An entry on Mellassioux says:

Correlationism is thus not the thesis that we must relate to something in order to know it, but rather that what we know of anything is true only for us. In this regard, correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. For example, for the correlationist there is no answer to the question of whether carbon atoms exist apart from us and whether they decay at such and such a rate because we only ever know appearances. This is Meillassoux’s support for scientific realism. For the correlationist we are never able to get out of the correlation between thought and being to determine whether or not carbon itself has these properties or whether it is thought that bestows these properties, which is sometimes the view of scientific functionalism. Meillassoux calls this unsurpassable relation the correlationist circle.

I think I can spot a weakness in that argument. My view that we know things as they appear, not to us as individuals, but to us as a species, a language-group, a culture, and so on. To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. But I don’t deny the domain of empirically-verifiable facts that will be verifiable by any other observer given the appropriate conditions and controls. In that sense, I’m a scientific realist. However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is not part of that outside that scope. I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea (which is discussed in many papers by another Frenchman, Michel Bitbol. Incidentally, all of these names are people I’ve only learned about through participation in this forum, so that says something.)

I think I might be able to tackle After Finitude, but I’m put off by not knowing anything about Badou and being a bit scared by Cantor. But, you know, live and learn.

To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. — Wayfarer

"to us" is a placeholder for "as conditioned by the categories of understanding" or "as encountered as as an object in the world with an understanding always already there" or "within an episteme" or "as articulated in collective discourse" or "in this culture"...

I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea — Wayfarer

He does. You're rehearsing one of the arguments he anticipates and responds to in the text. Which isn't to say he's right (I have some reservations), but it's to say you'd benefit from reading it!

Thank you, I shall follow your advice.

What then is an uninteresting phenomena? — jkop

Good question. I believe uninteresting phenomena are those that lack primary qualities such as bulk, figure, texture, motion, and so on. As a result, our senses have little ability to recognize them. I'm aware that this argument sounds rather Lockian...

However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is outside that scope. — Wayfarer

There's scientific knowledge about the subjective domain as well. For example, pains, itches, stress, feelings and thoughts are real phenomena whose mode of existing is subjective, and are therefore studied indirectly via language, analysis of reports, behavior, statistics, shared experiences etc. They are not outside the scope of objective knowledge in medicine, psychology, social sciences, linguistics, philosophy etc. From being ontologically subjective it does not follow that it is also epistemically subjective and outside the scope of objective knowledge.

Yes fair point. That pertains to objective understanding of reported sensations, experience, and so on. But without the ability of subjects to report on those phenomena, there would be no data, so it's something like 'objective knowledge of subjective reports'. But the subject of experience as such is not objectively perceptible. What I had in mind was more like what Michel Bitbol says in this talk:

What is unseen in objective science? The first item that is unseen is my, your, own bodies – not the body as an object for anatomy, of course, but my body while it stands in front of any object whatsoever. If I am a scientist, I have a body. I go back and forth in the laboratory doing gestures, shaping chunks of matter, making instruments, in workshops essentially like this studio. But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. This assumption extends to the scientists’ instruments as well, which are usually subtracted or forgotten in the ultimate outcome of their work. Science wants to understand ‘the world out there’; scientists no longer care about the instruments once they have used them to obtain whatever knowledge they’re after. — Michel Bitbol

That also extends to the axioms, theories, bodies of knowledge which comprise the basis on which objective analysis is conducted. That too is dependent on decisions and choices - on what to study, what to include or exclude and so on. And of course many of those elements might also be subject to modification as a consequence of experiment and experience. But the point remains that the subject who is conducting all of this work, the scientist who's theory it is, is generally not considered as a part of the object of analysis. (Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?)

But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. — Michel Bitbol

I don't think Bitbol has it right here. If you talk to physicists or biochemists, say, about their experimental work, scientists are trying to eliminate the effects of their bodies on the matter in hand because they regard that as the right thing to do in that context. If one is trying to identify how variables interact, one has to 'assume' ceteris paribus, that the rest of the world holds still, even though it doesn't. A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes.

Then a 'scientific' approach would be, separately and perhaps within a different scientific discipline, to identify the effect of bodies or equipment holding everything else still.

