I think where a deflationist who also enjoys the functionalist paradigm above would disagree with a functionalist simpliciter is whether metaphysical {and maybe even epistemological} questions can only concern specific instances of the mapping between true behaviours and our descriptions. In effect, they disagree on whether the only salient questions about objects and concepts are of the modelling form. Which is roughly describing how things work, or describing {how describing things work} works. — fdrake

You seem to be saying that the deflationist and the functionalist (or "behaviorist") occupy the same position, but the former occupies it dogmatically and the latter occupies it tentatively. That is an interesting idea, but if someone looks like a deflationist, quacks like a deflationist, and waddles like a deflationist, is he then a deflationist? :razz:

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And sortals were my logico-linguistic way of getting at [being/essence]. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay, interesting. There is here the closely related issue of accidental wholes vs. organic wholes (organisms), i.e. whether organisms can be modeled as machines.

We don't talk this way much anymore. There was a time when "essence" was tidied up as "necessary and sufficient conditions" for ― for what? For truthfully applying a predicate, mostly. Being is scrunched down into the copula, and all that's left is being a value of a bound variable. — Srap Tasmaner

The thread, "Essence and Modality: Kit Fine," comes to mind.

If your model quantifies over ducks, you're committed to ducks as entities, no cheating. — Srap Tasmaner

Yep, and was recently overseeing this rule.

But the anti-metaphysics comes by flipping that around: ducks are entities just means you have a model in which you quantify over them. That implies "duck" has what amounts to a functionalist definition: what role ducks play in the model, how the duck nodes behave, interact with other nodes, and so on. — Srap Tasmaner

This is where 's shift from "behavior" to "function" becomes a bit precarious, especially given that he never actually drops the "behavior" language. I'm not sure that the jump to functionalism or "behaviorism" is justified. Is there a petitio principii which allows 'ducks' to be entities in the first place, as claims? This is the question of what an entity is, of what a duck is, and this is presumably related to your "sortals."

And if that's the case, it provides a kind of justification for functionalist philosophy: we know this will work because we're just doing the same sort of thing the world is already doing. — Srap Tasmaner

My basic counterargument here is that what the world is already doing in a prima facie sense is represented by our language, which includes verbs and nouns. If the behaviorist needs to rewrite that to exclude nouns (i.e. if models require only behavior and not bearers of behavior), then behaviorism is not ready-made. It requires a revision of our prima facie interpretation of the world.

Oh yeah, really far. Most ordinary people aren't going to notice that the only consistent way to do this is, like Isaac, to treat the universe as behavior all the way down, never bottoming out at some thing it's the behavior of. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, exactly.

Ralph and Sam, striding through philosophy with their functionalist hammers for years, and one day Ralph says, "Hey Sam. You ever notice that the world is full of nails? That there's nothing but nails? That's funny, isn't it?"

That's the sentiment behind this thread. — Srap Tasmaner

Okay, haha.

But I don't necessarily buy the idea that functionalism or "behaviorism" are unfalsifiable. Regardless, you are right that in order to assess it one must step outside of its frame. In many discussions with @fdrake I have the suspicion that he is not ready to step outside of its frame. For example, in the thread about triangles I kept trying to push the discussion away from merely stipulated definitions and into metaphysics, and I felt that he kept saying, "I am not opposed to metaphysics," all the while resisting the shift into the explicitly metaphysical register.

(There may be a meta-mentality about the limitations of the powers of human knowing at play, such that “metaphysics” is necessarily limited to a model-theoretic framework. On my view this is related to Enlightenment motives and the quiet significance of behavior vs. function, but more on that later.)

The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable. — Leontiskos

Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Withdrawal

Reminds me of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology#Withdrawal — schopenhauer1

Real objects withdraw for OOO, but sensual objects don't. Sensual objects, unlike real objects, have direct access to each other.

... and with that, I'm out of this Thread.

First, going back to what I said to ↪fdrake, "But activity is only half the picture. The other half is receptivity..."

That's a good point. I glossed behavior as "act."

Will it be sufficient to know how ducks behave? I don't think so. I think one will also need to know how ducks respond to the behavior of other things, such as the fox that eats duck (including how it responds to having its neck broken and being digested). And one will also need to understand not only the internal proportion of duck "behaviors," but also the principles, causes, and explanations of the behaviors, which dictate the manner in which different kinds of behaviors interact (as well as the proportions and interactions between these powers).

Right, epistemically accessible acts involve interaction. When we speak of (essential) properties, we can be inclined to miss this. So, for instance, nothing looks red in a dark room, and for something to "be red" there needs to be (at least potentially) something that can "see red." Likewise, while we might say that salt is "water-soluble," it only ever dissolves in water when it is actually placed in water. That's a thought that comes out a bit stronger in later Patristic synthesizers of Aristotle (e.g. the St. Maximus quote above). No finite thing is wholly subsistent in itself: "[things'] essences and... their way of developing [are determined by] by their own logoi and by the logoi the beings that provide their external context. Through these logoi they find their defining limits."

I suppose if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far, such that it includes everything about a duck, then there can be no difference between behavior and being - no 'being' of the duck that is not captured by its behavior.

