My conclusion is that all three uses of the symbol "=" have different meanings in the aforementioned scientific equations. Additionally, these uses do not seem to reflect the logician's use in an expression such as "a = a". While I can see the application in Kripkes' examples of "table = table" or "Nixon = Nixon", its application to these so called "identity statements" discovered by scientist, well that is a bridge too far. — Richard B

I agree here -- which is why I began to think that the lecturn lectern example might be better because it gets us out of thinking about how the science relates to the metaphysics, which is a whole ball of wax, and starts to focus on an object which we take as real, and then Kripke demonstrates how we might still be able to have necessary relationships after the fact and so a kind of "essence" might still hold good.

The level of abstraction in what I’m saying here produces the suspicion that it’s lacking in substance. I don’t think it is, but maybe there’s a need to bring it down to earth with concrete examples, more concrete than talk of rationality and irrationality. Maybe later. — Jamal

I don't think it's lacking in substance.

(Btw, Tuesday is when I'm catching up on 9)

Ableist, becasue it minimises the intelligence and perceptiveness of pre-linguistic or non-verbal individuals, and misses the real problem, which is isolation from language, not failure to understand the world. — Banno

:up:

Rather than the object or referrent serving as a ground for meaning I rather think it's the linguistic community that's more important in determining "What is real?" specifically because that's the "home" of meaning. It's how terms come to refer in the first place, to be able to name and predicate in the first place depends upon how those around us name and predicate.

Right. This happened right in this thread, when Moliere claimed that because Aristotle views water "teleologically" and Lavoisier views it as H2O, therefore Lavoisier has falsified Aristotle. — Leontiskos

I don't believe that Aristotle was falsified by Lavoisier.

Falsification is a much more complicated maneuver than disagreement on fundamentals. Disagreement on fundamentals -- such as whether water is an element or not, or whether water is composed of atoms or not -- don't so much falsify each other as much as they both make claims that cannot both be true at the same time. This is because they mean different things, but are referring to the same object.

I would say with respect to reasoning about reality -- deciding "What is real?" -- the PNC is not violated, of course, but they can't both be true either. Water is either a fundamental element which does not divide further into more fundamental atoms, or it is a composition of other more fundamental elements and so does divide further, or something else entirely (in which case both thinkers are false when making the universal claim -- there's an implicit universal claim in both, namely that All water is such and such. This is how I read them anyways, which is where the conflict arises. They can't both be true such that All water is such and such ((and not the other thing)))

The thinkers are very far apart from one another in terms of time, who they are talking to, the problems they're trying to address, and so forth, and yet are talking about the same thing -- at least I think so. So the variance between the two can only be accounted for by looking to the meanings of the terms, which in turn is how we can come to understand how people have made inferences about fundamental matter in the past, and thereby can serve as a kind of model for our own inferences.

For my part I don't believe in essences or even that water must be H2O. The lectern example of Kripke's makes more sense to me, but even then I'm hesitant to make necessary claims with respect to the object -- hence why I'm speaking about meanings, inferences, and all the rest.

What water is seems to me more of scientific than philosophical question, but then I know that barrier is another bit where we're likely not in agreement, since for Aristotle the question of science and philosophy isn't as separate. His whole philosophy has large parts dedicated to ancient science and he's making use of philosophical arguments.

My guess is that the various empirical "methods" -- which really just amount to norms of collective argument -- probably handle claims about reality better than universal claims about what something is or is not. But then the picture of nature that arises isn't exactly one of a harmonious whole.
 
EDIT: Also, to head off something I see-- just because science is good at one thing doesn't mean philosophy is overturned or useless or anything like that. I think it stands on its own without the need for the sciences, but that its methods are good for the reflective practice of science, which is where we begin to clarify what it is we mean.


I, for one, am in favor of there being true sentences.

Yes, in a way, but I think reality comes first. I think we have to have some familiarity with water before we have any sensible familiarity with "water." Familiarity with water is a precondition for familiarity with the English sign "water." — Leontiskos

Heh -- well as long as it's the reality I understand then I'm OK with that ;)

Much of this is right, but again, the crucial point you are failing to recognize is that neither Aristotle nor Lavoisier mean that anyone who does not mean what they mean must therefore be wrong. That is a very strange reading. No one is claiming to have a complete and exclusive understanding of water. — Leontiskos

I'm starting to think this is just something of a misunderstanding that I haven't figured out yet. I'm not saying either believed they had the complete or exclusive reading, even in what they meant.

I am referencing what they meant and relating it to what we know about reality, though, to make a point about "How do we know what is real?"