I appreciate the result may still be the same, but I do think us arty-farts sometimes castigate scientists, if only implicitly, for things they understand perfectly well.

Aren't all scientific theories underdetermined? Does that mean science, in general, reflects our biases, our worldviews, our pet perspectives?

Rocks also might be the wrong sort of thing to look at for a paradigmatic example of discrete objects. Rocks don't have much of a definite form. A rock broken in half becomes two rocks, generally speaking, and many rocks fused together become one rock, whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half. Rocks are largely bundles of causes external to them. They don't do much to determine themselves.

I would say rather that the paradigmatic example of multiplicity and discrete separation would be the plurality of minds in the world. Further down the chain would be the bodies of animals, which not only have a determinate form but also are relatively self-determining, being what they are because of what they are (and thus having their boundaries contained within them). The dandelion seed clinging to a bears fur is distinguishable from the bear in a way sand laying stop sandstone is not.

This in turn would lead to a view where beings are, as discrete beings, to the extent they have self-determing unity (which is essentially the Thomist view).

Edit: In the classical view, this would often be framed in terms of objects having greater or lesser levels of reality. Ideas have greater reality because they are self-determining in a way, being that they are what makes things what they are. But if ideas and the things instantiating them are mutually self-constituting and subject to evolution, this would seem to challenge the classical view in some ways.

Rocks also might be the wrong sort of thing to look at for a paradigmatic example of discrete objects. Rocks don't have much of a definite form. A rock broken in half becomes two rocks, generally speaking, and many rocks fused together become one rock, whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half. Rocks are largely bundles of causes external to them. They don't do much to determine themselves. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Any discrete object is discrete by virtue of standing out against a background. Think of this thesis:

The realm of the senses is all rabbit-duck and it's divided up into discrete-object-background complexes according to the organizing ability of your mind.

Is it possible to disprove this thesis?

edit: I think the main problem with it is that I'll need a higher power to separate me out from the the rest of the world. Plus, I might run afoul of the private language argument.

I believe uninteresting phenomena are those that lack primary qualities such as bulk, figure, texture, motion, and so on. — javi2541997

Ideas and abstract objects lack "primary" qualities a la Locke, but can nevertheless be interesting. Many "secondary" qualities are interesting too, e.g. the qualities in music, coloured shapes, food etc.

(Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?) — Wayfarer

The physics is way over my head, but if there is backwards causation in a block universe and such, then our current understanding of causation might require some additions.

Aren't all scientific theories underdetermined? Does that mean science, in general, reflects our biases, our worldviews, our pet perspectives? — frank

To generalise so broadly does seem to me to obscure the underdetermination involved. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measurement of the gravitational constant doesn't reflect our biases etc.; that much modern neuroscience, as a different example, is infected with biases and pet perspectives given the small evidence base, and often obscures this to make generalisations about humans; and that 'social science' of necessity is understood to be inflected by the worldview of the scientists and their culture.

A feeling, a country, and a state of mind. Clarky, I assume those exist by common convention, but I'm not sure how 'real' they are. Yes, the United States has a specified territory, but isn't this acknowledged as convention rather than reality? — javi2541997

I guess it comes down to that - if we name it, which is a matter of convention, it is real and it is a thing.

What then is an uninteresting phenomena? — jkop

Good point. I guess "phenomenon" is just another word for "thing," which makes the argument circular. Let's try this - a thing is an aspect of the world that draws the attention of and holds interest for people. Now you ask "What then is an aspect of the world that doesn't draw the attention of or hold interest for people?"

Any discrete object is discrete by virtue of standing out against a background. Think of this thesis:

The realm of the senses is all rabbit-duck and it's divided up into discrete-object-background complexes according to the organizing ability of your mind.

Is it possible to disprove this thesis?

No, I think this holds up even from a purely information theoretic view. Floridi addresses this sort of thing in his Philosophy of Information in a chapter on the application of information theory to physics and metaphysics. While we can, in a certain context, speak of the "information carry capacity/'in'" particles of baryonic matter, it is very easy to get mislead here and to start thinking of bits and qbits as building blocks who "contain information in themselves."

