Objects in nature (let alone those in the human world of artifacts) don't come into existence labeled with their own criteria of persistence and individuation — Pierre-Normand

Indeed. It runs all together deeper. Objects which are, later named and categorised by us, ARE something which we later identify (tall, short, soft, round, heavy, a chair, a cat, a tree, etc.,etc.). There is NO criteria of persistence and individuation.

An object, by definition, is persistent (else it would be a given language/experience that was talking about something else) and individuated (else it wouldn't be a specific finite state). All objects express these qualities, regardless of what they might be.

I think there is a subtle distinction between claims about what is and claims about what we should say about what is. — John

It is unclear to me that such a distinction is intelligible. It's like saying that one is entitled to say that some tomato is red while not being entitled to say that it can be said that it is red. How can one possibly argue that P and not thereby be committed to endorse the claim that it should be asserted (rather than denied) that P? Maybe you want to gesture at the idea that there might be things that can't be said at all (or ever). Wittgenstein commented on this in the very last proposition of the Tractatus: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

It really depends on you mean by "perfectly correspond."

We tend to get fooled and confused when we approach this topic because while all instances of knowledge must be "perfect" (i.e. one must have the exact idea of what they understand), it is also true that any instance of knowledge is incomplete.

Even one has (perfect) knowledge of an entire library, there is always something else to know, and sometimes it relates to what they do know in important ways (what good is it knowing the stove is hot if you don't know it is damaging you?).

Our world is simultaneously exhausted in the conceptual (there can't be something without meaning, viz Wittgenstein), but never completed in the concepts of our knowledge (each concept we have leaves out knowledge of everything else). We "perfectly correspond" in our knowledge all the time, but it is a mere drop in the ocean of "what is." What our "perfect knowledge"does just doesn't fit with the notion of the exhaustive account we are sometime prone to chasing.

I actually meant something more along the lines of suggesting that strong claims about what is are often understood to be strong metaphysical claims about the absolute nature of reality. These kinds of claims are distinct from the more modest claims about what we might be entitled to say about the things we experience.

I think Wittgenstein's injunction points to the same thing; that is that we should be silent about matters that go beyond sense. Although I actually think we are entitled to make cautious ontological or metaphysical claims like what I said earlier about it being inconceivable that 'things in themselves' are not reliably and regularly differentiable.

It is very difficult to penetrate and speak about such matters without descending into incoherence or at least ambiguity.

Yes, when I wrote 'perfectly correspond' I was thinking about how what we say always fails to be exhaustive. There is always more to the things than we can say about them. Also there is a perfectly coherent logical distinction between 'things as experienced' and 'things as they are independent of experience'. About the latter though we can say very little; and all of what we do say is based on inference from experience. We don't even know what it could mean for something we say about things as they are independent of experience ( about their "absolute" nature) to be true or even false, and that would seem to be a big problem for metaphysics, at least as it is traditionally understood.

Indeed. It runs all together deeper. Objects which are, later named and categorised by us, ARE something which we later identify (tall, short, soft, round, heavy, a chair, a cat, a tree, etc.,etc.). There is NO criteria of persistence and individuation.

An object, by definition, is persistent (else it would be a given language/experience that was talking about something else) and individuated (else it wouldn't be a specific finite state). All objects express these qualities, regardless of what they might be. — TheWillowOfDarkness

You misunderstand. I wasn't arguing that we are providing criteria for distinguishing objects that do persist from objects that don't persist at all. (Let us put aside objects such as numbers or events that aren't 'material objects' (or gods) -- i.e. the 'substances' of scholastic metaphysics).

Rather, I am following David Wiggins who argues for the sortal dependence of identity in his magisterial Sameness and Substance: Renewed. Material entities persist in time and can be re-identified throughout their careers (until the moment when they die or are destroyed). However, some object such as a statue of Hermes, say, can be materially constituted by a lump of bronze. The lump of bronze can spatially coincide with the statue, and, indeed, be made us of the same collection of atoms, at a time. But they are distinct objects since the statue can be destroyed while the lump of bronze persists for awhile longer. What distinguishes the statue, as an object, that is not identical with the lump of bronze that constitutes it, is its having different criteria of persistence and individuation. (Refer to the puzzles about the Ship of Theseus regarding criteria of individuation). Sticking to criteria of persistence, for simplicity, we can say that they are provided by the sortal concept under which any material object necessarily falls if it is to be counted as such.

Hence, when the statue is melted down, or hammered flat, it is destroyed. It doesn't exist anymore as a statue, which is to say, it doesn't exist anymore simpliciter. There just aren't any statue existing anymore at that location, where there might still exist a lump of bronze.

The issue, then, is what is it that supplies the sortal concepts under which existing (perceptually identifiable and countable) material objects fall? I would say that we do. Objects themselves can't be found in natures labelled with concepts that provide their persistence conditions. But this doesn't threaten realism. We supply the sortal concepts, together with the persistence conditions tacitly associated with them, and then we can look up in the world to see if some objects falling under that concept exist, and we can track them until they meet their demises (not always through our own agencies).