Right. For instance, when we see a sleeping tiger it is still "behaving" in how it interacts with the ambient environment, light bouncing off its body, etc. However, there is a serious problem for the functionalism mentioned by and as a "universal solvent," how exactly do you decide where different being start and end? Everything is just a heap of behaviors. Are all our groupings of them into beings and entities ultimately arbitrary? They certainly don't seem arbitrary.

Consider "The Problem of the Many" (not to be confused with "the One and the Many.") If a cat on a mat is just a cloud of atoms (or measurable variables), where does the cat end. When we see the cat, shouldn't we all just be part of some single, diffuse "physical system." Now, I will allow that, in some sense, we are part of a single system. A lot of problems crop up, particularly with superveniance, if one doesn't think of perception as involving the perceives, perceived, and the ambient environment. However, surely we don't want to have to default into mereological nihilism and deny that cats, stars, ourselves exist as entities that are in some way discrete.

Well, this is the old problem of the One and the Many, and it shows up as fiercely in process metaphysics as in atomism, perhaps more so. You see this all the time in contemporary though, a constant flip between smallism (e.g. everything is just configurations of quarks and leptons-or isolated "behaviors") and bigism (e.g. there are just a few quantum fields, perhaps all unifiable, in which case we just have one thing in all the universe). Surely, it might be profitable to seek a via media here, no?

Now, the deflationist might say: "hey, no worries, we just pragmatically decide where different substances start and end." Now, this might very well be what you do in some cases, based on practical concerns, but this seems pretty weak as a philosophy (not to mention totally at odds with common sense and how science, with all its focus on classifications, is actually done) . For one, it leaves you with no grounds for deciding how the sciences should be organized, because now there is no per se predication and no essential identities.

So, you'll often see people throwing up their hands at the idea of a separate, sui generis "feminist science" or a "physics of the global south." Lots of people can agree that there is bias in science, and that we need to eliminate it, but this sort of thing smacks of the old "Jewish versus Aryan physics" of the Third Reich or the "capitalist versus socialist genetics" of Stalin. Yet often, all critics of these view can muster is incredulity. They cannot actually offer an explanation of why "the physics of Quebec as conducted by Asian men on Thursdays" is not as valid a potential division of the sciences because they've overdosed on more radical forms of nominalism or reductionism.

but those aren't waters I've swum in.

Well, if you're interested, Rescher's book is quite good. Some other treatments tend to look just at Whitehead and Bergson, but he goes back to look at Hegel, Aristotle, etc.

Say the scientist is talking about convergent evolution where mammals and fish

Well, you can talk about the "behavior" of the species' genes in response to various tests, etc. However, note that such a view will tend to dissolve any notion of species in the first place.

We don't talk this way much anymore. There was a time when "essence" was tidied up as "necessary and sufficient conditions" for ― for what? For truthfully applying a predicate, mostly. Being is scrunched down into the copula, and all that's left is being a value of a bound variable.

I've seen many advocates of the Aristotelian and medieval traditions present this as a grave deflation. Species and genus becoming primarily calcified, logical terms is often presented as a corruption of the classical tradition that sparks all sorts of problems in modern thought. Principles through which a "many" are "one" are what is important, not logical terms.

Supposing we want to play the game of finding the "next of kin" to the OP, I would look to metaphysical or mereological bundle theory, not process philosophy. Process thought does provide an alternative to substance metaphysics, but it is historically and metaphysically thick in a way that the modeling approach is not, and I don't think it has received much attention in the Anglophone world apart from religious philosophers.

You are probably correct here. I thought of process metaphysics because I like it much more.

Real objects withdraw for OOO, but sensual objects don't. Sensual objects, unlike real objects, have direct access to each other.

... and with that, I'm out of this Thread. — Arcane Sandwich

As I interpreted it, "real objects" always retain something "withdrawn" that sort of makes it its "essence" (though that word is a bit tricky in various contexts). If it was all sensual objects, everything would be indeed just a "bundle of properties". There is something of the object qua object, that doesn't get translated in this theory. This theory seems to directly oppose "bundle theories" and "process theories", as both would be the translation part, but not the object part.

Well, you can talk about the "behavior" of the species' genes in response to various tests, etc. However, note that such a view will tend to dissolve any notion of species in the first place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. I was trying to explain that behavior reflects the way a thing interacts with it's environment. For that reason, it's not good to fuse thing and behavior. It's potentially unhelpful anyway.

You seem to be saying that the deflationist and the functionalist (or "behaviorist") occupy the same position, but the former occupies it dogmatically and the latter occupies it tentatively. — Leontiskos

Nah. I see myself in the functionalist camp, and see the modelling thing I mentioned as how I approach metaphysical stuff. Being able to talk about whether it's up to the task of metaphysics, I think, is something that distinguishes the thread's deflationist stereotype from non-deflationists.

It could very well be that there are ways of asking questions about being, or finding things out about it, or structures of knowledge, which don't resemble anything like the structure I've outlined. There might be questions which that schema can't handle even in principle. I suspect that there are, even.

