "potential" to be red; if such a point were red, it would change the definition of the spacetime that contains this point and so it would be a different spacetime, a different world, and the red point in this other world would be a different point than the non-red point in the former world. So it is not logically possible (consistent) for a non-red point of a particular spacetime to be red. We can say that a point in space can "change" in time, for example from non-red to red, but the non-red point of spacetime is non-red forever and the red point of spacetime is red forever. So, like the resemblance relation, the instantiation of a universal exists timelessly too, in all similar objects that exist, have ever existed and will ever exist.

By the way, when I said that the resemblance relation is "potentially" infinite-place, I just meant that maybe it has infinitely many relata.

Now we might think — identity of indiscernibles to the rescue! And now that we come to it, how did we imagine the sort of partial particular I described being a numerically distinct entity? It's not, after all; it's only an aspect of a 'genuine' concrete entity. Not even a part of it, but something that, obviously it seems, cannot exist on its own, but only as an aspect of something concrete.

No problem; we knew that as soon as we said we were creating an abstract object (the red of this ball) from a concrete object (this ball). But if it's no real objection that these things can't exist on their own, then we can't rely on their individual existence to underwrite their being numerically distinct. Maybe abstract objects can be numerically distinct, but if they can it's not the way regular concrete objects are. — Srap Tasmaner

Actually, I would say that the partial particular, for example the particular redness of this ball, is a concrete part of the concrete whole (this ball). A concrete object is structurally a collection of other concrete objects and there are various overlapping collections inside this collection. In the case of this ball, one of those overlapping collections is a particular red color because the structure of that collection is such that it reflects certain wavelengths of incoming light. — litewave

The problem with litewave's representation here is that the existence of the particular "concrete whole" is taken for granted. Srap demonstrates how this is not an acceptable starting place. The idea that we build universals through observation and abstraction from particulars, is just not consistent with what we really do. Abstract, "pure mathematics" shows that we dream up universal principles (axioms) first, from the imagination, or they come to us intuitively, then we try to force the particulars of specific circumstances to be consistent with the universals. If we cannot produce such consistency, the universals get rejected and replaced. What is neglected, or left out from litewave's representation, is that whenever we proceed toward comparing particulars, we do so with a preconceived standard, or rule, for comparison. A comparison without such a standard is impossible, therefore the standard must be prior to the comparison and cannot be properly represented as being produced from it.

This is the problem which Plato faced with Pythagorean Idealism, the question of how the reality of the particular individual, the "concrete object" is supported, justified, or substantiated. Litewave's suggestion, that a concrete particular is a collection of concrete particulars had already been demonstrated to be faulty because it was known to produce an infinite regress. The Idealists proposed that the existence of the particular is supported by the universal, the Idea, and this was seen to be necessary from the reality of the concept of "generation". When a particular being comes into existence, it is necessarily the type of being which it is, therefore the universal, or Idea, must precede in time, as a cause of existence of the particular. The universal must precede in time, the particular, in order for the particular to be caused to be the type of thing which it is.

The problem which Plato exposed is that the Pythagoreans supported their Idealism with the theory of participation, and this could not account for a causal relationship between the universal and the particular. A particular concrete entity is supposed to be the type of thing which it is, through the means of participating in the Idea. So Plato showed how, in this representation, the Idea is passive, while the particular thing is active, by actually participating in the Idea, and this cannot account for causation. Then, in "The Timaeus" he proposed an alternative whereby the Idea is actual, and acts to cause the reality of a particular concrete entity being the type of thing which it is, therefore the Idea acts to cause the existence of the particular thing.

I think that a general property without particular instances is an oxymoron because it is inherent in the meaning of "general" property that it is instantiated in "particular" instances. — litewave

Again, this is an example of your misrepresentation. We can and do imagine many general properties without any particular instances. That's obvious in mathematics.

But is there any reason why not identify the universal with the resemblance relation itself? — litewave

Are you (and others) referring to Carnap's Logical Structure of the World ?

Abstract, "pure mathematics" shows that we dream up universal principles (axioms) first, from the imagination, or they come to us intuitively, then we try to force the particulars of specific circumstances to be consistent with the universals. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, but I am saying that these "universal principles" are just resemblance relations between particulars rather than additional entities (universals) that instantiate in the particulars. I just identify a universal with a resemblance relation and thus simplify the metaphysical picture: instead of (1) a universal, (2) an instantiation relation between a universal and a particular, and (3) a resemblance relation between particulars we would have just a resemblance relation between particulars.

