The article assumes a divide between language and the study of what exists which ignores how the problem of language has always been central to the concerns of philosophers.

In Plato's Cratylus, there is the conclusion that names are not natural products but the result of a lot of talking. In Phaedrus, the introduction ot text is said to leave out an important dimension of live dialogue. The validity of arguments throughout the dialogues generates more questions than they answer.

Aristotle's development of logic and how it collides with the processes he wants to understand in 'the world of the becoming' is the central task of his Metaphysics. A lot of his style of criticism involves having statements cancel each other out.

Hegel's Logic is, in one sense, a grammar. It is like Aristotle's Metaphysics in the way it specifies the use of words.

I could go on in this vein but want to avoid becoming tiresome.

As a result, I think the 'history of philosophy' view that we are in a place is dubious.

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Contrary to Aristotle, Descartes claims that we do not see things is (in?) the world, but rather representations in the mind. — Fooloso4

Aristotle had a version of that separation. Descartes kicked off the consequent discussion of what was "mind independent." Maybe the thinking here is not a determination as it is often portrayed to be.

So, what do you think about it? Maybe you could quote what was particularly meaningful to you.

That he imagines cannot be doubted, but what he imagines can be. He says that imagination is related to the nature of body, but also that to imagine is to think. — Fooloso4

I think the 'imagination being related to the nature of the body' comes from Aristotle/Aquinas saying images come from senses interacting with material things and that thinking is analogous to that process because thinking requires images.

Descartes is opposing that analogy by saying our intellect is a process that we experience more intimately than its objects: After including all the various activities as kinds of thinking, he says:

I cannot keep myself from believing that corporeal things, images of which are formed by thought and which the senses themselves examine are much more distinctly known than that indescribable part of myself which cannot be pictured by the imagination. Yet it would truly be very strange to say that I know and comprehend more distinctly things whose existence seems doubtful to me, that are unknown to me, and which belong to me, than those of whose truth I am persuade, which are known to me, and which belong to my real nature--to say, in a word, that I know better than myself. But I see well what is the trouble: my mind is a vagabond who likes to wander and is not yet able to stay within the strict bounds of truth. — Second Meditation, pg 29, emphasis mine

Not being able to describe this 'real nature' must be one of the reasons why the mind is easily attracted by things that can be.

The ego is an idea. Right? — frank

That nicely cues the work of the Third Meditation, where ideas are defined in the context of the "thinker." Giorgo Agamben makes some interesting observations about the grammar of pronouns and their indeterminate nature that may throw light on how Descartes distinguishes the 'thinking subject' from the 'I' as an object:

We should pay attention to the specific condition of the utterance:it is the very act of producing an utter, not the text of the uttered....
This act is the work of the speaker who set langue into motion. The relation between the speaker and the langue determines the linguistic character of the utterance. (Benveniste 2, pl 80)

The sphere of the utterance thus includes that which in every speech act, refers exclusively to its taking place, to its instance, independently and prior to what is said meant in it. Pronouns and the other indicators of the utterance, before they designate real objects, indicate precisely that language takes place. In this way, still prior to the world of meaning, they permit the reference to the very event of language, the only context in which something can only be signified. — Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death, The Place of Negativity, pg 17

I think that captures some of the 'living instance to instance' quality in the passage Fooloso4 quoted above:

For a life-span can be divided into countless parts, each completely independent of the others, so that from my existing at one time it doesn’t follow that I exist at later times, unless some cause keeps me in existence – one might say that it creates me afresh at each moment.

I get that a lot.

Let me try this from a different direction. Your OP asserts that people are incarcerated because the system has a faulty idea of why people do things. What change would help ameliorate that mistake?

This is confusing:

The law is a primary determinant of human conduct according to our legalistic society, NOT according to me and my understanding of how a human act originates. It is not actually possible for given law to be determinative of a human act. — quintillus

If we can agree that compliance with the law is not, or at least is more complicated, than various legal systems that have emerged to respond to crime, are you saying that enforcement of the law cancels the obligation of responsibility upon which it is based?