Though I also imagine that I would construe something which went outside the schema as another flavour of schema, without any convincing reason not to. However I do agree with our dear @Count Timothy von Icarus:

Right. For instance, when we see a sleeping tiger it is still "behaving" in how it interacts with the ambient environment, light bouncing off its body, etc. However, there is a serious problem for the functionalism mentioned by ↪fdrake and ↪Srap Tasmaner as a "universal solvent," how exactly do you decide where different being start and end? Everything is just a heap of behaviors. Are all our groupings of them into beings and entities ultimately arbitrary? They certainly don't seem arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Some things I think resist being put into the schema are ontogenetic questions. Events need to be individuated in order for there to be patterns in them, events need to be patterned - what individuates events? How are events individuated? What patterns events? How are events patterned? It's difficult for me to imagine how to tackle those without taking some domain of entities as a fundament, which would then give rise to another domain of entities. If someone wished to ask ultimate questions about things, they would not find my perspective very helpful in that endeavour, and would vehemently resist the way it frames metaphysical questions.

For my part, I do think individuation only occurs as part of an extant process - like a crystal appears as a distinct unit out of a solvent, or a volcano from subduction of tectonic plates. The question of how the crystal distinguishes itself from the solvent, or a volcano from the plate subduction, definitely has a metaphysical flavour to it.

I think classical approaches to this grant that there is a primary register of beings - like a substance, or god, or idea, and try to show how everything else is a mode of that's elements. Which for me is a similar move to the above, holding one entity set constant so another can emerge upon it. Only I think this applies to disparate entities of different types rather than whole regimes. Rather than all arising from one type of entity, consider something like: a body eating a cyanide pill erases a human mind from existence, causing grief in that person's loved ones, through inhibition of a cellular process. That's a death. It implicates natural, social, metaphysical and perhaps even spiritual orders in one event, in a manner which is not a raw juxtaposition of parts. Beings are not isolated, they clamour together. I think this speaks to @Srap Tasmaner's point about bundles of behaviour, that bundles in the map show up because the territory comes prepackaged.

The framing of metaphysics would be: providing descriptions of mechanisms abstracted from encountered patterns. The schema I provided is, I think, a prototypical example of such a thing. You take notes about a thing's behaviours, think about them a bit, then put them together. A bunch of stuff has to be posited in the background in order for such a thing to get going. Whether you can get at that background with a more general functionalist description is anyone's guess.

I'm inclined to say "yes" in some sense, and bite the bullet of @Count Timothy von Icarus's regress. Since infinite regressions tend to work through infinite chains of presupposition needing distinct justifications for why they're there, things on one level of explanation presupposing things on another. And with reference to Chesterton's madman, it can't be turtles all the way down if you arrange them in a big circle.

Though I believe that the events themselves are "arranged in a big circle", because every single thing which happens is a terrifying alchemy of ontological categories - a nation can end due to bloodloss of a leader, a civilisation due to its empty stomachs. And their patterns are tangled between registers (thoughts, cellular processes, chemical processes, geology, social institutions}.

I also believe that the tangledness of things is "in the territory", and so if a functionalist perspective appears tangled, that is because what it views really is.

Though I am biased, I absolutely love the filth of things.

- Yep, good connection.

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Well, this is the old problem of the One and the Many — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep, and I think the entry point into one of the deeper issues at play here is the modern concept of "sortals" that mentioned.

You are probably correct here. I thought of process metaphysics because I like it much more. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right, although the bundle theorist who wants to beef up or thicken their approach could always move in the process direction. The difficulty is that the modern mechanistic paradigm is the hurdle that must be leapt over, and I think it is a rather large hurdle.

I don't mean to derail the thread, but there are lots of interesting theological parallels and antecedents. The Thomistic resistance to what is now called "existential inertia," and its contention that esse is the participatory act of existence can easily be taken in a process or bundle-esque direction (although Catholicism has always tried to maintain a balance).

Further, the <simplicity and unification> approach finds its antecedent in Occasionalism, and I think there are good arguments that Hume—who is often seen as the father of bundle-theoretic paradigms—is deeply indebted to Occasionalists.

Now, the deflationist might say: "hey, no worries, we just pragmatically decide where different substances start and end." Now, this might very well be what you do in some cases, based on practical concerns, but this seems pretty weak as a philosophy (not to mention totally at odds with common sense and how science, with all its focus on classifications, is actually done) . For one, it leaves you with no grounds for deciding how the sciences should be organized, because now there is no per se predication and no essential identities. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is about how we choose to see the world, right? That's more apparent when we look at the moral dimensions of it. Do we want to identify people by their behavior? Joe is a drug addict. That's all there is to him. That's a common way of seeing people, but it's dehumanizing, which is a reminder that a person is a well of potential.

The idea is that, contrary to "behaviorism," nouns are not dispensable. — Leontiskos

I'm also going to @Srap Tasmaner as this post gestures toward a metaphysics of "processes all the way down".

I'm suspicious of treating all nouns as substantive - that is, naming a demarcated natural entity. Where does this or that cloud end? That seems to be a matter largely of our fiat. Whereas the endpoints of a duck do not seem arbitrary.

I think that there's an interesting functionalist response to that boundary. Though it may be a way of passing the buck on an individuation question to another set of concepts.

There are some processes, potentials and properties which distinguish the duck from other things. Process - its own homeostasis. Potentials - it can fly through flapping its wings. Properties - its bill is its. You can read this as a collection of predicates which only have that duck as their extension, but that's a consequence of what I'm getting at.