Information is always relational though. A proton in a universe where every measurement everywhere has the same value as a proton essentially doesn't exist. You need variance of some sort to have anything meaningfully existing, even in the simplistic toy universe (David Bohm has some good stuff on the priority of difference over similarity, and I think Hegel's ideas on the collapse of "sheer being" into nothing hold up here).

If things are defined by their relations, including their status as constituting even basic ontological difference, then the principle idea underlying substance metaphysics, i.e., "that things properties inhere in their constituents," is simply false. I find this to be a good point in favor of such a view, because I think Jaegwon Kim, and others, have successfully ruled out "strong emergence," under the substance view, and yet we seem to need something like "strong emergence" to explain ourselves.

More controversially, it might be possible to extend this inherit relationality into an argument for an inherit "perspectiveness" to all physical interactions— relevant perspective (or something like it) without experience.

. I'm personally pretty confident, for instance, that the measurement of the gravitational constant doesn't reflect our biases — mcdoodle

More controversially, it might be possible to extend this inherit relationality into an argument for an inherit "perspectiveness" to all physical interactions— relevant perspective (or something like it) without experience. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an SEP article on underdetermination of knowledge. It's like a relative of the problem of induction. With regard to gravity, it means this: any attempts to explain gravity will run into issues with underdetermination, which are:

1. Any hypothesis makes sense as part of a web of already held beliefs. If a hypothesis fails, we have a choice between saying that the hypothesis is wrong, or saying that one of the background beliefs (part of the web of beliefs) is wrong. There's no way to make this choice beyond pragmatism.

2. For any theory that gains approval in the scientific community, there are alternatives that will also explain the available data. Again, it's a matter of pragmatism.

So tying this back to the OP @noAxioms, it means that if we question the makeup of a human (does it include the clothes or bugs on the sleeve), we'll find that however we approach the question, the conclusion will be an exercise in pragmatism. Any revision to our web of beliefs comes down to psychology (see in the above article where Quine says epistemology is basically psychology.)

I meant in the sense that for humans, there existed objects - stuff, placeholders, particulars, whatevs you wanna call it - prior to our purposes and conceptualisations. — fdrake

I don't understand this comment. If these things are prior to our purposes and conceptualisations, then how is this relationship 'for humans'?

Regardless I think you're making a distinction between purposive/normative and physical, whereas there's other graduations - like you might think of chemical, biological, systemic, ecological, intentional etc strata as other strata of existence in which nonarbitrarily individuated objects may exist.

I am kind of looking for specific examples. Chemical seems more concerned with 'bulk goods' rather than objects. Biology can work. It is a living thing, so it kind of has 'bounds', but I attacked those bounds in my OP. A tree can distinguish between the life form itself and the parts it sheds (leaves) every autumn, which thus arguably construe objects even while still on the tree.
A bacteria cell (brought up by somebody above) chasing down another is closer to chemical: It has evolved to react to chemical signals and absorb nutrients: follow its nose so to speak. This is definitely biosemiotics, brought up by Wayfarer. Not much 'object' about that until it has to absorb all of some other 'thing' and not just take 'bites' as it can.

Though you might want to say that such things still have a physical basis, because they relate to distinctions in physical processes. Bodies stuff is still star stuff. But then the ascription of a physical basis to a distinction means nothing other than a distinction. If you think everything's physical anyway. In other words, if there is a distinction drawable between two terms, in that analysis, it must be done in terms of physical properties since all properties would be stipulated to be physical.

and you may need to clarify what you would pre-theoretically count as an object.

For purposes of this discussion, "All of whatever is indicated (e.g. 'this', 'that over there'), and not more than what is indicated". How said thing is indicated is not entirely defined, but pointing, touch, and semi-enveloping are good places to start. Yes, it depends on context, but the context is usually absent in the cases I care about. A phaser set to 'kill' (and not just disintegrate) implies a single biological context, and probably not meant as a way to dispose of a container of toxic waste, despite the wonderful utility of using it that way.

The arche-fossil serves as the linch-pin for Meillassoux to assert that there is a reality independent of human perception and cognition. — Wayfarer

This seems to presume a non-epistemological definition of 'real'. I'm all for that, but not all are (notably those holding that being is fundamentally tied to our experience), and I don't use a 'realist' definition of 'real' myself, but I state the definition it if I need to use it.