I think the key here is that when Lavoisier says, "Water is H2O," he could be saying two different things:

M: "Water is H2O, and if anyone, past or future, says anything else about water, they are wrong."
N: "Water is H2O, and there are all sorts of other true things that can be said about water."

You seem to take Aristotle to have said something like (M), but that's not generally what a scientist means when they say, "Water is such-and-such." If all scientists are saying things like (M) then there can be no growth in knowledge and therefore Aristotle's approach is wrong. But given that scientists are usually saying things like ( N) there is no true barrier to growth in knowledge - either individually or communally. — Leontiskos

I'm taking the "M" translation to demonstrate a point -- these are both very intelligent persons who have done scholarly work on water, one philosophical and the other scientific -- though with the added qualification that Aristotle's scholarly work has a kind of proto-scientific thing going on in his philosophy.

The "N" translation I take for granted, in a sense. Yes, we can figure out ways to reconcile them.

Because learning occurred and knowledge grew. Lavoisier knows more about water than Aristotle did. Aristotle would expect this to be the case for later scientists. — Leontiskos

I agree that Aristotle would accept and expect this -- but I don't think he'd predict what's different. Namely that the atomic theory is correct, that water does not act in accord with any teleology, and it's not a fundamental element.

But then, in comparing the meanings between the two, it doesn't seem they mean the same thing after all... even if they refer to the same thing, roughly.

There seems to be an assumption amongst some folk here that we have to understand what water is before we can begin to make use of the word "water". That either we understand what water is, and then learn to use the word, or we have the word, and learn to apply it.

But is that right? That "Water before word" or "Word before water" exhausts all the possibilities? — Banno

To put my cards on the table I don't think that's right. I wouldn't put such a hard distinction between meaning and the thing talked about, though perhaps that's fuel for another thread?

Does that help? — Banno

It may eventually. Still dully mulling. I'm thankful for the reply either way.

I would say that things don't have inherent meanings (at least for philosophy). I think you are still conflating metaphysics with linguistics. Throughout this post you talk a lot about "meanings," but essentialism is not about what words mean, it is about what things are. — Leontiskos

In order to talk about what is real we need to know what it is we mean by "What is real?" -- this would be before any question on essentialism. In order to talk about what water is we have to be able to talk about "What does it mean when we say "Water is real", or "Water has an essence"? or "The essence of water is that it is H2O"?"

We can't really deal with any dead philosopher without dealing with meanings -- the words have to mean something, rather than be the thing they are about.

I've already pointed out that Lavoisier's discovery did not necessarily falsify what came before: — Leontiskos

Whether they falsify one another or not is different from whether they mean the same thing. I don't think they do, but are probably talking about the same thing in nature. I do, however, think you have to pick one or the other if we presume that Lavoisier and Aristotle are talking about the same thing because the meanings are not the same. The lack of falsification is because the meanings are disparate and they aren't in conversation with one another, and they aren't even doing the same thing.

It's the difference in meaning that raises the question -- if the thing is the same why does the meaning differ? If stating "What the thing is" in a metaphysical way can be done without knowing what it is we mean by claims on reality then maybe you'd have a point. But I don't think we can just begin with the things as they are in the abstract -- we begin with things as they are around us.

@Leontiskos Then we've likely been talking past and working out and all the rest that we do here.

There is a possibility that I think isn't taken seriously enough that marks a difference between how I'm thinking on "What is real?" and how it seems Leon is.

And I think this would include our conversation too @Count Timothy von Icarus

There's the sense in which, if pressed, I'll say that I think the water which we drink today is H2O, and that the water which Aristotle refers to has at least a similar enough reference for comparison, if not the same meaning.

But this is a best guess, and not a philosophical demonstration.

Something that's operating in the background of my thoughts that hasn't been clear is the reason and use for historical examples, such as using Aristotle to talk about essentialism when a modern essentialist would not make the claims Aristotle did about water in marking out its essence. The reason I use Aristotle is because he is likely talking about the same thing, and yet he gets a different meaning. Further, his view was taken as the truth for a long time, and then it wasn't (and now it is, by some! :D) -- so there's a tangible conversation through history that we can reference in thinking through how the terms were developed. There's a tradition in which the terms meanings can come to make sense and we can make comparisons between the meanings of the terms. Further, when we accept meaning we get rid of the need for being as a kind of "ground" or "explanation" for why we're saying the things in the first place -- the historical method is what keeps the arguments from devolving into circularity and arbitrary stipulation.