Like @Count Timothy von Icarus suggested - you can treat the duck as a bundle of coupled processes, properties and potentials, and you can construe processes as series of patterned events. Even though all of those processes are also coupled with environmental processes, there's a substitutability of the environment in some of them. When the duck flaps its wings, the exact molecules the air is made of near the wings doesn't matter for the wing function, only that the air has certain properties - like sufficient density. Its digestion doesn't care too much about the chemical constitution of its food, only that the food is digestible and has appropriate macronutrients to integrate with its internal biochemical processes.

There are two concepts at work there - a sharp autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's wing flapping with the air molecules, and a loose autonomy, like the relationship of the duck's digestive process with the arrangement of chemicals in its food. That makes how one process individuates itself from others a matter of quality and degree. The gut doesn't care if this worm is eaten before that one, only that both go down in a single act of eating.

Then let's return to the cloud. I think this works decently well for a cloud - which is a field of condensation of water droplets, so the fungibility of its boundary, its condition of individuation, gets explained by a distance from its already localised molecules. The field of condensation is a localising process, and brings with it potentials and properties. Like the droplet size in the cloud, the type of cloud, and the volume of rain it will create. The ambiguity of the boundary humans will draw between the cloud and its environment is explained by the cloud's nature as a field, and its constitutive process as a matter of dissipating concentration away from its already constitutive water. Its boundary is ambiguous for humans because its characteristic functions are dissipative over space.

Two more supporting intuition pumps for using processes as individuating conditions. Some - likely all - types of process are generative. And processes tend to have conditions of dissolution. The former creates individuated patterns, the former marks that an individuated pattern is present because it can end.

By generative, I mean that processes couple patterns of events together, and thus create joint patterns and pattern forming mechanisms. Gestating an infant is a paradigmatic example, one process individuates another by setting up the latter's internal constitution.

By dissolution, I mean that processes cease to function as they do when their subprocesses decouple. If you decouple digestion from the production of energy for an organism, the processes that depend on it dissipate - the human dies when ingesting the cyanide pill. And note the human who dies is also the one whose digestive process is dissipated.

What this perspective does replaces problems of individuation with problems of relevance. How does one process become coupled to another? And to what degree? I think that is a genuine problem. It is a similar flavour of problem to mereological ones, only regarding functional parts. What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole?

I should also say that the underlying flavour of metaphysics above is assemblage theory, rather than process philosophy, but the concept of an assemblage is more academically obscure than the concept of process. Everyone knows roughly what a process is, few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole. The above is based on engagement with the naturalistic assemblage theory of Manuel De Landa and a reading of Deleuze which emphasises what I'd called "tangles" {my term not theirs}, which are assemblages that span multiple ontological registers {strata}, like the act of opening one's window to check the if it's raining tangles the weather with ideas. The tangle there is between the state of rain outside with my knowledge of whether it's raining.

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that?

The measure of success is evidently saving the appearances. Clouds and ducks don't look much alike, so you have to show how they can both be accounted for ("generated" perhaps), how using the same underlying mechanisms can produce endless forms most beautiful.

But as @frank noted, science is already pretty hard at work doing this. In biology, that's evo-devo, genetics, epigenetics, and all the rest. Clouds don't have generic material as such, but they are natural aggregations of the sort that abiogenesis looks to for the origins of genetic material, and there are common chemical mechanisms.

I think what you really want is something like a large set of dials: set them to a certain position, you get a duck, slightly different a mallard duck, quite different a cloud, more different again a nation-state. I'm sure it's an interesting project, but I don't know why you'd want to do that.

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary?

(I wrote this last night, and although it pushes things a bit far, I am going to post it. That is, it may be more appropriate for later in the thread, and maybe I will come back to it then, but if we have no anchor for speculative knowledge then I'm not sure there will be room for things like science, scientific explanation, and understanding, to breathe. That is, I think scientific understanding precisely in the classical, "useless" sense is at the bottom of much of this.)

Nah. I see myself in the functionalist camp, and see the modelling thing I mentioned as how I approach metaphysical stuff. Being able to talk about whether it's up to the task of metaphysics, I think, is something that distinguishes the thread's deflationist stereotype from non-deflationists.

It could very well be that there are ways of asking questions about being, or finding things out about it, or structures of knowledge, which don't resemble anything like the structure I've outlined. There might be questions which that schema can't handle even in principle. I suspect that there are, even. — fdrake

Well if you think your behavioral model is incomplete then it would seem that you are not modeling a duck; you are modeling a duck’s behavior. It looks like your deflationist is the one who uses behavior to (completely) model ducks. You part ways with this deflationist because you think there is more to ducks than their behavior. (Apparently your model would be a bit like an x-ray that captures a duck’s bone structure but does not pretend to do more than that.)

I think that’s right. I think there is more to ducks than their behavior.

The natural scientist or philosopher wants to understand ducks. They want to know what a duck is. Others are different insofar as they have only a limited and practical interest in ducks. They may want to know how to cook a duck, or how to hunt a duck, or how to get a cute photograph of ducklings. The one who wants to understand a duck’s behavior is somewhere in between. They seem to seek speculative knowledge of the duck, but only of one part of the duck (unless they are the sort of deflationist who sees behavior as the whole). But the difficulty for this person is that the boundary of their interest is a bit arbitrary. Why be interested in the duck’s behavior and not the duck beyond the behavior? If they are a descendant of Francis Bacon then the answer lies in a value judgment, and in that case their interest in nature really is practical rather than speculative. Hence “functionalism.”

