Must everything be black or white with you? I never said logic is a complete failure, only that it assumes a hermeticity not supported by its arguments. Newtonion mechanics doesn't account for relativity. It doesn't even quite cover conventional motions. The infinitesimal is dogmatically excluded. But what if the infinitesimal is the value meant to be determined? Similarly in logic, the assumption we share terms could never be valid if terms were universal, because meaning is intimacy. There is no universal teacher, though somehow I suspect you will contradict that. That's you prerogative, but it means we can never really speak at all. If only you understood your issue you would see what a tragedy that is for you. Differences in the terms we do share may seem infinitesimal and therefore negligible, but in fact, as Plato makes plain (if you read him) if that infinitesimal divergence between us is the moment we are recognized our opinion is untruth all terms alter of that moment so as to begin a more completely shared set of terms. That process of altering all terms infinitesimally cannot be limited by any prior conviction about our terms, and so must ultimately bring us into a more complete intimacy in our terms. And that intimacy is real only insofar as we mean to set each other free of our convictions. And that freedom entails a commitment to be dispossessed those term we do share. And that dispossession is experienced as "Platonism" in the sense you do go on about. And that is why those of us who actually read Plato describe Platonism as inverted Plato. BTW, my instructor studied with John Wilde and Raphael Demos, since you do like to cite any source other than the one in question.

Borrowed WiFi is not what it's cracked up to be! The sun is on my screen!

Factional support does not have to be standing immediately behind you, ask anyone ever subjected to sexism or racism. By the way, women are much more likely than men to be sexually assaulted, But men are more likely to have their sexuality assaulted. They say stand up to the bully, do they back down? Maybe so, but, I think, more likely to welcome you into the fold of sexists, than from fear. Intimidation does not require overt action. Just the knowledge of potentially assault or being ganged up on will do it, and does.

ou use words like belief and certain without knowing either their meanings or their significances. A belief is neither claim, grounds, or warrant, not an argument. It is just a belief, and as such you're welcome to yours. And certainty is with respect to the context, and certain therein. Confusion about these things is destructive of sense. — tim wood

A belief is much more than a personal opinion if there is convention backing it up. Convention can never prevail so broadly it is beyond question. And a factional convention cannot plea personal preference when those otherwise partisan to it are quite prepared to bully any who question it. That is, factional bullying scores no points singling out an opponent as just one opinion.

Well,

Well, if he knows that he knows nothing, then on one hand, what he knows must be true – otherwise he couldn’t know (wissen) it –, so he indeed knows nothing, but on the other hand, he knows at least something, namely that he knows nothing. That’s a contradiction. However, I’m (likely :wink:) so careful as to say only that it almost certainly is a contradiction. — Tristan L

I don't see the point in refuting all this. It just appeared as I posted the above.

My answer to the quoted passage here is that you're lack of familiarity with Plato is quite shocking, considering the extensiveness and pretense to authority of your postulations.

Over and over again, you make dogmatic claims like this one and many others without giving any justification (begrounding) or evidence whatsoever. It’s no wonder, though, that you haven’t given a right justification for your baseless accusing logic of lying, for a false claim cannot be rightly begrounded, and your claim is very, very likely false. — Tristan L

If my claim is dogmatic, why is it the most authoritative examples of the "law" of contradiction base their self-evidence on their quantifiers? As in "All A is B, some A is not B? The verb Is is a quantifier wherever it assigns hermetic membership. Have you been reading Heidegger? You couldn't pick a worse source for understanding Plato! Unless it is Aristotle! But, then, Heidegger gets his take on Plato from Aristotle.

As I see it, witcraft (logic) works perfectly and does the exact opposite of lying. It it what uncovers lies, as well as fallacies arising from imprecise, incomprehensible, swollen language without soothfast substance or meaning. — Tristan L

"As I see it" is not an argument. As I see it, you don't like to speak English. In logic 101 you might be expected to swallow the lesson uncritically. But you're gonna have to do better if you want expect to get past the first year. You don't even know what terms like "conjunction" and "disjunction" mean if you uncritically assume a category comprehensive hermetic and coherent between which one it is and its supposed membership, or how many it is. Is Apollo a category? Plato does a nice comparison between Achilles and Odysseus, in Lesser Hippias. Achilles cannot satisfy his ambition to define the category (valor or courage) because he is too abstract (outside it) to be a member of it. Odysseus cannot satisfy his ambition to be most completely of the category (cleverness and cammaraderie) because he was too central to it to have any membership to share it with. Between the extreme and the typical he sums up the enigma of category. You can't have an extrinsic definition and count its membership and you can't have a clear discernment of each member and still count them of an extrinsic defining principle. 1+1 doesn't equal 2 if 1 and 1 each is distinct, and you can't add 1+1 to get 2 if they are not distinct. Well, I know you disallow careful reasoning, but what I do find depressingly consistent is that you dismiss Plato wherever his own work conflicts with your notion of Platonism, and pay no heed to him at all otherwise.

