To simply reply "I don't feel that is a very useful way of looking at things," just courts the reply "well I do." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You've construed me as committed to this when I don't believe I am? Correctness conditions for assertibility aren't the same idea as usefulness. Simply because being correct isn't always useful, and being useful isn't always being correct. We agree on that. Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different!

My question is: "what's you're response?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised. My position's roughly stated in terms of the following inequalities:

socially constructed != arbitrary != false. Fallibilism != skepticism. natural != conventional.

It's correct to assert plenty of stuff, even if it doesn't turn out to be right upon new evidence, or appears to be a non-problem if the norms change. I see that as a descriptive statement rather than a proscriptive one - I'm making first a descriptive claim that the norms of discourse regarding knowledge construction are not arbitrary, and a proscriptive one that in order to create knowledge using them one must act in accord with them.

A good example there is Ramanujan the mathematician. He wrote a lot of correct things, even though he couldn't assert them correctly with the standards of mathematical proof at the time. When he was trained to do such a thing in his collaboration with Hardy, he produced a lot of knowledge. Before that, all he said was conjecture. What made his conjectures knowledge are that they were correctly assertible, and they were so even before their proof.

I'm not explaining how the world really is, but just how I experience it. So all I can say is that I don't recognize, detect likeness, etc. through sensation, but maybe you do? Or did I misunderstand what you meant by "perception"?

I think what you're saying is that we choose a frame of reference and declare a certain spot to be unchanging (like the horizon). I agree that we do this reflexively, but the awareness that fiat is involved is purely intellectual. There's nothing in perception that lets us know that the horizon isn't really stationary. — frank

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. That is to say, seeing colors and contrasts and lines and textures is not seeing purely what is there without any mediation from prior conceptually-derived expectations , any more than is seeing the visual field in terms of trees, houses and cars. It is just a different sort of conceptual stance.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.

I draw and paint also, so I understand what you’re saying about the shift in stance that is required to ‘paint what we see’ rather than our linguistic concepts. But I beleive that all perception is conceptual, so when I am trying to ‘survey my visual field without judgement about what the objects are’, I am still using a kind of conceptual judgement. — Joshs

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously.

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness. — Joshs

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought.

The coherence and unity of the assemblage do not stem from an underlying, intelligible principle but from the regularity in the dispersion of the system of discursive elements themselves.
— Number2018

Yes. An assemblage doesn't have to make sense at all does it? It just has to work together. A "law" is a durable regularity. Some are so durable that they appear immutable, and may as well be. — fdrake

There are lots of things with lots of structures. Assemblage is a generic term for such a structure. Any particular assemblage will have a structure. Even if assemblages in general have no general laws. — fdrake

One likely needs an assemblage when confronted with situations that defy sense. When something impossible, improbable, or unbearable occurs, one can no longer rely on traditional ethical criteria of judgment or the innate "good nature" of reason itself. How can philosophy proceed when the principle of universal rationality bear upon or compatible with extraneous and heterogeneous elements? New ethical questions arise concerning action and life within a totality, and these became pressing concerns for thinkers like Adorno, Blanchot, and Levinas. For Foucault and Deleuze, these issues were central, forming the driving forces behind their development of assemblage theory.
The classical Frankfurt School’s solution was that the systematic progression of rational utility calculations required an increasing repression of the spontaneity of inner nature. Abstract, impersonal forms of domination seemed to take precedence over the agency and freedom of a self-identical subject. Even Habermas’s shift from instrumental reason to communicative reason implicitly remained within the traditional vision of a totalizing state of future reconciliation. But how, then, can one assemble a multiplicity from disparate agentive instances—parts that have no connection to the Dominating Whole, whether it is a lost whole or a virtual one yet to come?Deleuze and Guattari's solution is that the Whole becomes related to its parts only as a complex of interconnected processes and relations—only through a set of sheer differences. It operates like a machine, but unlike a mechanism, it lacks a predefined or intentional design. It sustains itself and maintains its consistency through the regular reiteration of divergent elements, which do not follow a direct causal order. The consistency that emerges is not the result of predetermined design but of the free interplay of parts. Regularity in dispersion thus gives way to the relation between the concrete assemblage and abstract machine. The abstract machine, in this context,serves as the primordial function substituting the absent whole. It acts as an unrepresentable diagram for assembling heterogeneous elements, maintaining a complex coordination without imposing a fixed structure.Take, for example, walking down the street: one’s behavior is automatically involved in navigating terrain, making one’s way to a destination, admiring sights, avoiding traffic, waiting at traffic lights, and so on. Who is orchestrating this set of disparate capacities? Similarly, who is in charge when one is driving a car or browsing the internet? An abstract machine becomes recognizable just through its apparent effects within a concrete assemblage. There are clear political and ethical implications in closing the gaps between instinct and intelligence, between thought and action, and in the automatic, habitual, and instinctual nature of internalized thought. The assemblage theory can offer a means of understanding how agency and structure, spontaneity and regularity, are dynamically interwoven, revealing a new approach to thinking about action, ethics, and the complexities of human existence. “Abstract machines operate within concrete assemblages. They draw the cutting edges of decoding. They make the assemblage open onto something else, assemblages of another type, the molecular, the cosmic.They constitute becomings." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.510)