This seems to be a very traditional understanding along the lines of saying that the matter remains while the form is transmuted.

This seems to be a very traditional understanding along the lines of saying that the matter remains while the form is transmuted. — John

No, the thesis is quite different. One main point of Wiggins' theory of the sortal dependency of identity precisely is to deny any simple dualism of matter and form. It still is close to Aristotle, though, since, arguably, in Aristotle, form and matter are concepts that are aligned with actuality and potentiality, respectively, and are likewise relative (to one another) rather than absolute concepts (e.g. a dichotomy). That is, if X is the matter of (or the 'material cause of') Y, then Y can likewise, at the very same time, be the matter of Z, etc., and something else, W, may be the matter of X. Generally, if X is some 'matter' that can potentially take the form of Y (and the existence of this potentiality is all that is said in saying that X is matter), then, when this potentiality is actualized, what was initially only potentially Y might or might not still persist as the X is was. (e.g. one might have to destroy a tree in order to make planks, but the planks can persist as they come to make up a house).

What is rather central to the account is the denial that anything could be 'raw matter', as it were, that is, being a material constituents of something else without also itself falling under some sortal concept or other, and thus having persistence and individuation conditions of its own. Everything conceivable (limiting ourselves to material objects and stuffs) that can be singled out in the material world (perceived, individuated or otherwise conceived) also had form. The material constituents of objects also are objects, in this broad sense.

That makes sense; even atoms or quarks must have some kind of form. So "small forms have larger forms to unite 'em, and so on ad infinitum '...or is it " large forms have small forms to disunite 'em, and so on ad infinitum "?

That makes sense; even atoms or quarks must have some kind of form. — John

Yes, though Aristotle's notions of form and matter, and of act and power, are more general and abstract, and thus applicable to a broader range of empirical domains, than the domain of material objects (Aristotelian substances) that fall under 'sortal concepts', and that have material constituents.

So "small forms have larger forms to unite 'em, and so on ad infinitum '...or is it " large forms have small forms to disunite 'em, and so on ad infinitum "?

That would possibly be a stretch unwarranted by Wiggins' account. His account just is an account of identity and persistence criteria for material objects (substances). Haugeland has a more general account of the constitutive rules that govern 'empirical domains', broadly conceived so as to also include the domain of natural numbers and their properties, and domains of social phenomena such as chess games (e.g. the phenomena that occur on the chess board such as a king being checkmated, or a rook being threatened by a bishop), etc. When considering a particular sort of material object (specifically), there is no reason to expect that its material constituents will always be other material objects with broadly the same sort of ontological structure (as material objects typically have). Electrons and quarks fall under sortal concepts that determine the kinds of experiments, and experimental set-ups, in which they show up, and what kinds of patterns they show up as. Those intelligible patterns need not be patterns of, or arrangements of, underlying material constituents. What they are 'made of', if anything, is for physics, and the philosophy of physics, to determine. That can't be settled by a general account of concepts and objects or a general theory of language and reference.

That's the dead end/error which drives much of the nonsense about theory of truth. There isn't a "how." At some point we are simply found with awareness of particular empirical or logical patterns. We never sit outside this knowledge to somehow derive it. Our knowledge is given by the presence of the object(s) which is(are) the understanding of something else. It is a question of (our) existence rather than of reasoning.

"Ontologically primary"and "the pre-conceptual" are incoherent. Existence doesn't preceded existence. There is just existence. Anything which does exist, which can be expressed language, expresses the conceptual by definition. There can't be a computer, for example, I discover and learn to talk about if such objects fall outside conceptual expression. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think this is rather nicely put. I had missed this response earlier. Let me just make clear that I agree with your attack on the presupposition of the question (that is: the idea that there might be some 'preconceptually existing' reality waiting to be conceptualized by us). Hence the paragraph that you quoted from my post wasn't my own question. It was my paraphrase of John's question. The rest of my response was meant to make (or gesture towards) a point similar to yours on behalf of Haugeland (who, like Brassier, albeit in a different manner, was much influenced by Sellars).

Also, though I also reject the idea of the preconceptual, the use that I make of "ontological primacy" is rather innocuous and only meant to signify a one-way conceptual dependence between two domains that both fall, indeed, within the sphere of the conceptual. In the specific case that I mentioned, Zuhandenheit is primary relative to Vorhandenheit because there is no distanced (theoretical) approach to empirical reality that isn't distanced from, or a view of some features abstracted from, a mode of engagement that directly (and inherently or constitutively) involves our interests and embodied capabilities.

I should say more about the reason why the possibility of (sentient) abilities or 'interests' that falls short from being a conceptual abilities (such a the perceptual and behavioral abilities and attitudes of the sentient albeit non-rational animals) doesn't entail that there are any 'preconceptual objects' for us to talk about, and why even (mere) animal 'affordances' (J.J. Gibson) aren't such objects. But I'll come back to this later, maybe in the thread about Brassier (Concepts and Objects).

We can certainly entertain ideas of pre-conceptual objects, but just as certainly those ideas are not themselves pre-conceptual.

I think this single fact about our situation is the source of much misunderstanding and senseless debate.