The psychology is messy. In many cases it seems that we imagine a concrete particular example, perhaps a typical or paradigmatic example, and call it a "universal". We can't visualize a universal circle, we always visualize a particular circle, but we can later write down the mathematical relationship among spatial points that defines a universal circle. But I don't rule out cases where our mind comes up first with a universal principle and then sees that it fits with the particular examples.

Litewave's suggestion, that a concrete particular is a collection of concrete particulars had already been demonstrated to be faulty because it was known to produce an infinite regress. — Metaphysician Undercover

How?

We can and do imagine many general properties without any particular instances. That's obvious in mathematics. — Metaphysician Undercover

All general mathematical properties have examples in particular sets (collections). That's why set theory is regarded as a foundation of mathematics.

Are you (and others) referring to https://www.phil.cmu.edu › la...PDF
The Logical Structure of the World - Cmu? — bongo fury

I haven't read Carnap's book "The Logical Structure of the World".

Ah well it might be what you're looking for? Constructing qualities/properties from (and reducing them to) similarity data? (Link to pdf now fixed.)

.....take a ball and you imaginatively delete its location.....
— Srap Tasmaner

Just curious. Where did you get the idea for doing this? — Mww

It's sort of the way empiricists like Hume talk. (@Manuel reads the early moderns a lot, so he could point out what a travesty of empiricism this is.)

It is also literally how I treat generating equivalence classes in everyday cases, choosing what to ignore, but there I've got a predicate machinery I don't intend to question.

It was intended as a simple, bone-headed account of abstraction, just to have a starting point. I assumed the main issue would be that you have to individuate properties in order to bracket them, which means you have to have universals to create a universal. (And now it sounds like Sellars's argument in EPM.) Never even got that far.

Srap demonstrates how this is not an acceptable starting place. — Metaphysician Undercover

If you say so. (Thanks for the notes on the ancients, btw.)

I don't think I demonstrated anything. I suspect the argument I gave is junk, but it had, for me, the desired effect of showing that the problem is not so simple as we might pre-theoretically think. Ask a non-philosopher friend and they'll probably sound like empiricists: concepts come from us "noticing patterns", "seeing what's in common", all this sort of thing. Maybe a "thank you, Darwin."

Abstract, "pure mathematics" shows that we dream up universal principles (axioms) first, from the imagination, or they come to us intuitively, then we try to force the particulars of specific circumstances to be consistent with the universals. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's at least in the neighborhood of Sellars's argument and the impasse I expected to reach, that empiricism from a blank slate can't actually get started.

Not perfectly clear to me what the status of that argument is though. I was promising to look at logic not psychology, and while this isn't empirical psychology, there's something unavoidably psychological here. I have thought it might be a matter of being unable to state the empiricist position coherently, so again a matter of logic, but now it looks like the logic at stake is somewhat transcendental. Well, no big surprise since Sellars was profoundly Kantian, but I didn't intend to drag that in. I'd rather there was a clear way to avoid this whole line of argumentation...

Actually, I would say that the partial particular, for example the particular redness of this ball, is a concrete part of the concrete whole (this ball). A concrete object is a collection of other concrete objects and there are various overlapping collections inside this collection. In the case of this ball, one of those overlapping collections is a particular red color because the structure of that collection is such that it reflects certain wavelengths of incoming light. — litewave

So I would say that the particular properties of a concrete object are overlapping parts (collections) of that object; their existences are mutually dependent on each other and the existence of the object as a whole is dependent on its parts. — litewave

I see what you're trying to say, but you can't say "part" because parts are concrete rather than abstract exactly in the sense that they can exist independently. (That much I learned from @Andrew M's explanation of hylomorphism.) And you really shouldn't be saying "collection" because that's a soft word for "class" and you precisely can't have classes without universals or predicates to define them. Clearly you're hoping to get structure — which is crucial, particulars aren't bags of properties — out of how the various collections are arranged.

Stepping back, this begins to sound like breaking down an object into its fundamental particles and then reassembling it, down the chain through chemistry to quarks and then back up again. We assume such a thing is possible in principle, I guess, but the argument for special sciences has always been that on the way back up, you have no way to know where you are and what you're building, so the particulars of interest are gone forever, leaving just an undifferentiated sea of particles.

No travesty at all. Hume has a ridiculous amount of quotable sentences, paragraphs and even pages. Good on you for trying that style of writing out, it's fantastic.