It operates like a machine, but unlike a mechanism, it lacks a predefined or intentional design. It sustains itself and maintains its consistency through the regular reiteration of divergent elements, which do not follow a direct causal order. — Number2018

We probably agree more than disagree. I just wanted to note that jettisoning causality from assemblages entirely {not that I'm saying you do this} is one of the paradigm's worst excesses. With reference to addiction studies, the sheer discursivity of heroin addiction makes people want to prohibit conceiving heroin as an addictive substance. As in, heroin is not addictive, it does not cause addiction. This is a lot of fart huffing and ceases to take materiality seriously, in materiality's name.

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle.

When I'm writing those dashes, I'm intending to treat the connected terms as a fully connected network, in which every concept and event set implicates all and only those it is reachable with a "-".

The consistency that emerges is not the result of predetermined design but of the free interplay of parts. — Number2018

Yes. Though I'd want to stress that {I see it as} the "free interplay" is a freedom from any external or conditioning necessity, the assemblages just is what it does, what it can do {openness, singularity}, and finally what it might do and is drawn to do {its abstract and virtual characters}, so it's "free" in the sense of being unconstrained by anything but its own nature. Including human concepts of representational adequacy.

For @Count Timothy von Icarus - I think a big difference between the perspective you're advocating and the one I'm coming at this with is that our perspective is also one thing among many, another material process. It's another form of assemblage that acts upon others.

I don't see why I would need to man the gates against relativism? Everything I've said is an attempt to provide a good vocabulary for the correct description of things. From my perspective, I could want nothing more than this. Especially since it's correctly assertible that things which have counted as knowledge - been knowledge - in eras past have turned out to be false.

Does the world behave as if it's full of intelligible principles? Yeah, there's loads. But there's different principles everywhere. And more than one way of describing each of those, those means of description might be inequivalent too, even if they stand on equal epistemic grounds {competing models}.

From my perspective, seeing relativism as a problem which must be defended against only invites it into the space of relevant problems. I've made no reference to incommensurability of conceptual schemes, the relativity of whether X is true to an individual's perspective, the relativity of whether X is known to an individual's perspective and so on and so on. From where I'm sitting whatever relativity I'm committed to is in the territory. Things really do behave as if they're relative to a context. Whether that's a path on a mountain or a response in a thread.

And from this we reach the conclusion of B above, that it there is no sense in which any description of or beliefs about reality can be more or less correct than any other. At best, they can be more or less correct relative to some arbitrary frame — Count Timothy von Icarus

BTW, this itself is also an absolute statement. To claim that "everything is relative and mutable" is no less absolute than claiming "some things are not relative and mutable." — Count Timothy von Icarus

These are very good arguments against @fdrake, and I do not see them begging the question.

Even though I believe it's to do with the norms regarding utility and the norms regarding correct assertibility being rather different! — fdrake

So what are the norms of correct assertibility?

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised. My position's roughly stated in terms of the following inequalities:

socially constructed != arbitrary != false. Fallibilism != skepticism. natural != conventional. — fdrake

These sorts of answers are characteristically evasive. It's a lot of words that never actually tell us what you think correct assertibility is. "Dogs aren't cats and they aren't spoons and they aren't made of lava and they aren't a numerical sum." "Er... So what are they? Telling us what they are not is no great help."

I think the criticism of @fdrake is fairly simple: he presupposes truth (correct assertibility) but his whole approach precludes it. It is that odd modern tendency to have the knowing subject so radically separate from the frame that the question of accounting for him never even arises. And fdrake even sees this better than most moderns.

I earlier spoke of utility and pragmatism vs contemplation, and my point also applies to discursive inference and other parts of discursive knowing. In order to model a duck you have to truly understand ducks, truly understand your model, and truly understand their relation. Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth. It presupposes it.

-

Edit: I also don't want to abandon this issue ad extra:

But I'd also disagree in my terms, relative fixity is more than enough of a guarantee. It works for the mountain and the mountain trail, and it works for our word meanings. Even though we know they change over time we can still speak and understand each other, partly because the word meanings change slower than the speech acts which use them. — fdrake

I think there are problems with this epistemology. Change requires permanence - the two notions are co-implicative. This is why Aristotle had prime matter and we now have conservation of energy, for without that underlying stability and permanence the idea of change is incoherent.