I see that as the inflection point: the Baconian lens of something like utility or gaining power over nature. After all, models are the tools of engineers, and engineers make things happen. The goal is pragmatic. Granted, there are rare cases in which a “behaviorist” (like perhaps fdrake’s deflationist) would not be a pragmatist. And although the way that the modern mechanistic paradigm feeds into Bacon is important, a speculative-mechanistic motivation nevertheless looks to be quite rare. So I would expect the lion’s share of “behaviorists” (and functionalists) to be pragmatists in the lineage of Bacon.

If this is right then it might account for why the behavior-modeling approach continues to haunt those who see it as insufficient. They are left with a question like, “What else is there to do with ducks beyond modeling their behavior?” To say just a bit more, I think that if one is able to weaken that pragmatist-Baconian lens then it will be easier to relativize behavior and use a wider palette to paint the duck, and it should also become easier to access a speculative (or what in Aristotle often gets translated as “contemplative”) mode. For Aristotle contemplating the duck in its wholeness is the highest stage of philosophy, and this act is “useless” and certainly not pragmatic. It may be easier to grasp the idea if you think of a lover rather than a duck. It would be absurd to constantly construct models of a lover or her behavior without ever simply appreciating her, just as it would be absurd to constantly take pictures of her without ever seeing her or gazing on the pictures. It is a bit like, after spending a semester studying the technical and discursive details of impressionism, then simply sitting and gazing on a piece by Cézanne for long hours, where the wholeness and splendor of the piece impresses itself on you and is finally allowed to shine through. Such contemplation can only occur when the pragmatic mindset has been quieted, and it answers the “What else…?” question in a way that is unanticipated and yet meet, in much the same way that at the end of a chain you don’t find yet another link, but you also don’t find something that is unrelated to the links you have been following. ...And the paradoxical irony is that Cézanne often repays the contemplative even with the sorts of wages that the laborer seeks.

* Many of these discussions over the last couple weeks have reminded me of Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: the Basis of Culture (link). His thesis is basically that useful things are for useless things, and we have become hamsters on a wheel after forgetting the properly useless ends. There is a way of understanding merely to understand, and also of allowing that understanding to simmer, develop, and unfold of its own accord. But such understanding is not self-conscious. It rests in the other and forgets itself – a kind of intellectual wu wei. Receptivity of the knower calls forth receptivity of the known.

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others. One context I'm familiar with assemblages "in the wild" is in addiction studies. And as frustrating as all all the rhizome woo can be in that field, it's a useful framing to take. Why would use this approach as a framing device? Because it enables some descriptions, provides a good lens, and a unifying vocabulary for a set of problems. If you've got an ontology which says "agents first", you've got to grapple with how a chemical can override an extant agency, if you've got an ontology which says "bodies first", you've got to grapple with how people in hospital who're given morphine don't tend to suffer addiction to heroin.

that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

I think the reason you'd want a flat ontology, not necessarily even assemblage theory, is in circumstances where a unique stratum doesn't behave like a fundament for your inquiry. If you're doing chemistry, treat matter as a fundamental thing, fine. Law? The law and its politics and institutions. As soon as you end up needing to cross registers, eg how violent oppression can create intergenetational trauma - bridging the political with the agential with the bodily - , a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense. When the world's causal networks seem to look like that.

In particular, if you're committed to saving the appearances, what makes this an explanatory framework like science (which it really seems to want to be), rather than just a change in vocabulary? — Srap Tasmaner

So yes, if you notice that the appearances have those weird causal tangles, adopting an appropriate ontology for it makes a lot of sense. I'm sure there are others.

But, more generally, at this point I'd need to press on the distinction between a description and an explanation, those two things are very linked. If you describe that someone who injects heroin tends to become addicted to it, you have a little causal model of addiction. If you describe that someone in a wheelchair gets depressed when socially excluded in some way, you have a causal model of why they were depressed after work booked an inaccessible venue for their night out.

That isn't unique to assemblage theory obv. That's just about descriptions and explanations in general. If you describe something's causal structure you've provided an explanatory model of {some aspect of} that thing, like if you described duck flapping and lift you'd have a model of them flying, but thus an explanation of why when they flap they fly.

Networks, assemblages, all that jazz, don't however tend to isolate variables like the above when they're used. They're used to highlight mediations between layers. Like the social context mediating addiction in hospitals vs in the street, hospitals make less addiction for the same chemicals, why. Rather than trying to isolate aspects of causal chains which span registers.

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it?

I think something particularly good about it is that it lets you leverage how "flat" the ontology is to span disparate themes.

From a philosophical standpoint, emphasising interaction like assemblage theory does has a nice effect on some philosophical problems. You just don't end up worrying about most of them. As an example, the interaction between bodies and souls goes away when you just sort of start with "it's all networks all the way down, soul? Not causally isolated, part of network. Body? Not causally isolated, part of network. They're all networks. And if they're not networks they're emerging from fields or networks".