An aspect of 'information' theory that I am not sure fits with your dichotomy is the emergence of cybernetic processes and system theories. That does make it a part of the 'realist' camp but does not necessarily render the components by which we build models 'commensurate' in contrast to the "incommensurability of information" you ascribe to the post-modernist.

Maybe approaches like biosemiotics are not as 'totalizing' as they may appear because the grammar projected upon them may be a good use of metaphor but is not like logic as 'rules of thinking' in many other ways.

People do not act, especially if badly, on the basis of what is permitted by law. So the following proposes a factor not observed in criminal behavior:

Current pre-reflectively free jurisprudentially-oriented legislators and magistrates, mistakenly, destructively, require all persons to determine themselves to act, or not, on the basis of given language of prohibitive law, - whereby said language of law it is, in fact, ontologically impossible to originate either human action or, inaction. — quintillus

You have placed the law before actions where it is always behind. People do bad things and other people try to stop it from dissolving whatever arrangement made in order to minimize the damage.

I apologize for my comparison. I should have left it as what I disagreed with.

The law, as practiced in the United States, sharply differentiates the criminal from civic disputes. So, the attempts to prevent criminal behavior, whether rightly or wrongly, conceived, is separated from the issue of rights of claims made by competing parities.

Against Oliver Wendell Holmes, your argument sounds like an AI generated device.

I take you as saying that Descartes is creating the role of the deceiver so that it won’t be thought he is speaking ill of God (if God was claimed to be the deceiver). And so, perhaps, our sin (doubt, uncertainty) does not blemish the perfection of God’s creation — Antony Nickles

One twist in this narrative is how the good God has permitted demons to exist and some quantum of ecclesiastical authority comes from protecting the flock by kicking the bad sheep out. The correlation between what you believed and your personal outcome was closely linked. Overcoming trials of temptation by evil entities was interwoven into the fabric of every garment.

While this experience was built on Paul's view of a view of a world where the Kingdom of Heaven would replace the one expected to pass away, the early theologians drew from the Greek tradition to legitimize their view against a received understanding of nature and divinity. The breathless anticipation of Paul morphed into the two cities of Augustine. Aristotle eventually was integrated into an acceptable view of nature with the constant caveat that Revelation preceded anything it had to say.

But then you have Galileo being charged with being a heretic for challenging what was stolen from the candy store in the first place. The genius of Descartes is that he did not simply take away something of value but offered a replacement.

Ray Brassier, from that collection of essays, The Speculative Turn, you posted in the other thread, calls for a relationship between the extremes that seeks to avoid the either/or between 'ontology' and 'epistemology.' It is interesting to see him included in the collection because he has a bone to pick with all the other views presented. The lovely rhetorical hit on 'post-modernism' aside, this chapter neatly captures one problem balancing the points of view:

18. However, in the absence of any understanding of the relationship between ‘meanings’ and things meant—the issue at the heart of the epistemological problematic which Latour dismisses but which has preoccupied an entire philosophical tradition from Frege through Sellars and up to their contemporary heirs—the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical. The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality: ‘It is not possible to distinguish for long between those actants that are going to play the role of “words” and those that will play the role of “things”’. In dismissing the epistemological obligation to explain what meaning is and how it relates to things that are not meanings, Latour, like all postmodernists—his own protestations to the contrary notwithstanding—reduces everything to meaning, since the difference between‘words’ and ‘things’ turns out to be no more than a functional difference subsumed by the concept of ‘actant’—that is to say, it is a merely nominal difference encompassed by the metaphysical function now ascribed to the metaphor ‘actant’. Since for Latour the latter encompasses everything from hydroelectric powerplants to tooth fairies, it follows that every possible difference between powerplants and fairies—i.e. differences in the mechanisms through which they affect and are affected by other entities, whether those mechanisms are currently conceivable or not—is supposed to be unproblematically accounted for by this single conceptual metaphor. — Ray Brassier

I was trying to say how I thought Aristotle framed the questions. i don't want to hijack the thread to address your more general question on that basis. I will ponder how to address it in the context of the OP.