A background? Like a mountain is fixed relative to a path on it. I don't mean this facetiously, what type of ground do you think is required of a philosophy? And why is it required to be that?

I don't think any unique ground is necessary, even if some grounding is necessary for each context. Do you believe there is a unique, correct ground to do philosophy from? Or a metaphysical structure of the universe? Why, and what is it? — fdrake

Mathematically, you are trying to say that the mountain changes less than the path, and you want to ground predications about their relation in the Δ between the two rates-of-change. But "changes less" makes no sense apart from a point of fixity that exists outside both of them. "Rate of change" requires some kind of unit or measure in order for it to be coherent. Without a notion of the unchanging the notion of change can't get off the ground. This is back to @Srap Tasmaner's "conceptual priority." It also brings us back to Aristotle, who sees physics as bound up in the puzzle of motion/change.

Utility/usefulness is never going to get you to truth — Leontiskos

I don't seek to reduce correct assertibility to utility. There are correctly assertible things which aren't useful in context - like using "Luke's father is Vader" in this discussion. And there are useful things which aren't correctly assertible in some contexts, like the idea that economic growth is always exponential.



It ultimately comes down to whether you see description relative to a frame as the same concept as description relative to an arbitrary frame. I don't. It seems you and @Count Timothy von Icarus do. You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge.

I reject that in two ways, firstly that a ground in the sense you mean it is necessary to begin with - the concept is inherently "unrelative", so is a presupposition I don't have and don't need to adopt unless I'm trying to argue in your terms. Secondly that frames aren't arbitrary, and can serve as grounds for correct assertibility.

We've been going back on forth on me stating a presupposition, and you stating a presupposition, but neither of us are arguing which presupposition is "better" in manner which relates our perspectives {very well anyway}. Which, as fas I understand it, was @Srap Tasmaner's point in the OP.

So let's go through why I like this perspective with a worked example or two.

I gave an example of something which is comprehensible in terms of a background which is nevertheless changing - a mountain path and the mountain. I also gave an example of correct assertibility with Ramanujan and Hardy. Which I'll go through in much more detail.

In which Ramanujan's statements prior to his collaboration with Hardy were correctly assertible but he did not assert them while following the norms of mathematical discourse at the time, and could not due to his lack of formal training - so they were not considered as true until that occurred. All there was to the truth of Ramanujan's claims was whether they were correctly assertible in accordance with the norms of mathematics taken in toto. They were, and were shown to be.

Note that "they were, and they were shown to" imputes a somewhat fixed structure of justification to mathematical discourse, like proof. But it isn't a unitary phenomenon - like published mathematical proofs tend to be formally invalid, and corrections are submittable to published and believed proofs.

So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine.

An assemblage like that which produces mathematical knowledge has pretty strict and durable rules, but many forms of them. And those rules are identical with an idealised form of current practice. And current practice has both a potential and an actual component, as well as an idiosyncratic concreteness. People follow the rules in their own way, and improvise and revise the rules to more fully explore/extend the scope of mathematics.

The assemblage of mathematics production is also open ended in terms of its operation - if you deleted all universities and mathematical knowledge from the world, the norms would die too. That would impact the production of mathematical knowledge despite having nothing to do with the content of mathematical practice. It's also self organising, like the Langlands Program was generated within it and has ordered a lot of research and thought within it. It develops according to its own idiosyncrasies as well as its constraints, and is nevertheless sensitive to whatever milieu it finds itself in. Maths looks different if it's done on the tables of aristocrats or the laptops and whiteboards of universities and is submitted to different social forces.

Correct assertibility in that milieu has changed over time. Newton's proofs of his calculus principles were formally invalid, and it was known at the time - infinitesimals were 0 and not 0 at the same time in his proofs, at different stages. His principles were useful but not correctly assertible, but people believed them nevertheless, and just didn't give a crap about the self contradiction because the overall endeavour seemed cromulent and useful. The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}.

Nowadays we could interpret the proofs as a germinal form of something formally valid - his calculus with fluxions is much the same as our nonstandard analysis or formal calculus with limits. So we can "repair" his proofs and see his results as correctly assertible, as well as being morally true at their publication.

Hopefully the above worked example illustrates that although the background can shift, that doesn't render the justifications using it arbitrary.

The idea was morally true {a term in maths scholarship}. — fdrake

Hi @fdrake, How are you? Would it be possible for you to explain to me, a non-mathematician, what that means, to mathematicians? I don't understand the underlying concept here. Is it a mathematical concept, or a moral concept? I'm not seeking to debate this point with you at the moment (though I might, in another Thread, in the future). All I'm asking for is a bit of clarification for the readers in general, including myself. Thanks in advance.