Which is a similar argument for why one would want to adopt modal realism, it lets you say lots of neat stuff about philosophical problems. Or dissolve them. And even create new ones! Cry havoc.

@Srap Tasmaner - if you wanted me to make a more ontological argument for why thinking about things as assemblages is a good idea, I could try to scrape one together. But I figured a pragmatic justification would do for now. As usual.

like science (which it really seems to want to be) — Srap Tasmaner

I think that's a good question. What makes me want to engage in metaphysics which are naturalistic and kinda flat is that I see them as providing good bridges between intuitive and scientific concepts, when I am aware of them anyway. A bit like a language of mutual framing which enables a reciprocal connection between the concepts.

This is the usual "philosophy is a bridge between the scientific and manifest images" jazz. Though I'm framing metaphysics as an intimate part of the bridge. It's a form of "conceptual engineering", of propagating changes and insights from one to another.

Though plenty of metaphysics are useful for this. I'm sure @Joshs would have lots of good things to say about Matthew Ratcliffe's work using phenomenology as a lens to link psychology concepts with clinical practice - a move between the theoretical and practical through an articulated metaphysical medium. Rather than taking the nascent ontologies of mind in psychology research.

What does it mean for two processes to together constitute a function? Versus what does it mean for two simples to constitute a whole? — fdrake

few people have gone down an assemblage theory rabbit hole — fdrake

Near as I can tell, the point of all of this is to be able to say that everything is an assemblage; that is, to flatten the ontology of the world. Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Depending on what fdrake means by “assemblage,” there are those who have explored this in great depth and in a programmatic way, namely the dialectical materialists. This in turn gave the Aristotelians a very clear target to develop their own views. One example of this is Richard Connell’s Matter and Becoming, which I have profited from. The Aristotelians cast this as what I called the “issue of accidental wholes vs. organic wholes.” An accidental whole is something like an accidental collection of substances, or as Connell states, “an accidental whole results from the composition of a substance or substances with an accident” (66). For example, a bronze statue is a bunch of bronze arranged spatially, and spatial arrangement is an accident of bronze. Bronze cares not whether it is spatially arranged in one way rather than another. “Accidental whole,” “Aggregate,” “Collection,” and, “Composite,” would be other names for the same sort of thing. Fdrake’s “two simples to make a whole” is an example of this.

And why does Aristotle think that not everything is an aggregate? Because he thinks there are organisms (organic wholes), such as ducks, and organisms are not aggregates. In organisms the relation between part and whole is not accidental. Bronze does not care how it is spatially arranged. You can break the statue in two and the two parts will still be bronze. But a duck does care about, say, the way that its internal organs are ordered. If you cut the duck in two it will no longer be a duck. This idea of dialectical materialism that there are only aggregates is also found in the mechanistic philosophical paradigm flowing from Descartes, which sees everything as a kind of machine (with accidental relations between parts and whole).

This means that for Aristotle ducks exist and statues don’t, at least qua whole. “Duck” names a real whole and “statue” names an accidental or artificial whole. Unlike the duck, the statue is an arbitrary collection of bronze, a true social construction. Thus the two nouns refer to very different realities, and so @fdrake is right to be suspicious of “treating all nouns as substantive.” Indeed, this is precisely correct, for the statue is not a substance given that it lacks a substantial form, i.e. a soul which integrates it as a single organism and whole. Yet the question is not whether all nouns are substantive, but whether some nouns are substantive. ...It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at this topic, but a substantial form is something like an internal principle of motion and change, which Aristotle attributes to vegetation and animals (in the sub-lunar sphere).

To bring this back to “behaviorism,” if fdrake (or his “deflationist”) is a behavior-atomist such that behaviors are the only real things and everything else can be reductively explained in terms of behavior, then for such a person there are no ducks in just the same way that there are no statues. If a dog barks and a duck quacks, then we have two behaviors or verbs that are not explainable in terms of substances or nouns. We say “The duck quacks” in the same way that we say “The foot belongs to the statue.” In both cases the attribution of part to whole is pure imagination, for the “whole” is nothing more than the sum of its arbitrary parts (which do not even belong to it in any real sense).

Why do that? — Srap Tasmaner

Why do that? For the dialectical materialists, it is ultimately because Marx wanted to change the world rather than simply understand it (not unlike Bacon). So you focus on matter, which is malleable and changeable. (And, going back to my last post, even among the dialectical materialists one will find speculative thinkers (non-pragmatists), because for Aristotle wonder and simply understanding are characteristically human activities which will occur wherever you find humans. But that speculative inclination will in this case be hamstrung by an environmental pragmatism.)

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Everyone knows roughly what a process is — fdrake

Do we, though? I haven't adopted your term 'functionalism'. Why? Because you kept talking about behavior instead of function, and they are not the same thing. Now you are talking about processes.

A basic characteristic of the OP is that it tries to paint the whole world in one color "all the way down," and this approach has trouble saving the appearances. But when you uncritically introduce new tools, such as behavior, function, process, assemblage, etc., you look to be introducing new colors without admitting that you are introducing new colors. If new words and concepts are really needed, then behavior-atomism has already been abandoned. In that case what is really going on is this, "Yes - I admit that behavior is insufficient to capture reality, but I think that behavior+process will be enough to get the job done."