Enough on meta-philosophical method -- I just wanted to make it clear why I've been using Aristotle and the rest rather than laying out propositions and definitions within logical form. And the reflection on the changing of meanings over time leads into the point I wanted to make in noting how the best guess is not a philosophical demonstration: when I look at how meaning has changed over time, and I presume that the thing referred to has not changed, and the meanings contradict, then it seems that either the thing has both meanings, contradictory though they be, or we invent meanings to make sense of the thing. Supposing the LNC holds in a metaphysically possible way, to use 's nesting of possibilities, and we change meanings then which meaning should be the one which is "true", and when will it be true? If we were wrong before then it's possible for us to be wrong again. And science cannot get us out of this conundrum because it is finite -- it deals with the "real' world, we'll say, so as to avoid poisoning the well in favor of physicalism, and the patterns we assign today can be seen as superseded tomorrow because of that. All scientific theories, no matter how certain we can come to see them as, are subject to change and subsumption by future discoveries, future subsumptions and corrections. Then, perhaps, water isn't really H2O, though the locals saw it that way, but from way up here we see....


This all by way of pointing out why I'm going over various meanings of "Water" through thinking on the question about "What is real?" -- let's say we have three contenders for what is real about water. @Banno's is that, in a particular example, we find out that the water was an oasis and not a mirage. In Kripke we find that if water is H2O, then water is necessarily H2O: there is no possible world in which water could be something else, without going into the metaphysics of what water is -- perhaps, to use the diagram again, "What is water?" is a question that can only be sensibly answered in the "Real Possible World" rather than the "Metaphysically possible world" (And, for what it's worth, even if it happens to be wrong, I couldn't make sense of Kripke without thinking of possible worlds as plausible worlds; i.e. what would I assent to as a genuine possibility in such-and-such a circumstance, and what objections might hold?)

For myself it seems that if we accept a realist metaphysics, and our meanings change, then we have to accept the very real possibility that most of what we know is false -- that it's "good enough" to begin with setting out a problem or understanding something, but the particular circumstance is where we'll find the thing rather than in the definition of what makes the thing what the thing is. This supposing the world does not change -- if the world changes, we could still accept a realist metaphysic, and this would make a great deal of sense out of why what seems simple is what smart people disagree about.

But then that just seems to stretch credibility too.

In both cases I'm sort of just setting out what makes reality what it is in relation to meaning -- the question to me is very much on the epistemic side, as I said. In a way what I'd pose is "What does this change in the meaning of water, something which actually seems quite mundane to us without much further ado, indicate about how we decide what is real?"

MacIntyre's philosophy is great, and his death is a shame to me.

His notion of tradition is probably what is still the most influential on my own thinking. The whole notion that traditions are what give philosophy a non-arbitrary grounding is something I use in thinking through philosophy historically -- the tradition is what gives context for understanding why a philosopher is responding how they are and whom, and this in turn is what begins to reveal the concepts within said tradition.

May his rest be peaceful.

Well, you can ask folk to burn there books, which would make your life more interesting. — Banno

Heh. I wouldn't do such a thing, I just couldn't resist the dumb joke.

Not sure about that last part? :smile: But yes, this is a huge problem with the veil of ignorance, for Nussbaum and many others. Rawls assumed a lot when he imagined what we could know and not know, accept and not accept, conceptualize and not conceptualize, from behind that veil. The idea is resilient, though, because you can correct and stretch it without breaking it and making it useless. — J

I began to think that I was saying something not worth saying.

Not entirely fair. Rawls has all kinds of things to say about this, most famously his "Difference Principle": — J

Fair. I am not a Rawls reader, though I've done selections from A Theory of Justice.

From my perspective, though I haven't read what you recommended so this is off the cuff, is that it's very easy to accept economic differences when you're higher up, and not so easy when you're lower down. So even if we go with the veil of ignorance I suspect the people who roll snake-eyes will still feel bitter and want more out of life.

Another attempt after re-reading -- pick which is best to reply to, or ignore it all if it's just bad:

But this is, at most, an epistemic issue. The step further, that claims that essences themselves change, has to say that the water that carved out the Grand Canyon isn't the same water we see causing erosion today. I think there are a host of problems with that though, not least of which is "why should our ideas about things evolve in one way instead of any other if there is no actuality that is prior to our speech about things?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

"at most"? As if that were the lesser question? :D

I admit I'm more on the epistemic than metaphysical side of thinking.

I don't think matter changes with our ideas, at least not so far with what I know.

"The step further" is the one I wouldn't take -- it's possible, but not something we really know or can claim to know.