Speaking English, eking is just getting by. This discussion is eking.

Making stuff up and calling it Platonic doesn't make it so. Nowhere does Plato raise anything to be taken as axiomatic. All must be examined and reexamined. Never ever does faith come into it, save perhaps, and only perhaps, his cock for Asclepius. And, no, not that cock. He may here and there appear to promote geometric patterns, but this is hardly what he means by forms, which Socrates repudiates even as he uses them on the way elsewhere. The central fact is the relation between personal character, responsiveness to cross-questioning, and asserted opinions. There is no opinion I have expressed I am not prepared to justify with Plato's own work. Why should I need any other?

Truth is not an aspiration, however inspiring that aspiration is to you!

Socrates doesn't say he knows nothing, he says he knows that he knows nothing. He is not unsure. Does being unsure have voice? Or does only knowing have voice? The voice of knowing is proving its terms not in our possession. The voice of being resolutely unsure is demanding those terms are in our possession. That distinguishes philosophy from faith.

As I asked above, what has logic to do with counting? — Tristan L

If you cannot be hermetically certain which one is which, assertion or negation, you cannot begin to count what constitutes the category either would otherwise define. And you cannot know which is which in any hermetic sense until you complete the count. Logic cannot outstrip its quantifier (save by lying to itself, which it does quite regularly and boldfaced). How many is one? There is no one until the enumeration is complete, and there is no beginning of the enumeration until we already know how many one is.

Another thing, we do not revert from nature to morality because religious law tells us what is moral, we suppress our natural impulses because we are equally motivated to be kind. As I said earlier, the moment of orgasm is the most intensely selfish thing we can engage in, but it is the opportunity for equally intense expressions of kindness that most motivates the act. And even where that kindness is just refraining from that act. It is religious coercion or commandment that makes us bullies and savages. And any moral system in which males become sexually incontinent without its support is morally immature.

The issue of freedom vs natural law is a red-herring. It came up because the Catholic church uses natural law to argue their way from conception to viability, but then switches to moral responsibility to support their proscription against birth-control, repudiating their natural law argument. And making hypocrites of themselves, but that's nothing new for them.

A little history,,, with apologies if these facts have come up already.

A guy by the name of George Whitefield came over from England to preach Luther/Calvin fire-and-brimstone to the colonies before the Revolution. At the time each colony had its own established church, and they did not cotton to mendicant preachers. So, he traveled the frontier just outside their reach, and in the process founded the Lutheran church, and promoted the idea of protecting the right of such preacher to challenge established churches. Jefferson became governor of Virginia in part with their support, newly called Lutheran or Baptist. And so he demanded the religion clause in the First Amendment, despite its glaring contradiction between individual faith and institutional authority. Which makes it very odd that it is the Baptists, or one branch of them, that is now demanding Christianity be established as the national faith.

Abortion was legal at the time of the nation's founding, but was outlawed later only because procedures were so primitive. Now, of course, it is one of the safest procedures in medicine.

In the early seventies a gathering of "evangelicals" (which I take to mean church leaders dedicated to the indoctrination of as many as possible--Catholics call it "spreading the faith") including, as I recall, the likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, to plan a strategy to support Nixon's "southern strategy". They had planned to make the issue divorce, but realized that that that horse had flown. So they latched onto abortion, which had never been an issue to then.

More hypocrisy.

Severing the connection between the unborn and its host is not murder. No more than disconnecting life-support from an otherwise non-viable adult. When the unborn becomes viable (something to be determined by science, not religious doctrine) the state can step in, if it chooses, but only once its equally fundamental obligation to the liberty of the mother is addressed.

Addendum,

Do I detect a Hobbesean view? That we are savages? That myth was created to rationalize the most atrocious oppression and dispossession. It is a colonization of the mind. The concept of obedience is tyrannical. I hope you realize Freud was a charlatan. The fact is, if given a wholesome context dissent is self-limiting. If not permitted to limit itself it is forced into subterranean rumblings that eventually cannot be limited. It is a bit of rebellion that has a real impact where it is given a chance to stand up to scrutiny of it that actually makes for real tranquillity. Autocrats, and to some extent all religious leaders are autocrats, want to count us, but don't want us to count. And a reasoned desire to count, and an avenue to be effective, makes for a just society. Commandments make us savages.