I used to have a pet theory, also somewhere between logical and psychological, that generality is not a matter of classification but a type of procedure. Example: you want to talk about triangles in general, what you imagine or what you draw on the whiteboard are going to be approximate actual triangles, the edges and angles having particular values; you can treat that as a concrete triangle such that you might just measure to determine these values, or you can treat the object as general, or abstract, meaning that in your reasoning you are careful *not* to rely on these particular values. You carefully ignore them. And so in doing geometry we get to just stipulate (and indicate with those little hash marks) that these edges or those angles are equal, without giving a thought to the actual values the representation, being a concrete object, has.

.....take a ball and you imaginatively delete its location.....
— Srap Tasmaner

Just curious. Where did you get the idea for doing this?
— Mww

It's sort of the way empiricists like Hume talk. — Srap Tasmaner

Ok, thanks.

FYI....in case you didn’t already know, and not that it matters....doctrines other than British Enlightenment empiricism start from that very same thought experiment for the development of purely rational theories. It’s just that I’ve never seen it presented by someone other than The Old Guys.

The Old Guys. — Mww

C'est moi.

HA!! I feel ya. We’re still breathing, so we don’t qualify as OLD guys.

It could be a bit of both, but the example you give was used by Descartes, if I don't misremember. And Cudworth too, though his examples were more varied.

In the empirical world, we don't see triangles, nor rectangles nor any other geometrical figure, for exactly the reason you point out: they are imperfect, sometimes severely so. The interesting thing is that unless it is completely unrecognizable, we see three distorted lines and judge it to be a triangle, same with other such figures. If this is not innate, then nothing is.

Hume, though not Locke (as far as I can tell), did not think this to be true, he thought we had no notion of straight line not derived from experience, but then we simply don't have such a notion. Because the experience won't yield what we take to be a straight line.

So, I wouldn't give up on your pet theory.

I suppose I should add, I wasn't just presenting empiricism in disguise; I was really just trying to see how I could come up with properties "from scratch". Looking back, what I did strikes me as an empiricist move, but it wouldn't surprise me to find it elsewhere. If it's one of the obvious ways to go, people have gone that way.

I like actually doing philosophy more than I like exegesis.

Over in the thread about causation, I found myself talking about approximations, and noting that we begin with noisy data and idealize it as a mathematical formula that we call an approximation; and if we can do that, we can go the other way and see the data as approximating the function.

How do we learn to do such things? If you draw a line on a chalkboard and say, "Imagine this is a straight line," what do you do if your audience asks, "What do you mean?" Once we know the trick, once we have the knack of idealizing, we can do this sort of thing all day long. But what if that trick is still opaque to you? I wonder if there are brain lesion studies on people who are unable to abstract in this way, or if there is a cognitive disorder that impedes this ability. It seems like you would get the sort of conversation you get with someone hyper-literal.

Yeah, but after 3000-odd years, the corpus of philosophy texts is so vast, it’s really hard to do philosophy that hasn’t already been done.

I was really just trying to see how I could come up with properties "from scratch". — Srap Tasmaner

Have you come up with anything in that respect....from scratch?

Hmmm. I would not be surprised if there were cases of people who lacked the capacity to visualize such elementary figures. But the vast majority of people call a "rectangle" or a "triangle" something which does not exist in the world.

I think that in the instance you are mentioning in your thought experiment, unless they do lack these basic capacities, I'd think you'd be arguing about the meaning of words and not the concept.

Plato goes over some of this (example of having knowledge you did not know you had) in his Meno, which I have to read. This shouldn't be too shocking; we very likely had the capacity to do math for thousands of years before we realized it could be used for things beyond very basic counting.

Yeah, but after 3000-odd years, the corpus of philosophy texts is so vast, it’s really hard to do philosophy that hasn’t already been done. — Mww

Pfffft.

May I invite you good Sir, to read Lacan and Derrida?

:joke:

And you really shouldn't be saying "collection" because that's a soft word for "class" and you precisely can't have classes without universals or predicates to define them. — Srap Tasmaner

I can also define a collection by enumerating its members, rather than by specifying a universal that is shared only by the members (or a resemblance relation that holds only among the members).

I can also define a collection by enumerating its members — litewave

That's a good point, but is it any use? If there's no criterion for membership, then the class you create is arbitrary, isn't it?

In the empirical world, we don't see triangles, nor rectangles nor any other geometrical figure, for exactly the reason you point out: they are imperfect, sometimes severely so. — Manuel

But we see at least imperfect triangles and they resemble each other in a particular way. You can postulate "imperfect triangle" as a universal, with some range of deviations from the perfect triangle.

May I invite you good Sir, to read Lacan and Derrida? — Manuel

Knowing my denkweise as you do, what do they offer that might interest me? Or....what about them interests you?