As the epicycles were once thought universal, so can our theory of water be thought universal, but mistaken in terms of meaning.

IDK, perhaps some of these can be ironed out but it certainly seems more intuitive to me that fire and water are, and remain, what they are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree there.

Nuh. Instead of worrying about meaning, worry about what folk do. I'm not asking folk to burn their book, just that they not to use it as an excuse for abominations. — Banno

BOOORRRRRINNNNNNNG! :D

Though I'm sympathetic here:

Do I discard the wisdom extracted over the millenia because you can show me it's not the perfect book? — Hanover

Reason can only go so far, after all. And I don't think @Hanover is using the book as an excuse for abominations, though I know many do.

pretty sure there's no discussion of that in either Theory of Justice or Political Liberalism. I'd have to reread both him and Nussbaum to have an educated opinion one way or the other. — J

Rawls is modern liberalism par excellence, if we take Keynes as his economic counter-part. The idea of justice includes classes of various kinds such that all the people, in the veil of ignorance, would agree to those classes before rolling the dice to find out which class they are in.

The big difficulty there is... well, whatever. I know i'm not a liberal. I agree with you that there's no discussion upon "just how low can the lower class go?", because he was not a member of the lower class.

Not exactly.

That is, we could use Kripke's lectern instead, and have the same discussion. — Banno

It might be better to use the lectern example than water example just to show what "necessity" and "essence" mean.

Where is that thread we talked about this in.... @Banno

IDK, perhaps some of these can be ironed out but it certainly seems more intuitive to me that fire and water are, and remain, what they are. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree that's intuitive.

It's what I assume in my thinking about matter from the past to now.

I also agree that if we had a fully worked out philosophy we could make the analogy between historical events and matter, but I'll admit I think the former claims on matter are a little more secure than claims about particular events.

The other question is, how could we be wrong in these sorts of cases if what a thing is depends on what we currently think of it? How can we discover that "fire is not phlogiston" if there is no such thing as fire outside of ideas like phlogiston theory? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because some scientist or researcher became obstinate about their theory and did what they could through the social structure to persuade others they were right after all.

Thinking through this question now -- Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is what I have in mind, but with a more materialist mindset which doesn't give into the notion that nature itself changes with the sciences.

I think if phlogiston had won the day then we'd be talking about how the caloric theory was wrong -- once we collectively accept a theory we can begin to discard thoughts that seem irrelevant and get to the work "at hand"

If all the scientists then had decided phlogiston is better they could have worked out the various difficulties with accepting that theory, in my mind. But this is a historical counter-factual.

But then in virtue of what do we speak of some enduring thing, "water," that changes over time as theories change — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think it's in virtue of the things our species relies upon water for -- drinking, cooking, bathing, etc.

"Water" is not a scientific term exactly.

But this is, at most, an epistemic issue. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, yes.

I tend to favor the epistemic side over the ontology side -- I understand it's basically a "player's choice", but it's my preference. On the reverse of "How do you know unless you start with what is?" is "How do you know what is unless you start with what you know?"

Another thing I'm tempted to say is a dialectical of some kind...

Yes, well that would be an interesting topic. Aristotle thinks that any piece of new knowledge that someone arrives at must be generated from things that they then knew better and still know better. That they then knew them better is vacuous, so the more interesting claim is that they still know them better. — Leontiskos

I'm beginning to think this is a dialectical point.

In a lot of ways I think of knowledge as the things I know are false -- don't do this, don't do that, this is false because, this is wrong cuz that...

Might be off topic to the original question, though.

Good to find some camaraderie though.

I think he is adamantly agreeing with you. — Banno

Whom?

Okay, great. And for Aristotelian essentialism this is taken for granted, namely that we can know water without knowing water fully, and that therefore future generations can improve on our understanding of water. None of that invalidates Aristotelian essentialism. It's actually baked in - crucially important for Aristotle who was emphatic in affirming the possibility of knowledge-growth. — Leontiskos

I agree, sir. :)

He's attractive for a reason. His ideas are amazing in their explicitness for the time he expressed them in. He attempts to move philosophy into the scientific realm by being an empiricist who prefers biology first and foremost, and observes the world around him in making generalizations according to his categories and causes. These are the things I'd like to emulate again in some sense, but maybe with less slavery.

Aristotle's a move which respects Plato, because the ideas are still important, but diverges from him -- at least in the sense of the schools -- because matter is part of the essence of a thing, rather thingthan the forms defining the essence of things.