I think the point moot because there is a necessary distinction between what is deemed morality (mostly erroneously!) and law. For instance, how would you resolve a conflict between individual conscience and religious authority? Does a church have a right to enforce doctrine even upon its church members, let alone non-member employees? If a church member feels oppressed by the church leaders, she or he could leave the church, I suppose, but what if that member feels a moral duty to set the leadership right? On which side is the First Amendment then? And if the law is contradictory, doesn't it require revision?

Men are required to raise children who otherwise would be aborted too. — Gregory

That's just lame! How many single fathers are there? I think you'll find the numbers are a bit lop-sided on that one! And no one is required to raise a child, just to support one if married but separated or divorced. I think a paternity suit is possible, but a woman without a lot of money is out of luck, unless suing a rich father with the help of a pro-bono lawyer or a greedy one on spec. The state will step in without fault if the parents don't want the child or can't manage it. In any case, before the third trimester the foetus is not viable. If you insist a mother carry it for the first six months, until viability, just to clock into the era in which you claim obligation ticks in, doesn't your remark above seem disingenuous? As for the DNA argument, we drip the stuff all over the place, it's just not that precious. And if you just gave some thought to how life really develops you would see what a lame argument it is. Life develops most crucially by cell differentiation, and DNA can only regulate replication. And quite frankly I don't care. It's about liberty. not life. Child support is a civil matter, not state coercion. Child care is never mandated, and most single fathers are by accident or choice. And most single mothers are forced into it by the neglect of the state and the influences of bogus ideologues.

The reason to drop the quantifier is because it instills false belief. Also, it seems to disprove what is true. Isn't anything 'beyondly' immortal? Is man 'beyondly'? The law of the excluded middle is a basis for proof? Because you say so? Do you ever wonder why Plato spends so much effort on the subject of virtue? A careful reading shows it is because virtue is not to be subsumed into some quantifier. Doesn't A is B, in the sense you define it, mean A counts of B? If so, which does it say more about? B of A or A of B? If neither, which possesses which? And isn't possession the meaning of the count? And if neither really possesses the other, how do we know either but as the character in which each is not that possession? The character of its not being what the other is is what virtue is. That is, the act of being is dispossession. The category does not possess the predicate, it supplies a term for the differentiation of each through the dispossession of other from it. The trait is not what it counts, and the count is not what it is. You can convince yourself that the subject is fixed by predication, put in a bin where it will keep even when you go off elsewhere. But only by its departure do we come to question what the attribution of possession by the predicate really means. As I said early in this discussion, If the predicate is a member of its own category we can learn nothing of it from its other members, and if it is not, we can learn nothing of its members from it. Hence, the middle term (negation) cannot be excluded save by resorting to its count. You can count the cogs into the bin, but in doing we cannot know which one is which. Or we can identify each one, but then we cannot count them, because each one is only itself alone. You cannot get from identity to possession with the same sense of what number is. A cardinal number can operate as an identifier, but not a count. An ordinal number can operate as a counter, but not an identifier. If you cannot determine which one is which you cannot know what it is you've counted, if you know how many is counted, you cannot know what it is you've counted. Identity is differentiation of what would be counted the same. The count is the sameness of what would be counted differentiated. Analogy, the fundamental emergence of terms, is a comparison of similar differences. But difference can subsume sameness or possession only by its dispossession. I know it's a strain on the old noggin, but it's a kind of strain that teaches and emancipates.

Reckonil? Sounds like some sci-fi smart pill. I get it, though. You do understand, though, there is no such thing a a randomness generator? Presumably, what passes for one gives fodder to the pre-programed system for finding and assessing patterns. It's really not the gem you seem to suppose. We tried that for explaining evolution, but if the creature does not put the mutation to use, and mutate itself, as it were (something AI will never achieve), nothing can come of random changes that is not part of it's programming. I have a thesis about that, males and females of almost all species (including human) are equally inclined to cheat on their mates. But there is a difference. The male is trying to produce a separate species of his own genetics. The female is trying to diversify the gene-pool. Lamarck shows us how differentiation comes about without randomness, but in response to biological needs. In other words, to a great extent (much greater than geneticist would have us believe) life creates, designs, and programs itself.

Symbolic notation is used by logicians because they know it isn't really true. It's just about power. My question to them is, if you can't know which is which and yet count, and you can't count and yet know which is which, how many is 'one'?

If you've engaged in romance, or any of the other human activities I referred to, then you know full well that not sharing terms is pretty much the whole game. Being in sync is either gratitude for difference, or it is just loss.