Those techniques may speak to the Aristotelian register of 'things happening for the most part' but does not treat them as a particular being which is treated as primary to all other qualifications.

Perfection is not something outside of a context. If you are a pretty good woodworker, you could be better if you did some things differently. Some of that is getting some events under more control. Some of that is accepting a process that one permits rather than planning. What is that element? The artist cannot get in front of the art.

And what about matters like love? The call to be perfect in love is not about technique. One knows when they are fucking it up in pursuit of whatever. It seems unlikely that awareness is based upon some projected success or failure.

Aristotle's essences would be ones where we could determine by human standards of induction the essential form of a substance that determines what that substance is. He does not seem to hold the notion that there are some attributes which are hidden or withdrawn as far as I've seen. — schopenhauer1

Yes, the passage is an objection to Plato's version of Forms. I read it also to say there is a great distance between our grouping by kinds and whatever activity is producing these different beings.

My approval of Grant given earlier in the thread is that he puts the Aristotelian argument that there can be no science of accidents in a particular light. Accidents are obviously the source of actual outcomes, but we do not have a science for it. Is that a problem of overwhelming complexity or the order of the universe coming to some kind of limit?

I am not sure how this lines up with the argument between Harmon and Whitehead but is my attempt to answer what seemed closest to your request for an analogue in the text of Aristotle.

This seems pretty similar to Aristotle's substance, except that Aristotle didn't have an idea of a "hiddenness". He seemed pretty concerned with their "essence" which is something that I believe can be known, and thus not hidden. But if anyone else has ideas of how this ties to Aristotle, let me know. — schopenhauer1

We encounter the 'essences' each time we come upon a particular being. But there is a tension between this condition and the 'universals' needed to inquire into causes:

But perhaps the universal, while it cannot be substance in the way in which the essence is, can yet be present in it—for example, as the animal is present in the human and the horse. Well then, clearly there is some account of it. And it makes no difference even if it is not the account of everything in the substance. For this [universal] will not be any the less the substance of something, as the human is of the human in whom it is present. And so the same result will again follow, since it (for example, the animal) will be the substance of that in which it is present as something special to it. Further, it is both impossible and absurd for the this (that is, the substance)—if it is composed of something—not to be composed of substances or of the this something but of a quality. For then non-substance (that is, the quality) will be prior to substance (that is, to the this). Which is just what is impossible. For neither in account nor in time nor in knowledge can the attributes be prior to the substance. For then they will also be separable. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 1038b15, translated by CDC Reeve

From this perspective, the 'essence' is hiding in plain sight.

The crux of what I see is that Descartes is demonizing the inherent fallibility of our human condition. — Antony Nickles

I don't think this captures the significance of Descartes using the motif of an evil demon during his experiment upon himself. In a time when people were executed for witchcraft, demanding that a 'good' god would not deliberately deceive us separates the realm of the created from the problem of sin.

On one hand, Descartes is couching his argument in a way to avoid the fate of Galileo. On the other hand, he is challenging the Christian appropriation of the cosmos as performed by Augustine, Aquinas, and the like.

That part is more like Kant arguing against superstition than Hume musing about causes between billiard games.

Why the fear of "anthropomorphism"? — Moliere

My impression from reading the essays so far is that it is not so much a general rejection of anthropomorphism but a response to Heidegger signaling the end of metaphysics. Thus Badiou's remark in the first essay:

I have difficulty in understanding Laruelle [laughs] especially regarding the question of the Real. The strength of philosophy is its decisions in regards to the Real. In a sense Laruelle is too much like Heidegger, in critiquing a kind great forgetting, of what is lost in the grasp of decision, what Heidegger called thinking. Beyond this, and not to judge a thinker only by his earliest work, his most recent work has a religious dimension. When you say something is purely in the historical existence of philosophy
the proposition is a failure. It becomes religious. There is a logical constraint when you say we most go beyond philosophy. This is why, in the end, Heidegger said only a god can save us. Ultimately, I do not see an opposition between being qua being (as multiplicity) and the Real, not at all. The Real can be decided except for the event which is always in relation to a particular world. — Badiou

I guess this can be seen as support for something like Spinoza's criticism of anthropomorphism. but I read it more as a challenge to whether 'post-modernism' is a thing.