Hi fdrake, How are you? Would it be possible for you to explain to me, a non-mathematician, what that means, to mathematicians? I don't understand the underlying concept here. Is it a mathematical concept, or a moral concept? I'm not seeking to debate this point with you at the moment (though I might, in another Thread, in the future). All I'm asking for is a bit of clarification for the readers in general, including myself. Thanks in advance. — Arcane Sandwich

A mathematical idea, or proof, which is morally true is one which says something which is correct or ought to be correct but in an imprecise or inaccurate way. The way it's said or written also makes the statement false or misleading in some important respect.

An example of something "morally true" might be 1/0 = infinity. It suggests a right idea - that if you divide by smaller and smaller numbers you get larger and larger numbers - but is false.

Thank you very much, fdrake.

From the triadicity of the hierarchy, flows the fourthness of the transfinite landscape. — Arcane Sandwich

I appreciate the thought but there is a technical difficulty that is key. My approach is Peircean and so although one, two, three is being counted off as a sequence, each next level incorporates what has come before it. So oneness is the line, twoness is the plane that includes now both length and area, threeness is the volume that includes length and area as now part of a volume. Which means that a fourthness has to continue this incorporation in a way that makes some useful sense.

Sure, you could go 4D here. Invoke a hypersphere in which the unit sphere is embedded. You could call that the infinite beyond that is some candidate next step. But my Peircean systems approach truncates at a threeness for the same kind of reasons that network theory says all possible networks can be simplified to networks of nodes with three links. Four, five or more links can reduce to 3-adic structure. And then 2-adic, or 1-adic are just to few. Therefore reality - in the logical sense of a space of relations – actually just is 3-adic as its simplest possible form.

So the mental image has to one of the number of internal convolutions involved, not some number line extension. What we are counting is the intricacy of the relational structure. And any fourth level would have to incorporate the first three in some further holistic sense.

Proceed one more step, and now you are about as aware as a rock: you have removed Firstness, you have removed your Physical First Person Perspective on the world, and it just seems like "A Thing, In Itself". — Arcane Sandwich

You see how this works in the same triadic fashion. Firstness is just the bare thing of first person response. Secondness is the second person point of view of two first persons in some immediate relation. Then the third person point of view is what emerges from innumerable such conversations – the generalisation over all possible first person views and the dyadic interactions that could result from there being two points of view.

The third person point of view becomes the one that incorporates or contextualises all the points of view now appearing within it. It now shapes the individual viewpoints in a positive fashion, imposing its educated structure on what would otherwise remain a confused or vague cacophony of hesitant opinion. Voices in the dark and going nowhere in particular.

So in the definite sense, the first person view doesn't even exist outside of the context of a third person framing. But when random ideas meet some dichotomous resistance, and when that clashing of views develops into a habitual community structure of understanding, then you arrive at the thirdness that incorporates everything to become the final historical something.

This is the fractal distribution of matter and energy that best characterises Nature. We see it in the Cosmic Web. It is the new "better" explanation for dark energy — apokrisis

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury? Dark Energy May Not Exist

The design develops from within due to the way Being has to grow into a realm that can lawfully persist. — apokrisis

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.)

So organisms arose when they stumbled across the further trick of encoding information using genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything?

n principle, life and mind just are expressions of the generalised cosmic desire to optimise dissipation. — apokrisis

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable.

For that matter, the capitalised Being above - does that refer to or distinguish living beings in particular? What is the capitalisation intended to signify?

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury? — Wayfarer

Yep.

Would that comprise an 'overall increase of intelligibility'? Does that sound Hegelian? (Then again Peirce professed affinities with Hegel.) — Wayfarer

Peirce called it the “growth of concrete reasonableness”. You get an evolution of the Cosmos that is the move from spontaneous chance to organised habit.

Don't they have to exist before they can stumble across anything? — Wayfarer

Language forces us into linear argument. That is both its strength and its weakness as a tool of thought. It is bad at dealing with the complexity of actual real world causality. But it is great for enforcing a mechanical mindset - which was useful even in those first cells that wanted to encode genetic programs to construct their molecular machinery.

Likewise, 'desire' can't help but sound teleological or anthropomorphic. Perhaps 'tendency' might be preferable. — Wayfarer

I have frequently noted that systems thinkers like Salthe make that distinction between tendencies, functions and purpose - three grades of semiosis to cover physics, biology and neurology.

For that matter, the capitalised Being above — Wayfarer

I was talking about Being in the classical sense of the source of fundamental existence.

My argument - as you know - is that semiosis is the mechanism that produces Being. So the cosmos, life and mind are all based on the one triadic causal logic. They are all best understood from the point of view of dissipative structure or topological order.