***

My thoughts come from a place of loving reading Aristotle while thinking about what it all means today.

I'm not certain how to distinguish how I think yet, but one thing I've noticed is how Aristotle's move from the more certain to the less certain might not be the way I generate knowledge.

But the more plausible view is that Aristotle and Lavoisier were talking about the same thing, and that Lavoisier learned something about that thing that Aristotle did not know. I don't see why that view is so hard to entertain. Is there some reason that this view must be opposed? That Lavoisier could learn true things from prior scientists and nevertheless make contributions to the field? — Leontiskos

O goodness no. Just up front -- I think they both contributed to the field. I think they likely were talking about the same thing, as you said -- in rivers, lakes, oceans, and so forth.

And I think I agree here too -- so maybe I've said something that's in error or wrong there, but I can at least put it in writing I agree here :D

Nice.

Never thought we'd get this far in understanding one another.

I'll accept that I'm contradicting myself in three sentences, and not in an intentional manner. At the end of the conversation I prefer to figure out what is different between our perspectives -- as I said before it's the differences I value.

I get the idea that you must know what water is, necessarily, if your expressions are true.

Though perhaps I'm only frustrating you and we're talking past one another.

The first is extensionally transparent, the second, extensionally opaque, becasue the sentence "Water is necessarily H₂O" is within the scope of "We know that..."

Talk of real and nominal essences is a bit of a furphy. It's about scope. — Banno

Yeh, all this talk is a bit furphy, to be honest.

So by what you say -- the sentence believed is extensionally transparent, but the sentence about our belief is not?

One is about the extension of the sentence, the other has a wider scope.

The only problem I can think of is that we've only invented another epicycle, of sorts.

While I think the notion that nature changes a bit outlandish, I'm uncertain that our discoveries about the terms we've been using tell us what will and has been real.

I find the notion that nature changes outlandish, but I don't find the notion that our understandings of nature change outlandish -- so prior to Cavendish water was not H₂O, but after the next theorist of matter....

Oh, one more quote:

. The fact is that philosophy does not have any particular
guaranteed object of study; it is possible to think philosophically only
where thinking can go awry, where it is fallible.

I agree with that.

Also I think I'd add a cribbing from the Dao, but instead with respect to philosophy: You can do anything you want with it.

I liked his highlighting the concept of infinity changing between Kant and Hegel, and how Kant's notion is pretty clearly inspired by the calculus.

Then his harsh treatment of it in Hegel surprised me because -- well, there's something funny in Hegel where I get the sense that there is some twaddle sometimes, but it's hard to pinpoint where. So this was an interesting point to note how "infinity" became a bit of a looser concept and so could be applied to all sorts of things.

Interesting, though, how he wants to preserve infinity as a basis for understanding what a proper philosophy does -- that it is reaching for what it cannot have, as a mortal thinking mortal thoughts, though perhaps the reflection brings one closer to immortal thoughts. This by way of still differentiating philosophy proper from Leibenphilosophie, or idle chatter, or a philosophy of this or that, but while also laying it out in a dialectical pattern which doesn't grasp the positive -- it's mindblowing stuff because it's making sense to me in a way Hegel didn't really.
***

Where he describes an intellectual experience at first I thought he was speaking hypothetically until he gets to...

The contents of this
experience – and this too sounds highly nominalist – are identical
with the concept of experience as this is contrasted with deduction.
The contents of such experience provide no models for categories,
but they become relevant because they enable the new to show itself
– whereas the fl aw in the entire gamut of current empiricist trends is
the concept of intellectual experience 83
that, as a theory of cognition, empiricism seems to me to be unable
to allow for the possibility of an Other, of something new in principle

Which strikes me as something like, to use his latter example, is an aesthetic experience of the object, but instead towards intellectual ends.

There is something to this, though the example I'd reach for would not be Adorno-appropriate, because I think about how repetition of the same often brings out the different that was hard to spot initially.

Even so, there's something to that 'aha!" moment when you put two and two together about some object and make a correct inference not because of something you already knew about it but because you notice something new that you didn't have words for before. In which case I find myself nodding along with him a lot of the time with respect to salvaging empiricism through dialectical reflection.

I also like his reflection on art because I tend to believe that aesthetics is more than directed at art and has greater applicability to things like epistemology and ethics so while a painting is not an act, there's something to the generality of aesthetics that makes these principles applicable to thought. At the very least they're helpful avenues for exploring why we make inferences, from a philosophical rather than psychological perspective.

FWIW I kept going and finished LND 8. I really breezed through it because I found it very amenable, though I'll have more to say after it digests.

