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.

On the other side of things, I like to mention proton-pumps -- proton transfer is a big part of biochem, and the reason they work is cuz of quantum properties -- this event may not have transferred the proton, but the next one may not or will, and so on. The probability distribution of position/momentum is what makes the transfer happen.

(This especially with respect to the notion that D2O is H2O -- the extra weight of that neutron is what makes it deadly to us)

Heh, I wasn't, so thanks for highlighting what I ought focus on when I'm in the mood to focus fr fr.

I actually think you've ignored that sort of question over and over throughout this conversation. You are ignoring requests for clarity. — Leontiskos

M'kay.

I'll focus on those, though not today. I've been responding with my first thoughts rather than digging in. Sorry if that's distracting.

I think the essentialist would tend to say the concept of fire (the understanding in the mind actualized by fire being experienced through the senses) stays the same, but our intentions towards it are clarified. Fire hasn't changed, but our intellects have become more adequate to it, and towards its relationship with other things. The identity of water as H2O clarifies a whole host of relations between water and other things (the way water acts in the world), and it is through those interactions that things are epistemically accessible at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Fair.

Tho this gets a bit into some of my disagreements -- an essentialist has to have an idea of mind? Intentions, actualized understanding, experience through the senses?

A Jedi craves not these things. ;)

I suppose one challenge to the essentialist lies in pursuing the primacy of interaction into something like a process metaphysics, dissolving the thing-ness (substance) of water into processes. Yet this has its own difficulties. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeh, I'm not so keen on process metaphysics, though I ought to be given my stances.

What can I say? I just live in a world of confusion and questions. :D

Why? Klima's whole point is that what Lavoisier & co. discovered does not falsify what came before. That Lavoisier understood water better than Aristotle does not mean Aristotle had no understanding of water, or that Aristotle's understanding of water was false. — Leontiskos

Because Aristotle believed water to have a teleology which put it above Earth, and air above water, and fire above air. The reason water goes where it goes is because it's supposed to be -- it wants -- to sit atop earth.

At the time I think that's pretty much true -- how else to distinguish why the ocean sits on top of the land and we breath what's above the water and see the fire in the sky?

I agree that Lavoisier did not falsify Aristotle. I just don't think there's a better or worse understanding of water with respect to historical thinkers.

Today we'd say that Lavoisier had a "better" understanding than Aristotle, but tomorrow we may say the opposite if we find out teleology was right after all.

I disagree, but also I don't think it matters that I disagree because I clearly put them forward thinking them convincing :D

When they are not.

1a. The essentialist would say that the term “water” signified H2O before 19th century chemistry. — Leontiskos

I don't think that's what the essentialist would claim -- but I would claim that water was not H2O before Lavoisier. But this is a claim about meanings and how we understand things rather than the world. The essentialist would agree with me there, and the disagreement would be about true reference -- that when Aristotle described water without use of H2O he said true things about water which are no longer true today.

I like the example of a quarter because it takes it out of the realm of abstract science and into the realm of our everyday understanding.

I'd use Yahtzee and Pachinko interchangeably with that example.

All of them can be interpreted as being in a deterministic world -- where this very coin flip must be heads -- but that interpretation, so I think, is beyond our ability to judge things true or false.

Rather, we have some macroscopic events which behave in accord with probability. And also some microscopic ones that surprised us along the way.

Heh, maybe.

I don't think I'd be wise enough to be able to tell if indeterminism comes after determinism, or elsewise.

What I know is that you have to perform the experiment in order to find out the outcome -- much like a quarter.

There's no question it's deterministic — flannel jesus

Well, I for one have a question -- namely that it uses probablity and you have to do the experiment to find out which "world" you happen to be in.

I prefer the Copenhagen interpretation. No infinite worlds, but simply a probability in one world. But probability throws a wrench into the notion that every event is connected by necessity -- which is what I think of when I think of determinism.

If it's not relying upon the science then apparently Kripke would have made the exact same argument in 1700, before the science had occurred. Is that your claim? — Leontiskos

Seems a bit outlandish, so I certainly couldn't claim that.

But I'd put it in historicist terms -- we can imagine Kripke being transplanted to another time with different concepts being taken seriously, but really we couldn't claim what he'd claim at that time at all. He was in his time, and made the claims he did in his time.

Hrmm... if so then I've done so without meaning to.

I'm still committed to essentialism being 1.

1. The essentialist would be likely to say that water is H2O (or that water is always H2O). — Leontiskos

And I'd attribute a misunderstanding on my part of what you're looking for -- I thought I was cogently arguing for my point rather than it having three different meanings.

this conservation isn't about if its true. You expressed confusion about why people think many worlds is deterministic. Regardless of if it's true or not, you can hopefully be able to gain an understanding of why it's a deterministic world view. — flannel jesus

OK, got it.

I thought you were claiming it rather than saying there's a possible interpretation of the equation such that determinism is true.

It says it, but how do we know it's true?

Have you googled if it's deterministic? What does a bit of googling tell you? — flannel jesus

Heh, no. In school I solved the Schrodinger equation in the one and only case that it's analytic as an exercise -- one proton and one electron.

So rather than googling I'm drawing upon my studies from whenever ago. (and it might sound impressive, but really it's just a partial differential equation -- so if you know them maths you can solve it too)

a deterministic function is a function that gives the same output given the same input — flannel jesus

If so then sure it's deterministic, but with a probablistic mathematics which makes it such that you cannot tell what will necessarily happen.

Well, here the "is" is open to interpretation. D2O isn't called water; it's called heavy water, which is meant to remind us of the family connection with what we do call water. We can, and do, also call it deuterium, with no reference to "water" at all. The Kripkean approach is, I think, intended to help us distinguish between which "is" questions are about essences, or properties like "potability," and which are about uses of words. Another way of saying this: — J

Huh, that's interesting.

I'd be inclined to say "potability" is, in large parts, what people mean by "water", though not always. In a way this is just a choice on how to use "water", from my perspective. We can include D2O or exclude D2O insofar that we understand one another.

Which might put a spanner into Kripke. Point 1 about how "if water is H2O" -- it's not, if we include D2O, for instance. Unless we say that D2O is just a name for a variant of water, and it has 2 hydrogen molecules after all, with a little extra.

The Schrodinger equation is not deterministic, by my understanding -- unless probability distributions as events are somehow deterministic, but that seems to go against anything I understand of determinism.

You understand that the Schrödinger equation is deterministic tight? And that many worlds is just the idea that the Schrödinger equation continues to evolve the wave function with no collapse? — flannel jesus

I understand that it's not deterministic, but that's probably contributing to our misunderstandings.

Well, you can't, you see -- that's what I'm getting at. We can say these things, but there's no way of telling which is what -- why am I in the up and not the down universe? -- so the ontology is exploded beyond our ability to judge.

It's a point about how there are a posteriori necessary truths -- it doesn't say that water is H2O; it's not relying upon the science for its point. Only if water is H2O then it is necessarily H2O, and this was a process of discovery from terms we previously would not have associated with H2O.

I think I'd push against the notion that D2O is water, after all, because it's not potable. Basically the "D" is a lot more different from "H" even though the only difference is the addition of a neutron.