(Note that I haven't yet read fdrake's three most recent posts. Maybe some of this is addressed there.)

Though I am biased, I absolutely love the filth of things. — fdrake

a flat ontology and its bizarre tangled networks starts to make more sense — fdrake

Cry havoc. — fdrake

Huh!? Flat ontologies are squeaky-clean. Diversity is what creates tangles. If there is only one thing "all the way down" then there are no tangles at all. Metaphysics is the science of the fully tangled realm, and it only makes sense for someone who admits a large variety of different kinds of entities. Bad metaphysics happens when specialists in sub-disciplines conflate their partial territory with the whole, thus oversimplifying the whole in the direction of their familiarity. For the flat ontologist the tangles are entirely illusory. For example, substance metaphysics is much more complex and tangled than Atomism, and Aristotle's moral theory is much more complex and interactional than the sorts of things that are in vogue today. The point of flat ontologies is simplicity and unification. A flat ontology "makes sense" of the tangled appearances by reducing them all to one or two simples.

I think the point of it is to promote some styles of description and disincentivise others. — fdrake

But to what end?

for a set of problems — fdrake

...it is to the end of solving problems. It is, I think, a form of pragmatism. It's a bit like saying that we should develop lots of tools, even if we don't currently know what they are for, so that we will have more tools to draw on in confronting future problems. Sort of how the defenders of the moon landing will point to all the inventions that were harvested from that endeavor.

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if we stretch the word "behavior" quite far — Leontiskos

Oh yeah, really far. — Srap Tasmaner

How should ontological concepts work? Presumably given the complexity of reality, top-level concepts should be wide and general, and yet because of this there will be significant limitations on their explanatory power. So for Aristotle you "begin" with the concepts of act and potency (and already you have a tension between two principles rather than a unitary atom). Being broad, they explain everything and nothing. Or taken individually, half of everything and half of nothing. But then the diverse kinds of act and potency flower within each concept; the appearances do not force us outside of the basic, broad concepts (unless one wants to see the interaction of act and potency as a third sort of thing, which @apokrisis may be able to speak to). If not everything is a nail, then the top-level explanations must be able to generically accommodate a large variety of diverse phenomena.

If this is right then it helps highlight the problems with "behavior" and the resultant need to stretch it. In a sense behavior is too explanatorily potent to function as a top-level ontological concept. It is explanatorily potent in the sense that it is so useful in describing the class of organisms. If such an explanatorily potent concept could ground all of reality, that would make for an astoundingly unified theory. But because it can't do that, we have to go outside of behavior, either by artificially stretching its meaning, or else by introducing new concepts and pretending they are no different than behavior (function, process, etc.).

I imagine you don't need assemblages as a vocabulary to do work like the above. No physical scientist or mathematician I've met has cared about or even been aware of assemblage theory. Social scientists are sometimes though. So why use it? — fdrake

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle. A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity. In contrast, a social entity can be seen as an assemblage of institutions, forms of organization, practices, and agents which do not follow a single, consistent logic. Thus, assemblage theory offers an alternative to the logic of unity, highlighting the interaction of its heterogeneous components.

A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity. — Number2018

What are the effects of its unity?

This is the usual "philosophy is a bridge between the scientific and manifest images" jazz. Though I'm framing metaphysics as an intimate part of the bridge. It's a form of "conceptual engineering", of propagating changes and insights from one to another. — fdrake

:up:

A pre-given whole necessarily subjects all agents and relationships to the effects of its unity.
— Number2018

What are the effects of its unity? — frank

The pre-given whole exists prior to the emergence of its parts. The consistency and stability of its unity prevent the development or recombination of the parts, as such changes would threaten its very existence.

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out. :grin:

There's an interesting idea that the relationship between the parts and whole can be an unfolding evolution, like the way each of the words in this sentence takes on meaning relative to the purpose of the whole, but the sentence rolls on without restrictions beyond the imperative to make some kind of sense, and even the author may not know how it ends until it does. Sentences that are used to try to convey this idea are usually long and drawn out — frank

Yes, it is interesting. Deleuze developed the concept of an open whole. It refers to a dynamic and ever-evolving whole, where the parts are interconnected in a "rhizomatic" manner. The free and continuous interaction of various processes drives the unfolding of their relationships. This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

Yes, it is interesting. Deleuze developed the concept of an open whole. It refers to a dynamic and ever-evolving whole, where the parts are interconnected in a "rhizomatic" manner. The free and continuous interaction of various processes drives the unfolding of their relationships. This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within. — Number2018

That's cool. For the mind, the organizing principle is meaning: the need to find it.

The assemblage theory helps to emphasize a social entity's contingent and constructivist nature. It allows us to conceive of it not as a unified whole governed by a single determinative principle. — Number2018

Isn't it commonly agreed that a social entity is not governed in this way, namely that it isn't a substance?