A counter-argument to that, is that any meaningful conception of existence just is a human conception.

Sort of. What if something nonhuman has a meaningful concept of existence? How is that different from a human that isn't you having a meaningful concept of existence? Secondly, a meaningful concept of existence may be dependent on conceptions, but existence itself need not be.

I think we are meandering away from the question in the OP. — L'éléphant

Thank you for your contribution to the thread. I am enjoying the wider discussion this has inspired. No need to throw water on it yet.

The question is:
Is there any physical basis for what constitutes a 'thing' or 'object'?
— noAxioms
Object, of course, here, is the "thing" that philosophical theories have been trying to explain.

Best defined through the numerous examples in the OP, plus also the 'Midas' one that I thought of later. I'm sure there are more, but most examples are fictional since fiction can use a convention that the consumer of the fiction can presume, but that physics cannot.

Yes, there is a physical basis for what constitute a thing: it has to be finite, it is complete in our conception of it, and we have a coherent idea of what this thing is.
That is why we will never call the universe a thing.

Off topic, but agree, that would be a category error. A 'thing' is created in time, essentially assembled from pre-existing stuff into its thingness for a duration.
My OP is more concerned about the boundary of a given thing. What all is included? What isn't? What is the physical basis for whatever answer is given for those questions.

We don't call consciousness or the mind a thing

Some do.

We call the trees things.

I mentioned a tree in the Midas example a ways up, which illustrates the ambiguity of what exactly was indicated.

The sci-fi examples or the Midas Touch I think are unanswerable. There is no one canonical dividing line for entities to refer to when dividing objects. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But that's an answer isn't it? There's no one line, and yet a line is shown to be in the fiction, as more or less expected by the consumer of the fiction. The answer is, the fiction cannot ever be real unless we either missed something, or there's a way to convey the convention to the 'device'.

Real world examples here might be instructive. If we want to delineate the boundaries of something for a machine using ultrasound, radar, etc., we might have it calibrated "just-so" as to have returns only come on the sort of thing we want to delineate.

That's a pretty good example. We want it to ignore uninteresting stuff, but cannot always. We want it to convey discreet interesting 'objects' but it doesn't always. A fetal ultrasound is going to see some of Mom's guts, but the range and aim is designed to minimize this. The navy sonar picks up whales when it wants subs, and it maybe misses some of the subs. Heck, do they have sonar-resistant subs like they do for ships with minimal radar profies? Don't see how that is easily done without making them a lot less quiet moving through the water, which would defeat the purpose.

Another good example might be using a specific sort of solvent so that only the thing you wish to dissolve ends up being washed away. Draino, for instance, is going to interact with hair, soap scum, etc. in a way different from how it interacts with a metal pipe, and this difference essentially delineates between "pipe" and "clog."

Both bulk substances, not 'objects', but still another very relevant example.

Am I understanding you to be saying that you are unsure of whether trees are "things" or "objects?" — NotAristotle

Well, once the word 'tree' is used, the convention has been stated. We know what a tree is, and it may or may not cover the underground parts, but it is definitely separate from some other tree.
But the question abou the tree was illustrated in my Midas example when I first brough that up. Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended.
Answer of course is that it's fiction, so there's no requirement for there to be a correct answer. There never seems to be an answer, which seems to support my suggestion of the lack of physical basis for what constitutes all of the 'thing' indicated.

whereas "half a dog" is clearly a half. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's why the phaser set to 'kill' is somewhat clearly defined. Life forms usually have reasonably clear boundaries, but we still have trouble shooting the spider off Kirk's chest. A phaser set to 'disintegrate' (same function) has far more trouble delimiting its job.

To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. — Wayfarer

Not, relativism, no!!! Don't fall down into that wretched pit of scum and villainy (with me).

So tying this back to the OP noAxioms, it means that if we question the makeup of a human (does it include the clothes or bugs on the sleeve) — frank

I was partly asking what all is part of a human, but I'm also asking what all is included in 'that ->' when pointing at a human, but I'm actually pointing to the bug.

we'll find that however we approach the question, the conclusion will be an exercise in pragmatism.