The Speculative Turn essays certainly represent very different views. It seems that much of the conversation concerns the logic of terms and what are actual unities versus arbitrary suppositions. This example by Grant makes sense to me:

Clearly, then, the problem stems from the mutual abstraction of becoming and
thing, a problem whose solution Plato already foreshadowed in coining the principle of immanence in the form of ‘the becoming of being [genesis eis ousian]’ (Philebus 26d8): it cannot be other-than-being that becomes, or becoming would not be at all. In the present context, this means: ‘the mark of all being is power’. Powers are inseparable from their products; if no products, then there were no powers, but not the reverse. It is neither the case that things ground powers, nor the converse; rather, powers unground the ultimacy attributed to substantial being and necessitate, therefore, rather than eliminate, the becomings of objects. Powers accordingly are natural history, in the precise sense that powers are not simply formally or logically inseparable from what they do, but are what they do, and compose being in its becoming. The thoroughgoing contingency of natural production undermines, I would claim, any account of permanently actual substantial forms precisely because such contingents entail the actuality not simply of abstractly separable forms, but of the powers that sculpt them. This is where
Harman’s retooling of vicarious causation will become the focus for discussion, but which must take place elsewhere. — Hart, Mining Conditions, a response to Harman, pg 48

This question relates to the scientific method used in the discussion of linguistics in the Chomsky thread and how to distinguish the "innate" from the 'environment."

"Whatever I have accepted until now as most true has come to me through my senses. But occasionally I have found that they have deceived me, and it is unwise to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. -- Descartes — frank

The reference to personal betrayal is interesting here. A loss of trust questioning the good faith of the interlocutor. The relationship is in peril before the trial has begun. The setting reminds me of Dante who discovers he is lost "midway through life's journey." The failure to find one's way threatens madness.

The fusion certainly did not come up in the Third Meditation when Descartes was saying his parents did not cause his 'thinking substance':

Finally, concerning my parents, from whom it seems that I derive my birth, even if all that I could ever have believed of them should be true, that would not imply that it is they who conserve me, nor even that they made and produced me in so far as I am a thinking being, there is no relation between the bodily activity by which I have been accustomed to believe I was engendered and the production of a thinking substance. The most that they can have contributed to my birth is that they have produced certain arrangements in the matter within which I have so far believed that the real I, that is my mind, is enclosed. Thus the existence of my parents is no objection to the argument, and we must necessarily conclude from the mere fact that I exist and that I have an idea of a supremely perfect God is very clearly demonstrated. — ibid. page 40

The 'ghost in the machine' register comes up when discussing a perfect God. It is not used when discussing the world he can explore. He has used the crisis of his doubt to separate a particular cosmic order from God as a matter of belief. Disagreeing with Aristotle's astronomy should not be treated as heresy.

Thinking, is not a proof for someone that s/he is aware of being alive, i.e. that s/he exists. In fact, the contrary may be true: when my mind is absorbed by thinking, I kind of stop being alive. — Alkis Piskas

After Descartes concludes that he is not being deceived by the creator of his experience, he can learn from nature. He says that thinking is not confined to abstract pondering:

Nature also teaches me by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on that I am not only residing in my body, as a pilot in his ship, but furthermore, that I am intimately connected with it, and that the mixture is so blended, as it were, that something like a single whole is produced. For if that were not the case, when my body is wounded I would not therefore feel pain, I, who am only a thinking being; but I would perceive that wound by the understanding alone, as a pilot perceives by sight if something in his vessel is broken. And when my body needs food or drink, I would simply know the fact itself, instead of receiving notice of it by having confused feelings of hunger and thirst. For actually all these feelings of hunger, thirst, pain, and so on are nothing else but certain confused modes of thinking, which have their origin in and depend upon the union and apparent fusion of the mind with the body. — Descartes, Meditation 6, pg 81, translated by L.J Lefleur

A feature of this thread from its beginning is that no source of information has been accepted as a common ground for differences of opinion to take as points of departure.