I found this quote, shortly after where you left off, hit me right. "Get out of my head!?!" type feeling:

If the method I am trying
to describe to you constantly tends towards micrology, in other
words to immerse itself in the minutest details, it does so not out of
philosophical pedantry, but precisely so as to strike a spark, and my
predilection for such matters is connected with factors such as these.
For in general the concept tends to magnify its objects; it perceives
in them only what is large enough to compare with other objects.

I also found his dismissal of Krug's quill off-putting. For me it's the perfect sort of example to reflect through Hegel's philosophy. If it can't derive the quill pen, then maybe it's not so universal after all. In which case "what is important" becomes a matter of the taste of the philosopher writing.

EDIT:Adding more quotes as I finish up --

You may well reply: then why
philosophize at all – and I can give you no answer to that.

:D

That made me smile, but his following remarks are actually interesting:

Nevertheless, if you feel such a need, it cannot be satisfi ed without an element
of confi dence in the possibility of a breakout. And this confi dence
itself is inseparable from the confi dent utopian belief that it ought
after all to be possible to obtain access to that which is not already
shaped in advance, staged or reifi ed. For this reason, I would maintain that Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘What we cannot speak about
we must pass over in silence’16 is the anti-philosophical statement par
excellence.

Considering Wittgenstein wanted to cure philosophers of doing philosophy I can see a certain truth there.

The task of philosophy, then – and I would like to fi nish today on
this programmatic note – is to concern itself with what is different
from itself, heterogeneous, and not with the attempt to import everything that exists into itself and its concepts. Its task is not to reduce
the entire world to a prefabricated system of categories, but rather
the opposite, viz. to hold itself open to whatever experience presents
itself to the mind. And I should like to say more about this concept
of experience and the altered relation towards infi nity in my next
lecture on Thursday

What a conclusion.

So, to break it down to simple bits --

This lecture is mostly about Adorno's project. He differentiates his project from Hegel's because of their closeness. The difference is in an interest in the non-conceptual. Other attempts have been made to "break out" towards the "dregs of the phenomenal world", namely Bergson and Husserl.

The problem with them is that they remain idealist, just like Hegel, so there is no breaking out. For Bergson he devolves everything to images, as from an individual subject, and for Husserl at the end of it all we have the basic logical categories. Both are idealistic, and after Auschwitz the world has no meaning, so this is untenable.

And he ends with some requirements for what this philosophy would do, and even notes how it is contradictory in itself. In a way I wonder if his anti-utopian stance means that negative dialectics will never reach the cognitive utopia he mentions.

But this certainly goes against the intuition that water was water millions of years ago, one which is supported by plenty of empirical evidence. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the underdetermination argument is what undermines this notion -- it's what I'd guess now, but it could be that we're reading patterns into the past that we accept now which are predictive and make sense, but so did the epicycles. Before Copernicus there was overwhelming evidence of the spheres having and will always being in existence.

Well then how in the heck are you getting to your conclusion that, "water was not H2O [at some point in the past]"? Do you have an argument for that claim? You seem to think that because Aristotle wasn't aware of H2O, or that because Aristotle was an essentialist, therefore your proposition is somehow made true. I don't see that you have offered any valid argument for your claim that water was not H2O (at some point in the past). — Leontiskos

Was Water H2O before Cavendish and Lavoisier?

De Dicto, no. There was no such language, so there was no such claim -- the thing, water, may have been H2O, but this isn't what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how we talk about essences, or more generally, how to get down to what's real, and whether or not science has much to say on that subject after all, and what is this water thing all about with reference to our philosophical meanderings.

Basically I see the work of scholars as generative -- before the work, nothing there, after the work, something there. This is generative of knowledge, though, not being. I am a realist for all this.

For Kripke this isn't a problem because we can come to find out necessities after the fact, so there's still a basis for laying out what an essence is -- an essence is what an individual has in all possible worlds.

But prior to the work of chemistry there wasn't really an individual "water" which we had some set of predicates for that held in all possible worlds, especially since "all possible worlds" wasn't used at the time.

Where Aristotle comes in as what appeared to be your account of essence, but your emphasis on his time and place seems to mean that what Aristotle means isn't as important to your account of essence. More or less since the account is vague we end up with arbitrarity where we can just sort of choose what counts as an essence and insist upon it -- the name could change to accommodate that particular thing as essence, or what-have-you. All it really amounts to is "This is what I've designated as the part that defines this individual" -- in this case let's just say "Water is necessarily H2O" is the sort of thing this essentialist believes.