I think classical approaches to this grant that there is a primary register of beings - like a substance, or god, or idea, and try to show how everything else is a mode of that's elements. Which for me is a similar move to the above, holding one entity set constant so another can emerge upon it. Only I think this applies to disparate entities of different types rather than whole regimes. Rather than all arising from one type of entity, consider something like: a body eating a cyanide pill erases a human mind from existence, causing grief in that person's loved ones, through inhibition of a cellular process. That's a death. It implicates natural, social, metaphysical and perhaps even spiritual orders in one event, in a manner which is not a raw juxtaposition of parts. Beings are not isolated, they clamour together. I think this speaks to @Srap Tasmaner's point about bundles of behaviour, that bundles in the map show up because the territory comes prepackaged.

The quoted bit sounds to me much more like the early-modern-period-and-on's focus on reductionism (also a trend in the pre-Socratics). I don't think this really applies to the classical tradition though. Everything isn't "reduced to substance." For Aristotle, there are "things that exist from causes," essentially bundles of external causes/processes without much of a principle of unity (e.g. a rock, which can be broken into many rocks fairly easily; whereas if you break a cat in half you no longer have a cat but a corpse) and "things that exist by nature," beings. The things that are most properly beings are ordered wholes, namely organisms, which are goal-directed (goals make a whole oriented towards some end as a whole), and the ordered cosmos as a whole (oriented towards the Prime Mover).

But things are ultimately understood in terms of their unifying principles. There are principles that are more and less proximate, more or less general, but this does not denote a "reduction" of one to the other. Yet there is a relation. Which makes sense, the principles of chemistry are not unrelated to the principles of health, which are not unrelated to goodness and well-being.

We can say that an event applies to many different "orders" but it's also clear that these orders relate. A death from cancer is a social event, an emotional event, a spiritual event, and a chemical one. The biochemistry of cancer treatments isn't unrelated to the spiritual, emotional, and physiological health of the patient. So, in order to avoid having a jumble of discrete models, you need some way of looking at these relations.

This probably shows up most acutely in ethics. Different disciplines have different measures that are closely related to what is "good,' i.e. desirable or choice worthy. Economics has utility, medicine has health. Welfare economists will tend to measure utility in terms of what people are willing to spend their money on. And yet plenty of doctors will tell you that people spend lots of money on things that ruin their health. If you have no overarching notion of the good as principle, you just have a heap of sui generis measures floating about. The same applies to health if one considers "mental health" versus "physiological health." I've seen a philosopher argue that diets are immoral because they cause suffering and are bad for "mental health," yet clearly this needs to be judged against the benefits of physiological health.

This approach eliminates the need for an external, transcendent organizing principle, suggesting that the system's organization emerges from within.

What would be an example of such a philosophy?

Take the following as provisional definitions of process, behaviour, event, assemblage. I think they work for my posts.

An event is something which happens.
A process is a sequence of interrelated events.
A behaviour is a type in a process, or a type of process.
An assemblage is a network of events, processes and behaviours.

If you want entity too:

An entity is an process with a slow rate of progression relative to a background.

Yes, the sense of behaviour is very big. I think this makes sense. "What's the behaviour of the system?" is the sense of behaviour used, it isn't like walking. It's more systems theory inspired.

Huh!? Flat ontologies are squeaky-clean. Diversity is what creates tangles. If there is only one thing "all the way down" then there are no tangles at all. — Leontiskos

You can read it like that. Or you could read it that being's arbitrary propensity for interaction makes the ontology flat. It isn't so much a flatness of "everything is the same thing", it's a flatness of arbitrary structure and nesting. Flatness through lack of {global} subordination of one register to another.

The quoted bit sounds to me much more like the early-modern-period-and-on's focus on reductionism (also a trend in the pre-Socratics). I — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes I had forgotten that classical philosophy meant the classical period's philosophy as well as paradigmatic approaches. Forgive me. I know very little about the classical period at all.

I suppose another common problem for modeling approaches and bundle theories is that they tend to have to ignore or demote the quiddity/whatness/intelligibility of things. This ends up needed to be decomposed into "behavior."

But this is bothersome is one thinks these represent essential facets of being. In a sense, it seems to assume a sort of representationalism, which would require a particular approach to phenomenology.

An entity is an process with a slow rate of progression relative to a background.

Does this have to presuppose that all entities are mutable? That everything is mutable?

Here is a difficulty in that case: for us to be able to “say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. Otherwise, our words would mean something different on each occasion, and whatever we referred to would constantly be passing out of being. If, as Heraclitus says, we “cannot step twice into the same river,” then it also seems we cannot speak of the same river twice either.

Heraclitus, for his part, has us both stepping into the same river and never doing so in one of his fragments. It seems he can appeal to the Logos as "that which stays the same." The problem is that this concept, at least in what survives of his work, is very ambiguous. It sort of just gets pulled out as a catch-all to fix problems, just like Anaxagoras's Nous. Contemporary philosophers likewise sometimes fall victim to this tendency in the process philosophy space.

Does this have to presuppose that all entities are mutable? That everything is mutable? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see why it would have to presuppose that. If a background doesn't change fast at all it doesn't disrupt any ontogonetic processes which use it as a foundation. Example, mountain range, a path on it, a person walking on that path, a bead of sweat on their face. The mountain range changes in the rate of epochs, the path changes in the rate of years, the person on the rate of days, the sweatbead in the rate of seconds.

“say anything true about anything,” there must be at least something that “stays the same” across this ceaseless change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Why? You can say that the bead drips down the walker's face, regardless of whether the path will be there when the mountain falls.