But life and mind add something to the mix, and that is an internal predictive model of the world. And this indeed completes the physics in a neatly ironic fashion as it is the existence of entropy that demands its dialectical “other” of negentropy or information. Life and mind had to be possible because a mindlessly dissipating universe could - by dichotomous symmetry - become entrained to an “external” control … if that control was encoded in a fashion that put it inside the body of an organism.

So this - as I’ve said often enough - is the fun realisation. Life and mind are implicit in the thermodynamic order of the universe as once the universe is a concrete system of dissipation, this in itself generates the conditions for life and mind to appear as the apparent negation of everything that mindless world stands for.

Symbol processing is inevitable once a noisy world creates the contrast it can stand against.

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move.

Physics isn’t in conflict with the existence of life and mind. It was the entropic move needed to make possible the informational counter-move. — apokrisis

So might I enquire where consciousness/awareness enters the picture as you see it? Causal or consequential?

It’s an interesting point, but a thing and its behaviors are one and the same. It’s impossible to take your eye off one in order to observe the other. There does appear to be a sort of being/behavior dualism, perhaps the result of splitting the two into subject/predicate for the purpose of language.

You mean the one from the University of Canterbury?
— Wayfarer

Yep. — apokrisis

Actually that makes perfect sense to me, little as I know about physical cosmology.

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary

Yes, this is essentially what I would argue. Truth is filtered-through socio-historical conditions, through institutions, language, etc. However, it is not reducible to them, and it is in a certain sense prior to culture and history. I mentioned earlier ITT that it seems plausible to me that technology, scientific institutions, and educational institutions serve to "objectify" certain sorts of knowledge in the same way that Hegel has social institutions (e.g., markets, the state, unions, etc.) objectifying morality for individuals.

Likewise, while language, models, scientific theories, etc. can be the explicit objects of our study, they generally are not. Language, models, theories, etc. are a means of knowing, not the primary objects of knowledge (as plenty of contemporary philosophy would have it, because they have made philosophy of language their first philosophy).

However, I would also argue that "everything is mutable," aside from being straight-forwardly self-refuting (if everything is mutable, then this claim itself must change and cease to be true), and as absolute and totalizing a claim as any "One True...." claim, also makes it impossible to justify this position.

I would just point out that Big Heg, the great modern philosopher of the Absolute, also has a fallibilist, circular epistemology. St. Thomas, for his part, rejects the notion that man's happiness is to be found in the knowledge of God had through demonstrations precisely because such knowledge is always mixed with a great deal of error. The point being, the opposite of "all is mutable and flux" is not foundationalism (which, as far as I am aware, is a distinctly modern concern).

For @Count Timothy von Icarus - I think a big difference between the perspective you're advocating and the one I'm coming at this with is that our perspective is also one thing among many, another material process. It's another form of assemblage that acts upon others.

I don't think this is a difference. The human intellect is part of the world and interacts with it.

I don't see why I would need to man the gates against relativism?

To have a response to one of, if not the, dominant philosophies of our era?

Especially since it's correctly assertible that things which have counted as knowledge - been knowledge - in eras past have turned out to be false.

Well let me ask, since everything changes relative to different background positions, do you think it will cease to be true that "George Washington was the first President of the United States," at some point in the future? Likewise, "Adolf Hitler was the first President of the United States," is false. But will the background frames in virtue of which this is false change eventually, such that Adolf Hitler was the first President? Or is it at least possible that they shall?

I would maintain it is not possible. Adolf Hitler will not become the first President of the USA at some point in the future due to any relative shifts in "frames in virtue of which things are true." I think I'm on fairly strong ground with this assertion.

However, if I am mistaken, and background frames can shift such that Adolf Hitler was the first president, then surely claims like "we need not worry to much about this shifting because it is occurring very slowly" are also liable to become false. When might they become false? This seems absolutely unknowable if there is no epistemically accessible regularity in the ways in which underlying "background frames" change. You say such changes "are not arbitrary" but then you also seem to also be claiming that any underlying pattern to such changes is both unknowable and changing. In which case the question is: "so ultimately, how do you know that that they aren't arbitrary?"

You can claim "it's not a problem, these frames shift slowly," but of course this statement, even if it is true now, is subject to change. When might it change? Who can know?

From my perspective, seeing relativism as a problem which must be defended against only invites it into the space of relevant problems. I've made no reference to incommensurability of conceptual schemes, the relativity of whether X is true to an individual's perspective, the relativity of whether X is known to an individual's perspective and so on and so on. From where I'm sitting whatever relativity I'm committed to is in the territory. Things really do behave as if they're relative to a context. Whether that's a path on a mountain or a response in a thread.