Maybe our grandchildren will be able to piece together the different parts.

Language and Death: The Place of Negativity by Giorgio Agamben

An interesting philosophical view of linguistics in contrast to the scientific theories being discussed lately around Chomsky's work.

The Tomasello lecture is excellent. His observations are noted in a larger challenge to Chomsky presented by Brian MacWhinney and Elizabeth Bates.

I agree, sentient life must evolve through interaction with the world in which it exists, which is why it has taken 3.7 billion years for life to have evolved to its current form. — RussellA

That does take the long view of what 'development' involves. I suppose the development of children has to be seen in the context of that larger one. In regard to language, it prompts me to question the clean separation between the 'innate' and the 'environment' as put forward by Chomsky.

Beyond the specific theory put forward by Vygotsky, I think the issue needs to include his observation, "From this point of view, learning is not development."

It is sophistical for Harris to use the diversity of religious expression to bolster his simple unitary view.

His emphasis upon the propositions of what is believed reflects the ritual importance of reciting the creed in many versions of Christianity. To cancel all religions on the basis of this model is oddly as chauvinistic as those who insist that it is the only truth. No sincere effort to compare religions can afford such baggage.

During a discussion of his predecessors, Aristotle said Plato included two of the four Aristote worked with and why it was not enough:

And that for the sake of which actions, changes, and movements take place they speak of as in a way a cause, but not in this way—that is, not in the way in which it is its nature to be a cause. For those who speak of understanding or love (philia) posit these causes as good, but they do not speak as if anything is or comes to be for the sake of these things, but as if movements arise from them. In the same way too those who say that the one or being is such a nature say that it is a cause of the substance, but not that anything is or comes to be for its sake, so that in a way they do and in a way they do not say that the good is a cause, since they do not say it is so unconditionally but coincidentally. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 988b5, translated by CDC Reeve

The addition of the fourth cause (efficient) comes from not being able to treat the eternal beings and what comes to be and passes away the same way. A step toward that method was to get past the monism of Parmenides:

But then if there is to be some being-itself and one-itself, there is much puzzlement as to how anything else will exist beyond these—I mean, as to how beings will be more than one. For what is other than being is not, and so, according to Parmenides’ argument, it necessarily follows that all beings are one, and this one is being. Either way, it is difficult. For whether the one is not substance or whether there is some one-itself, number cannot be substance. We said earlier why this holds if the one is not substance, but if it is substance, the puzzle is the same as that concerning being, For from what, beyond the one-itself, will there be another one? Indeed, it must be not-one. |1001b5| But all beings are either one or a many of which each is one. — ibid. 1001a28

In this respect, the Prime Mover is the beginning of the series of causes but not the 'first' of that series because its principle is not the same species as the "moved." I would not call that a denial of the 'existence of absolute time' but a limit to what we can be thought about it.

It comes down to the debate between Chomsky, who argued that language is founded on innate concepts biologically pre-set and the Behaviourists, such as Skinner, who argued that that all language is learnt during one's interaction with the environment. — RussellA

The relationship between the learner and the environment can mean very different things. In the Skinner model, stimulus is always on one side and response the other side of events. For Vygotsky, for example, there is a dynamic where the stimulus becomes modified by changes in the learner:

The acquisition of language can provide a paradigm for the entire problem of the relation between learning and development. Language arises initially as a means of communication between the child and the people in his environment. Only subsequently, upon conversion to internal speech, does it come to organize the child's thought, that is, become an internal mental function. Piaget and others have shown that reasoning occurs in a children's group as an argument intended to prove one's own point of view before it occurs as an internal activity whose distinctive feature is that the child begins to perceive and check the basis of his thoughts. Such observation prompted Piaget to conclude that communication produces the need for checking and confirming thoughts, a process that is characteristic of adult thought. In the same way that internal speech and reflective thought arise from the interactions between the child and persons in her environment, these interactions provide the source of development of a child's voluntary behavior. Piaget has shown that cooperation provides the basis for the development of a child's moral judgement. Earlier research established that a child first becomes able to subordinate her behavior to rules in group play and only later does voluntary self-regulation of behavior arise as an internal function.