So far I can grant a posteriori necessity,

But the essentialist you have in mind seems to believe that water is necessarily H2O, and it was necessarily H2O, and it will necessarily be H2O. For me I don't see the confidence in such a belief for the simple fact that we have changed our mind about water's essence before, so there's nothing stopping us from doing it again.

That the necessity holds a posteriori seems to allow updates to knowledge as we find out how wrong we were.

In a certain way then, things are most what they are when their intelligibility is grasped by a rational agent. For, over any given interval, a thing will only tend to manifest a small number of its properties — properties which make the thing "what it is." E.g., a given salt crystal over a given interval only interacts with one environment; all of its relational properties are not actualized. Yet in the mind of the rational agent who knows a thing well, a vast number of relational properties are brought together. If a thing "is what it does," then it is in the knowing mind that "what it does" is most fully actualized. And this is accomplished through syntax, which allows disparate relations to be combined, divided, and concatenated across time and space.

.....

I am reminded here that in Genesis God first speaks being into existence, but then presents being to Man to know and name himself. There is the being of things within infinite being, and then their unfolding in immanence, the two approaching each other (e.g. in the, admittedly suspect, idea of the "Omega Point"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does "are-ness" or "being" admit of degrees?

I'm close to agreeing with you where you say

So, rather than the relationship between knower and known being a sort of "less real" relationship, I would argue it is the most real relationship because it is a relationship where all of a things disparate properties given different environments can be brough together. And this is a relationship that is realized in history.

I don't think that the relationship is "less real" -- hence the grab-bag of ambiguous examples -- I just don't believe there are degrees of reality.

Though it being realized in history is something I'm sympathetic to, at least from a materialist perspective.

I liked it in sentence form :D

I think that I can make sense of the notion @Count Timothy von Icarus says -- I'm still chewing on it.


My immediate guess is it sounds like hylomorphism, which seems relevant to "Water is H2O" to me -- but I've encountered resistance here now: there's an updated essentialism that isn't Aristotle, but Aristotle-inspired.

I'm interested, though I suspect I know which way my thoughts will go.

"A property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists". — Banno

Nice. That's a very clear rendition.

* That thread was more appropriate to that forum than to this one. This forum struggles more with skepticism than certainty. — Leontiskos

On the contrary, I'd say the forum is not skeptical enough. ;)

I love this theory of Rock 'n Roll. Just the idea of digging down into the conceptual bits -- it's some good aesthetic reflection, which is rare to come across.

(Should I wait and allow people to catch up? Should we set a schedule from now on?) — Jamal

I plan on catching up tomorrow. So far lack of schedule has worked for me, but if you'd feel better with it I'm not opposed either.

No, not in the least.

I don't believe in essences, so I have to pick up someone else's beliefs in essences just to make sense of the notion. If his essentialism isn't the one being advocated for then by all means the example is off topic.

But then are we talking in terms of Kripke's essentialism? In which case what I've said ought to make sense -- if water is H2O then water is necessarily H2O a posteriori. I can go that far.

But that a posteriori bit is important, after all. It means that we discovered a necessary relationship between terms after the fact -- so before the fact (or perhaps later when we use a new way of talking about matter the necessity de-emphasizes) there was nothing to say there was an essence in the first place.

I'm using Aristotle because he's an essentialist, and his notion of essence seems to be the sort of thing essentialist have in mind -- so rather than setting up a character, The Essentialist, I'm using an essentialist to help clarify just what essentialism is.

If what Aristotle believed doesn't pertain to essentialism, then what's the difference between yourself and Aristotle's "essence"?

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O).
2. Water was not H2O before 19th century chemistry.
3. "Water" nor "H2O" "pick out" what water or H2O is. — Leontiskos

Er, but how are you disagreeing?

Again:

(2) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1a). And (3) does not contest (1); instead it contests (1b).
— Leontiskos

So:

P1. (2) does not contradict (1)
P2. (2) contradicts (1a)
P3. (3) does not contradict (1)
P4. (3) contradicts (1b)

If you disagree, then assign truth values to P1-P4. Be clear about what you are saying. If you say you disagree then apparently at least one of the truth values must be false. — Leontiskos

P1 is False. 2 counters the claim that water was always H2O -- in Aristotle's time, water was not H2O. Aristotle in particular stood against Democritus, so we even have reason to believe Aristotle would oppose the belief that water is always H2O. That's an atomistic belief.

De dicto, note. Not De re.