I'm confused by the bolded part because you seem to have just claimed that we, our languages, concepts, etc. are all part of the territory? Is there anything outside the "territory"?

Anyhow, shouldn't one have a response to other philosophies that goes beyond simply ignoring them? I am not sure how "I don't think that's true so I will simply not consider it," doesn't amount to an endorsement of blind faith/dogmatism.

We agree, the radical relativist is wrong. I would argue that one should be able to explain why. Certainly, one cannot do so in the relativists own terms, since this is presupposed to be impossible (any refutation would just be a refutation relative to some language game, culture, etc.), but one should be able to do it in one's own terms.

It’s an interesting point, but a thing and its behaviors are one and the same. It’s impossible to take your eye off one in order to observe the other. There does appear to be a sort of being/behavior dualism, perhaps the result of splitting the two into subject/predicate for the purpose of language.
5h — NOS4A2

You're saying language divides objects from their behavior, but this produces a misconception. So if we used language to describe what's really going on, would we be spouting nonsense?

Let's try. Describe how you drank coffee, but do so in a way that I won't become delusional. Is it that:

I am the drinking of the coffee.
The driving of the car drove me to work.
The sitting at the desk typing stupid shit in my phone, typed stupid shit on my phone.
The loving of philosophy has loved the philosophy. This is awesome.

How is conceptual judgment different from predication? You said predication was tacked onto perception, but it sounds like you've got them happening simultaneously. — frank

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment.

BTW, I know that any description of the visual field will be organized by ideas. My point was that the visual field itself is not driving conclusions about identification. That involves the application of discernment. Call it proto-predication. — frank

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field. Seeing the world o e way for the purposes of drawing and another for the purposes of walking is a matter of a change in the manner of discernment.

My point was that , while figures must emerge from some sort of ground, we wouldn’t be able to see anything at all if either the figure or its ground remained purely unchanging. For instance, our pupils must oscillate continually in order to perceive a constant visual image. As soon as the eye is immobilized the visual field vanishes. Perception seeks to construct relative stabilities, not pure unchaningness.
— Joshs

That may be, but as you drive down the road, you're not usually aware that the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns. That would be something you'd realize via your intellect. It's a pretty sophisticated thought. — frank

There are many things one is not explicitly aware of when one is driving, such as the physical actions involved in driving the car. One can be daydreaming about how the road is actually moving 1000 miles per hour as the earth turns, and not remember any of the sights along the way or how one navigated the route to get to the destination. These conceptual aspects that one was not paying explicit attention to were nonetheless made use of in a implicit way. They were below the level of but never far from explicit awareness. Their proximity to explicit consciousness is demonstrated whenever something unexpected happens with the car. It may be a pothole or there may be a strange engine noise, and suddenly one’s attentional focus is immediately fixed on how one is driving , where one is , etc.

As far as seeing relative stability as absolute identity, what many fail to understand is that the experiencing of anything as absolutely self-identical over time, which traditional philosophies count on to ground ‘truth’, not only requires that a thing is qualitatively changing with respect to itself moment by moment.’, but it is the meaningful, relevant way in which it changes itself that gives us the sense of its continued identity.

BTW, I missed this earlier because we seemed to be in agreement, but perhaps not:

That the norms of correct assertibility are socio-historically conditioned but not arbitrary. They're provisional and often revised

You both seem to want something "extra", in addition to norms of truth telling, knowledge and how people discover and find stuff out in the world, as a ground for knowledge.

I was speaking to descriptions, models, etc. being correct vis-a-vis their adequacy to reality. That seemed to be what you were speaking to as well, but here you have pivoted to "norms of correct assertibility."

But wouldn't you agree that these are not the same thing? If "correctness" is only correctness relative to current norms, than I am even less sure how you are going to have a response to more extreme forms of relativism, because these very obviously do shift by location, era, etc., even across the span of one person's lifetime. Hell, they can shift dramatically over the course of a single day as you move between different academic departments.

The something extra I would like it the notion that things are in some sense actually true, not just true relative to norms.

Predicational judgement is one kind of conceptual discernment, and the perception one uses to draw shapes without making use of prior knowledge of objects like trees and tables is another kind of conceptual discernment. — Joshs

But what is the difference?

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field. — Joshs

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that.

a thing and its behaviors are one and the same — NOS4A2

Well, that's a question.

The thing is, models are sort of inherently hypothetical. They tell you what the world would be like if a duck were right there, what patterns you would see, what connections to other loci of behavior there would be, how the world system would work if it included that duck node.

But what about there actually being a duck there? Do you model that by embedding your model into a larger model, and in the larger model the duck existing sort of switches on the model you had before? But that's another kind of behavior, that switching on a model. So how do you model switching on a model? Do you keep going? Can you get actuality by making your model somehow recursive (or maybe reflective)?