These individual examples illustrate a general developmental law for the higher mental functions that we feel can be applied in its entirety to children's learning processes. We propose that an essential feature of learning is that it creates the zone of proximal development; that is, learning awakens a variety of internal development processes that are able to only operate when the child is interacting with people in his environment and in cooperation with his peers. Once these processes are internalized, they become part of the child's independent developmental achievement.

From this point of view, learning is not development; however, properly organized learning results in mental development and sets in motion a variety of developmental processes that would be impossible apart from learning. Thus, learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human, psychological functions. — Vygotsky, Mind in Society, page 90

This approach does not cancel the domain of the 'innate' but neither does it make it a realm where 'e-language' can be clearly separated from 'I-language'.

No. A closed loop does not answer Aristotle's quest for an explanation of Causation itself — Gnomon

I don't think Aristotle would have described his work that way. He was surrounded by those who rejected the idea of an intelligible whole. He fought them tooth and nail.

*Defining it formally with E-languages at least. But I'd include logic as within the E-language category. — Moliere

This element is what confuses me trying to sort out what is 'innate' versus an imposed condition. Are all environmental factors to be dubbed 'structural' factors in contradistinction to what happens in an individual?

I don't get the either/or here. Cognitive psychology has plenty of theoretical claims that differ from the 'taxonomy' Chomsky has objected to throughout his career.

I actually meant the idea that view that is critical of all religion, specifically on the basis that they're irreconcilable and that schisms aren't based on any kind of underlining logical framework. — Hallucinogen

That framework sounds like what one would need to compare religions with each other. Are there critics of religion who reject such comparisons?

I was not agreeing with your analysis of the circumstances but only observing that Ukraine cannot afford to just wait out the present situation if it is to have a chance of stopping the Russians.

You have been saying that resistance is futile since 2/22. We will see.

Yet this never satisfied the philosopher, namely Aristotle. Hence the proposal of first cause or the uncaused cause. — invicta

For Aristotle, the problem with infinite regression is that we would not be able to learn anything theoretical in such a universe:

At the same time, however, it is also impossible that the first [cause], since it is eternal, should pass away. For since coming to be is not without a limit in the upward direction, [a] the first thing from (ek) whose passing away something came to be must be non-eternal. And since the for-the-sake-of-which is an end, and the sort of end that is not for the sake of other things but rather other things are for its sake, it follows that if there is to be a last thing of this sort, the series will not be without a limit, but if there is no such thing, there will be no for-the-sake-of-which. Those who make it unlimited are unwittingly getting rid of the nature of the good (and yet no one would try to do anything if he were not going to come to a limit). Nor would there be any understanding present in beings. For someone who has understanding, at any rate, always does the actions he does for the sake of something, and this is a limit, since the end is a limit. — Aristotle. Metaphysics, 994b5, translated by C.D.C. Reeve

Time is not on Ukraine's side. The Chechens thought they had won for a bit but were crushed eventually.

If the annexations stand, they become 'facts on the ground'.

I can't answer your challenge to bert1 regarding the scientific theory of consciousness as a development that started without it and appeared after some time. Bateson approached that in a paradigmatic fashion where Chalmers is trying to rank different kinds of reduction.

On the other hand, the Aristotelian interpretation of structure you have presented does bring the problem of time front and center as a matter of principle.

Aristotle did not have a "hard problem" because he had an unmoved mover contemplating what it had set into motion.

Noted.

Language has to be embedded far more widely in cognition - to the point where cognition and language use are much the same thing. — Banno

In a nutshell, I can't see why generative grammar requires analyticity. — Banno

Language surely must be closely linked to cognition. But the devil is in the details. The range of theories between what the brain does and what social interactions do suggest they are only 'the same thing' when some conditions are presumed to be the case.

That prompts me to ask about how you see the scientific method in relation to 'analyticity', as you coin the phrase. Chomsky located linguistics as one of the enterprises of cognitive psychology. Do you conceive of the 'analytic' as prior to such theoretical endeavors?