Who's talking about responsibility? I thought the issue was access or prohibition. Under what circumstances are males denied liberty or required to sacrifice it for the sake of an other's life? It's not about morality or responsibility, it's a matter of legal requirement or proscription. Why should anyone have to look to government, not just for protection of liberty, but for permission to exercise it????

For a few seconds we can only be completely selfish, perhaps the most selfish possible. But that only means the rest of the time is an opportunity to be grateful, and kind. But why isn't the right to liberty as fundamental to a pregnant woman as the right to life is to all others? If the right to life is inalienable then execution is a violation of the founding authority of the state. A Jesuit religion instructor once explained the church's view about prophylactics, claiming that it interrupts the natural process. This he promoted as a conclusive argument because the reason the church opposes early stage abortion is that only the natural process of development distinguishes the zygote from the embryo and foetus, and that the person is already fixed into development upon conception. Well, that being as may be, if a prophylactic is as much an interruption of the natural process, and therefore not permissible, what about other natural processes, like an irresistible sexual urge? Shouldn't we engage in sex wherever and whenever nature calls? Remember, this is church doctrine! But there really is no justification for requiring a woman to sacrifice liberty for the unborn any more than the state can require someone to run into a burning building or dive into the sea to rescue another. The same instructor informed the class that in the case of a pregnant woman with a pregnancy that can only come to term at the cost of her life, or of the foetus, then she must sacrifice her life to give birth. You see, the mother has lived and been baptized, and so may go to heaven, but the unborn is unbaptized.The issue isn't the person-hood of the foetus, but the motherhood of the woman, and the collection of souls to send hereafter in good shape for whatever mystical fate their god is imagined to have in store. It's sort of a numbers game, the more souls shipped into paradise the better, so long as the church can get at them first. And life doesn't really mean anything but the ability of the church to arrange its style of passage from it.

Could'a fooled me! Damascious seems to have eluded my notice, though I'm sure I've come across something of him somewhere, I make a pretty thorough overview of the literature. All the signs of rationalism as I understand it. Certainly not Platonic. In Timaeus (and elsewhere), Plato horses around with divine design, but a careful reading will show he is ridiculing it. Athens defeats Atlantis because it, Athens, is embedded in a dialectic of loss and response to it that ultimately causes it to be stronger than divinely governed Atlantis, which saps its strength in the ritual repetition and preservation of received forms. In the end the gods erase themselves from being altogether. As they are about to announce their verdict upon the world they vanish,,,. This sort of thing is how Plato intimates his real meaning. Few if any catch it, and suppose he means to order the world by triangles and circles.

What you are experiencing is that time in incalculable worth. And that the dialectical engagement of honest and competent reasoners, forced to quantify the world by the strictures of reason, but always necessarily from an unjustifiably assumed axiom, helping each other escape their conviction in that unjustified axiom simply by being of an alternative opinion of what they mean. The rational reduction of that difference of perceived terms to the least term of that difference brings us to a complementary contrariety to the convictions we both share, and so alter all terms antecedent to that complement we are to it. In this way we recognize the loss of the continuity in our convictions we find ourselves contrary to in a kind of community in contrariety against that conviction, and yet distinguish each other as much contrary to each other as contrary to that conviction lost to us, and emancipated us from, as the moment of our being reduced that loss to its lest term. It's a sort of quantum moment of ideas. But reduced loss to its least term we not only suffer the loss as the healing term of conviction, or emancipating us from conviction, but in being complement to each other and yet contrary to each other in that therapy of emancipation, we perceive the quality of reasoning we each bring to the drama of it that we would never have a chance of perceiving if we were simply meant to agree. That perception is impossible if the universe is divinely or mathematically/geometrically ordered. And, if the dialectic is permitted to recur, there can be no limit to our recognizing each other as complete and distinct individuals, yet partners at every turn and return in that intimation of the worth of that therapeutic moment. That is, intimated that participation in the defeat of conviction, there can be no limit to our knowing each other subterranean to what at any duration reason is between conviction and its loss, and so intimated who we really are completely. The completest term time is that growing moment that dialectic is. Time is the intimation of the moment of its incalculable worth. And we are its most articulate term. But if god or number intrude, that intimation dies, and all is loss.

[Why do I keep getting notifications about your posts hours after I have already responded?]