This presumes that the physical device (which artificially made to serve a pragmatic purpose) will be able to glean the pragmatic intent when being used. Bottom line, don't use a big gun to shoot a bug off your buddy's chest.

This presumes that the physical device (which artificially made to serve a pragmatic purpose) will be able to glean the pragmatic intent when being used — noAxioms

It could do that with AI directed actuation. Just tell the AI what you want to shoot.

So this got me thinking, and I could only conclude that what constitutes an 'object' is entirely a matter of language/convention. There's no physical basis for it. — noAxioms

I'm trying to get a classical device like the fictional phaser to apply its function to a classical object without using language to convey intent. — noAxioms

The biggest hurdle to this this task is fundamentally you are trying to find object in the absence of language, but you have to use language as an instrument to do it. — Fire Ologist

You've just designed a gun that emits a destructive heat ray. Your IC board supports three settings for the temperature of the emitted heat ray. In order to test your settings, you turn a dial to the middle setting. This setting maxes out at the combustion threshold for common notebook paper. Pointing your gun, you fire at a notebook paper poster framed within the boundary of an iron rectangle. Will your gun make a discrimination, thus destroying only the paper? Success! The poster bursts into flame, burns up to gossamer black carbon and stops at the edge of the iron frame.

How to design the gun to do the right thing? — noAxioms

By setting the gun to the middle heat-range setting, you constrained the gun to discriminate a paper burn from an iron burn. Did your setting dial dialog with your IC board?

A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes. — mcdoodle

That’s not really the point of the lecture, though. It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are attempting to arrive at the purported ‘view from nowhere’ which is believed to be something approaching complete objectivity. But that doesn’t mean science is ‘getting it wrong’, either. It’s a philosophical observation about interpreting the meaning of scientific observations. It doesn’t invalidate those observations. (It’s related to an Aeon essay I posted ages ago, The Blind Spot of Science, which likewise was interpreted as an attack on science, which it wasn’t.)

I don't understand this comment. If these things are prior to our purposes and conceptualisations, then how is this relationship 'for humans'? — noAxioms

Two senses of priority - you might think of them as temporal and transcendental. The one you're talking about is transcendental. Norms condition perceptions/interactions/actions and make particulars count as objects within them.

Dinosaurs are temporally prior to human existence - they happened before. Thus however they behaved is prior to human faculties of reason - we developed later. Thus there existed a time in which dinosaurs were not judged by human intellects. Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet.

That's relevant because stuff individuates without us being there. So if you want to talk about individuation, it should be in a manner that doesn't depend on "us" being there. For a very broad sense of "us". Like a conditioning perception or set of norms, that's an "us".

Or alternatively, you want a sense in which one process can treat something as an object, and thus that thing counts as an object for that process. Like your dinosaurs example. In which case you can make the same move as I did above with the human intellect and dinosaurs as you can for a process which makes something else count as an object for it. Find some greater embedding context for the process and start asking about the process' interactive capacities with the particular it makes count as an object for some purpose. You then locate the object and the conditioning process in the same embedding context and ask how the object properties could only come to be in terms of the conditioning process interactions when conditioning process properties and object properties emerge from the same context.

So with the amylase/starch example. The process that makes a starch molecule - and other molecules - count as an object for the amylase enzyme is the binding site. A great embedding context there is the evolutionary development of metabolism and digestion. It'd be very difficult to think of the starch as only an object for the enzyme because the starch has highly exploitable bonds which the amylase enzyme developed to break down as fuel.

In my book you end up needing to think about how a process distinguishes itself from a background. Like a subprocess. Like a tree growing a distinct leaf. With that leaf's relatively autonomous being.

Or I suppose you bite the bullet and make all of natures' processes effectively arbitrarily demarcated from each other. Even when they have different laws and levels.

So with your trucks - a collision of a car with the truck+load will behave as if its the truck+load has the mass of the truck+load. The process there is a collision, and in terms of momentum transfer the truck+load is the relevant object. The same would be true for how the truck+load balances.

But for the process of unloading the truck, the truck+load behaves as a truck with a load in it. Since that process distinguishes the truck from the load and doesn't care that adding the load to the truck would make it behave like a heavier point mass.