I understand that it was Cavendish, not Lavoisier, who first identified water as a compound (through experiments around 1781), though Lavoisier's chemical revolution helped fix the conceptual framework. — Banno

Yes, I stand corrected.

It occurred to me on looking again that there are two readings of what you wrote - the de re and the de dicto. The sentence ‘Water is H₂O’ was not something people could assert or know before Cavendish; the term "water" did not yet rigidly refer to H₂O. So if you were saying that the word "water" could not be used to refer to H₂O before Cavendish announced his work, I agree. — Banno

Yes! Bingo! de dicto is what I mean --

However, if the assertion is that prior to Cavendish's announcement, the chemical structure of water was not H₂O, it is I think in error. — Banno

There's a sense in which we can entertain the idea that matter itself changed, but I think it's an erroneous inference -- even if it were true there'd be no way for us to make that inference because we don't live in that time. We live in now. And what seems most consistent is that nature hasn't changed all that very much from then to now, in the sense that there are fewer hoops to jump through mentally to make an inference.

Note, though, that none of this is scientific. It'd be impossible to determine, scientifically, if the meaning of "water" in Aristotle's time excluded H2O as a possibility, which is where I think the sympathetic readings of Aristotle get headway: broadly accepting an Aristotelian framework while changing the details to match what we know now in a scientific spirit.

For myself I'd say that Aristotle is not a scientist in the modern sense -- this isn't to speak against his work as a scholar, only to note that first guesses will often be inadequate, even if they hold a certain spell to them. What's atractive in Aristotle is how it all seems to fit together into a harmonious whole -- but this is a siren's song more than a mark of wisdom, if you ask me.

It's entrancing, but doesn't really look like the world I see now. And I'm not sure how the methods of metaphysics in Aristotle are somehow better than latter methods of metaphysics -- it seems to me that this is very much in the realm of philosophy and philosophy alone, where the science is a grab-bag for examples of reflection, but not philosophy itself.

This to go back to my point with @Richard B -- that philosophy is not using science to give itself credibility, and it has no need to do so.

There's all sorts of complexities here. The foremost is that Kripke's "Water=H₂O" is intended only for extensional contexts. While Aristotle presumably believed fish live water, he doubtless did not believe that they live in H₂O.

We should head back to the topic at hand, which is "what is real". The idea seems to be that there is an essence, a "what makes a thing what it is", and that this is of use in deciding what is real and what isn't. Along with this goes the view that there really is a difference between what is real and what is not real, such that for any x, the question "is x real" has a firm "yes" or no"no" answer.

I think that view is mistaken, for reasons I gave earlier. And I think that view is quite common amongst philosophers - at least those who are alive. — Banno

We're in agreement here, for the most part and for what's worthwhile in the thread as points of contention.

there's a grab-bag of entities which don't have as firm an answer as we'd like -- dreams, halucinations, mistaken worldviews, historical counter-factuals, hypothetical examples...

We could certainly stipulate answers, though I tend to think "X is real" sounds like "X exists", and I'm still fairly well persuaded by Kant on that -- that there is no difference between the imagined unicorn and the real unicorn in terms of its predicates. The old "existence is not a predicate" thing, which isn't strictly true but it gets at something important about making inferences about existence -- in a lot of ways we treat reality like it's given. If whatever we conceptually designate as "the given" matches our conceptions of "the given" then we are inclined to say such and such exists.

Or to go along with Quine -- to be is to be the value of a variable. So it's not a predicate, but a quantifier over predicates. (EDIT: Or individuals? "Over" loosely meant)

Both seem to handle inferences about existence better than positing an essence, to my mind. Which part of water are we to call its essential part, after all? As you note, in Aristotle, the essential part was not that it is H2O. So why the switch? What makes this description a better example of essence, or is it at all?

But here are those amongst us who, bathing in the light of Plato and Aristotle, seek to reinvigorate metaphysics by bringing back the "what makes a thing what it is" version of essence. And that's pretty much were the argument here stands. — Banno

Funnily enough I kind of welcome the resurgence, as long as we take the historical approach. They really do have valuable things to offer a thinking mind, and points of comparison between ancient and modern science are deeply illuminating on the practice of producing knowledge.

It's their difference that I value, above all. I don't care of its true! :D

I'll leave this now, although I might come back to it and talk about water again.

Cheers.

Cheers!

That seem quite mistaken. And on either account of essence. — Banno

The only thing that comes to mind is that I'm anti-essence. But I'm glad to see that I've said false things cuz that's what leads to new thoughts.

I'm certain that your perspective is perfect for a counter-balance to mine, though.