It feels to me like actuality is something that always just escapes the model.

Am I wrong about that?

The thing is, models are sort of inherently hypothetical. They tell you what the world would be like if a duck were right there, what patterns you would see, what connections to other loci of behavior there would be, how the world system would work if it included that duck node.

It seems to me that this is more a question of how models are viewed. Are models, and the observations used to construct them primarily a means of knowing the world (a word that may contain substances/things), or are models, observations, propositions, language, etc. all primarily what we know.

Some people take claims like: "we don't actually know what anything is like, even our own hands, or that chair over there, we only know what our experiences of them are like. We only ever experience our experiences!" - very seriously. For others, this represents a sort of profound confusion, to say "I only experience my experiences of my car," is simply to say "I experience my car," etc.

I don't think a model can answer this question for you. It is one of the limits of the methodology. "There is nothing outside the model," seems like something that it would be hard to justify with a model. Just as, "there is no such thing as internal 'meaning,'" is more something that someone presumes by starting with the premises of behaviorism (behaviorism of the sort once in vogue in psychology, not of the broader sort we are discussing) rather than being something one can demonstrate from such premises. The premises assume the thing in question in this case.

I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all." I don't think many people would want to be committed to this sort of view, but whether or not it follows from the suppositions some philosophies is another question.

For instance, if the causes of behavior/action are completely epistemically inaccessible, this question is at best undecidable. Things are what they do and why they do what they do is inscrutable.

I don’t see the application of discernment as optional. Since all perception is conceptually driven, expectations guide even the simplest sort of visual perception, ‘filling in’ for and enriching the paucity of data one receives from the visual field.
— Joshs

So again, how is this not predication? If you have expectations, you expect that x is y, or some variant of that. — frank

The propositional statement ‘x is y’ involves the manipulation of logical symbols. Cognitive science, using the computer as its model, used to depict all cognitive processes by way of symbol manipulation inside the head. More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping Just because we can use symbol manipulation models such as ‘s=p’ doesnt mean that the underlying cognitive processes operate this way.

More recent approaches abandon the notions of representation and symbol manipulation in favor of embodied, contextual coping — Joshs

More recent approaches abandon symbol manipulation in favor of quantum mechanics. Doesn't mean we know anymore now than we've ever known about how cognition actually works.

The something extra I would like it the notion that things are in some sense actually true, not just true relative to norms. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What do you imagine "actually true" means?

For me, there are norms of what count as discovery. That includes actually doing things like opening the window to check the weather. The weather's going to be what it is regardless of our opinion, and our norms of truth telling understand that. Our norms of truth telling also understand things like if people stopped using a currency, it would cease to have value. See what I mean? I mentioned this in the previous thread. With @Leontiskos. That people routinely assess mind independence as part of social norms, and it's a real thing, you can go look.

I think that there is an important sense in which "things are what they do," can be affirmed without having to jettison the intuition that "things do what they do because of what they are." Where I believe we get into trouble is when we end up with something like: "things are what they do and what they do is unintelligible brute fact, i.e. they do what they do "for no reason at all." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But we all, I presume, want to avoid saying that a potion makes you sleepy because of its virtus dormitiva. The "because" in "because of what they are" feels a little thin. Are we sure that talk about how something behaves and talk about what it is aren't just equivalent vocabularies?

As for the second sentence I've quoted, I'm not sure "things do what they do because of what they are" will be much of an advance over "no reason at all." Why do ducks quack? Because it's in their nature? Is that different from saying a duck is a thing that quacks? No one is going to be excited to learn either that ducks quack because they're ducks or that ducks quack because ducks quack.

(Why do ducks quack rather than chirp or croak or bark or meow -- different kind of question, I think. Similarly, why do ducks quack on particular sorts of occasions and not others. There are lots of questions about quacking we can expect substantive answers to.)

The way I prefer to approach causality in assemblages - and this might be my own brainfarts - is that causality in an assemblage is equivalent to the behaviour of a change propagation through connected parts. Like if you had the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, if you had shitty heroin instead of good heroin it could propagate changes into needle behaviour {up the dose} addict behaviour {inject the higher dose, craving} and social stuff {complain at the dealer, buy more...}. And it's appropriate to think of that as a cause.