In terms of my point above, you end up conditioning the individuating properties of those two scenarios in terms of the load's mass's relevance to individuation. So asking about the conditioning mechanism which allows you to distinguish them leads you to mass. Which gives you a bizarre dependence of the allegedly arbitrary distinction on a subsuming context, upon which the distinction makes sense.

And that distinction isn't necessarily just normative - like the momentum transfer isn't word stuff.

I was partly asking what all is part of a human, but I'm also asking what all is included in 'that ->' when pointing at a human, but I'm actually pointing to the bug. — noAxioms

One of the books I was singing the praises of a couple of years back was Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He’s a maths emeritus (now deceased although he lived until a ripe old age. I wrote to him about his book in 2022 and got a nice reply.) It’s not a fringe or new-age book, it’s firmly grounded in cognitive science and empiricism. A glance at the chapter abstracts in the link will convey something of its gist.

The fact that cognitive scientists are talking about ‘how mind creates world’ is directly relevant this conversation. See also this video Is Reality Real? with a couple of cognitive scientists and a rather alarmed Richard Dawkins (“Of course it is! What are you saying”?!?)

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? — noAxioms

That's an easy one; it would be the tree in its entirety that turns to gold. Not the branch nor the forest, for neither of these are standalone things like the tree is, unless the branch is broken off the tree.

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended. — noAxioms

The twig is a portion of the tree, and the set of the latter is the density that makes up a forest. If Midas touches a twig, everything turns gold unintentionally because each element is interdependent. It would be different if Midas cut a twig with another object (like an axe) and then touched it. Once an element has been lost, the chain of turning into gold is no longer present.

These explanations are sufficient. To touch a branch of a tree is to touch a tree. No confusion there.

But the question abou the tree was illustrated in my Midas example when I first brough that up. Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest? The word 'tree' was never conveyed. The intent might not even be there. The touch may have been unintended.
Answer of course is that it's fiction, so there's no requirement for there to be a correct answer. There never seems to be an answer, which seems to support my suggestion of the lack of physical basis for what constitutes all of the 'thing' indicated. — noAxioms

I am beginning to believe that you are contriving, intentionally or unintentionally, a difficulty that is not there. True, Philosophy has been criticized to be full of (1) archaic definitions (2) esoteric selectiveness (3) and even stubbornness. But it is never accused of unnecessary overthink.

Midas touches a twig. What turns to gold? The twig, branch, tree, forest?
— noAxioms

That's an easy one; it would be the tree in its entirety that turns to gold. Not the branch nor the forest, for neither of these are standalone things like the tree is, unless the branch is broken off the tree. — NotAristotle

Right. Just because everything is touching, like the tree touches the forrest floor, touching the whole Forrest, etc, etc, doesn’t mean you lose sight of the separate things that are touching. You need separate things to have a question about where to draw lines where separate things touch and overlap. You can’t lose site of the trees because of the forest either.

*

Dinosaurs are temporally prior to human existence - they happened before. Thus however they behaved is prior to human faculties of reason - we developed later. Thus there existed a time in which dinosaurs were not judged by human intellects. Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet. — fdrake

Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’? Granted, dinosaurs weren’t known to him, but he did help author a theory of nebular formation and presumably would not have given any credence to Biblical creation mythology. The general question being, does the fact of discoveries that pre-date the human species undermine transcendental idealism? Mellaissoux seems to argue that they do.

Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’? — Wayfarer

I doubt it. I'm sure the argument is sufficiently arcane that no one cares about it. Also the move to make something which is seen as transcendental an event, or locate it within a body, probably wouldn't parse for him. The arche fossil is very much targeted against combining embodiment and materiality with reciprocal co-constitution. You can even read it as a constructive dilemma - reciprocal co constitution implies idealism about what is interacted with, or what is interacted with has independent properties, choose. I imagine you'd go with the former.

If the question was whether our common worldview assures us that distinctions don't need conscious input, then dinosaurs would be on point. But dinosaurs are part of a worldview that is itself underdetermined by physical evidence (see here). As Quine would say, we believe there was a time when there were no humans because of psychological reasons, not physical ones.

So the question is whether our worldview should limit our questioning or not. I think we all agree it shouldn't, but in this case, that just leaves us where we started.