Though I agree that the causal order can be tangled in assemblages - if you're considering addict-heroin-socius-needle as an assemblage, it doesn't have any unique event ordering. You could have a change in addict propagating to heroin-socius-needle, then back to addict, or a change in socius propagating to addict-heroin-needle. — fdrake

I understand causality in assemblages differently. Thus, your description could be seen as a successive derivation, like the synaptic transmission of nerve impulses—a modulated propagation of the impulse through various mediums. It is certainly a form of indirect causality, of the input-output type, which regularly appears in your assemblage. It looks similar to De Landa’s perspective on causality in assemblages.I would consider your case of causality within the context of Deleuze’s notion of immanent cause. As Deleuze explains, “The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages” (Deleuze, Foucault, p. 32).First, the needle-heroin-addict-socius complex is an aggregation of heterogeneous elements. But what makes it a concrete assemblage? Bluntly, it is repetition—a coherent reappearance of the key elements, accompanied by derivative modulations, much like what you just described. Each disparate element has its own history, its own developmental tendency, and belongs to an autonomous field of knowledge and practice far greater than the individual components in your example. The historical and contingent overlap of these fields creates a virtual prerequisite potential for the assemblage. We typically take this virtual constellation for granted, but each of its implicit components is critically important for the existence of the assemblage.Imagine, for instance, that needles are no longer used in medicine, and thus will no longer be produced. Or that a medication is invented to prevent heroin use. In either case, the immanent cause would act as the whole interplay of relations that gives rise to the identity of the concrete assemblage. Conversely, the coherence of needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage would affect the prerequisite constellation of presupposed factors.Moreover, without concrete assemblages, we cannot distinguish the fluid and variable conjunction of the generative state. In both directions, there is no direct causal interaction between the two planes. There are only indirect, mediated effects and implications. Immanent cause designates the autonomous organization of a system of implicit operative conditions, which acquires a temporal mode of self-sustaining autopoiesis. The abstract machine operates as a reciprocal feedback loop that maintains the relational unity of the two planes of heterogeneous multiplicity.By emphasizing the singularity of a concrete assemblage, the notion of immanent cause also marks the development of Deleuze’s philosophy of individuation, especially concerning the relation between the virtual and the actual.

There are only indirect, mediated effects and implications. Immanent cause designates the autonomous organization of a system of implicit operative conditions, which acquires a temporal mode of self-sustaining autopoiesis. — Number2018

That would be worth another thread. Some assemblages behave as if there is a relevant concept of sufficient cause - pool cue strikes ball, ball goes into table pocket. Eating a lethal dose of cyanide is sufficient to kill you. Things like that. The changes propagate in each case, but to the extent an assemblage can be split into distinct entities with relations, it makes sense to see the state of one relation propagating into others given a change.

The immanent cause is realized, integrated, and distinguished by its effect. In this way there is a correlation or mutual superposition between cause and effect, between abstract machine and concrete assemblages — Number2018

I read that as less a statement of arbitrary, recursive mediation and more a statement that assemblage-level laws {abstract machines, things like physical laws} are coextensive with the behaviour of their components {concrete assemblages}. It's roughly a way of saying a law of nature says nothing more than what things already do and can do.

So there's enough normative character to do things with, but the nature of what can be done using those norms is not totally determined by their current state of expression - only what may be expressed with them fully determines their expression {given the current state of the assemblage}. Which is basically a tautology, but no one knows the scope of those rules without knowing all the theorems. An appeal to potential development, there, is an assemblage concept that ↪Number2018 referenced, organisation in accordance with some abstract machine."

The explicit articulation of a system of norms or rules prescribing concrete conduct or behavior for people in a concrete assemblage has a complex and ambiguous relationship with what people actually do. Let’s return to your case of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage. There are different degrees of conscious adherence to the rules, ranging from the complete automation of the addicts to the high degree of awareness in the social and medical staff involved. Yet, while acting, even the involved professionals do not explicitly follow a system of rules. Similarly, when playing, professional basketball players do not consciously attend to the system of the game’s rules.Shaun Gallagher notes that “When the fielder is trying to catch the baseball, she is not performing tests or sampling the environment. The brain is not located in the center, conducting tests along the radii; it is on the circumference, one station amongst other stations involved in the loop thatalso navigates through the body and environment and forms the whole” (Gallagher, "Enactivist Interventions", p. 19). Gallagher’s enactivist approach aligns closely with the framework of assemblage theory. Thus, apparent rules are situated within the environment, which possesses its own organization, and where discursive, social, and normative components constitute the clearly expressible and articulable system.On the other hand, Gallagher’s concept of the ‘body’ refers to an integration of disparate but interconnected patterns of physical and psychic states, perceptions, reactions, and behaviors. The conscious self-orientation, ‘the brain’, is just one component of the larger complex that constitutes the game’s assemblage. It primarily follows the vectors of alignment between the two planes, which can be referred to as the abstract machine of the game’s assemblage. Similarly, in your example of the needle-heroin-addict-socius assemblage, the conscious participation follows "one station amongst other stations involved in the navigation on the loop." — fdrake