Aristotle illustrates your point by saying:

Socrates is a man
All men are Mortal
Therefore:
Socrates is mortal.
I assume you subscribe to this. But, ever ask why the quantifier? Does "is" need a quantifier to be determinant? If Aristotle thinks so, and Kant thinks so, why can't you at least entertain the possibility I have a legitimate area of inquiry? If "is" is the qualifier between subject and predicate, and not a quantifier, as analysts (like yourself?) would have it, then there simply is no rational basis for treating it like some fantasized Venn diagram! These dogmatic shifts are a crime against mind, not a discovery of its law. I do understand the glee with which "rationalists" must relish their newfound place the real power systems of the world "technology" lets them feel (though a computer, for all its utility, is nothing more than an automatic - not autonomous - filing system!). But this is no excuse for neglecting its proper role of reasoned dissension from such systems. When the hell did philosophy become the vigilante of uniformity in ideas?!!!! Drop the quantifiers ("a" and "all') and the "deduction" falls to pieces.

George is like Sam.
Sam is vain.
Therefore, George is vain?????

Spoken like Zeno, Parmenides' shill. Both your comments are question begging. The law of contradiction does not prove itself. I've said over and over, reason must be convicted of the continuity of terms to begin its reductive process, but cannot prove this conviction. And so suffers dynamism to it, from which its terms ultimately emerge and grow. You are taking your conclusion as axiomatic. Taking what you find as what you were looking for, because it comes to your mind. A subject "is" a predicate? What do you mean? You seem to be taking predication as certifiable assertion of coherent belonging of a hermetic class. But that is not what "is" is, not what predication is. Predication is an assertion that a subject has something of the character of a predicate, not that it is a hermetic and finite pigeon hole rigidly fixed and secured the subject said to be something of it. A is something like B, B is something like C, does not in the slightest mean that A is anything at all like C. Take it any further than that and you are doing dogma, not philosophy. Philosophy is not science. Only a dogmatist could say it is. What do they teach in schools these days!? Language is a human artifact, not a machine determining reality. Thinking we ever completely sync on the meaning of terms or even the forms of reason is laughable, any more than it is reasonable to suppose we experience anything at all in perfect sync. We can pretend to adhere to scientific definitions, but who defined them when there was no science, but pretty effective language? First we have to recognize a separate mind, and a desire to be less separate, and yet not fall thrall to what we do share. We are constantly struggling with our own internal tendency to become enthralled into our definitions, and set each other free only where we do achieve some degree of recognition we are not in sync in them. And that recognition is how language comes into being and grows. Your prejudice toward the hermetic proposition puts the brakes on that dynamism, and ultimately puts you out of sync with all humanity save those few sorry dogmatists you probably hooked up with in a classroom somewhere. There ought to a period of purgation from such "learning" in which we are taught to forget it all, and to think instead of applying rules. Have you ever watched a kid learn to talk? Ever had a romance? Ever had a fight with your boss, or an encounter with the law? If any of these, and so much more, it is hard to see you still believing in the excluded middle. Kant agrees with me, if you don't. More recently, of course, it is hard to find such honesty.

Maybe take a peek at Satanism and Witchcraft, by Jules Michelet.

Does the First Amendment protect religious liberty, or religious authority? Is it really a proper function of government to support the imposition of doctrine even upon church members, let alone non-member employeses?

An end of metaphysics? Don't think so! If Kant weren't full of holes Hegel would not have had anything to add. The epistemic and the formal are incoherent to each other. A useful lie is required to convince us they are. Between opposites, between an assertion and its negation, we need absolute certitude which is which in order to extend the proposition one or the other is. But that extension alters the completeness, if any, of what we had been resolutely convinced of between them. In a determinate world there is no subjunctive. If there's any if about it there is no if about it. If there is no if about it it's all pretty iffy. To attribute anything "solid" to Kant is just vacuous! But even in his Critique, with his square of opposition, he demonstrates his inability to support the excluded middle as an a priori law of reason. If we have to add a quantifier to make it so, that excludes any coherence between the rational and the real. We cannot know which one we mean and count up how many it is, or count up how many anything is and still know which one it is, except by providing ourselves with a useful lie about them.

Pato's semantics appears in the Craytalus. There he compares onomatopeoia to etymology as sources of significations of terms. As usual, of course, the answer is neither/nor, not either/or. Interestingly, sociologists have found that there is no such thing as a primitive language. That is, every language in the world is capable of the rational structures required to imagine the construction of a machine or "determinative" language. The implication is that language is always born full-grown. Compare this to a restoration of sight in one eye in a person that always had sight in the other. They do not acquire 3D vision immediately, It might take months. Clearly, the autonomous mind must first construct the autonomic apparatus to support the new faculty. Reports from those who experience this are that the faculty does not emerge gradually, but pops into being suddenly and complete.

What if the apparatus reported the color of the photon then receives another photon exactly 180 degrees out of phase with the first? What then? Does the first report vanish? I think you'll find it does. When matter interferes with itself, where the hell does it go? I'm reminded of a phenomenon in which an inaudible sound becomes distinctly audible when surrounded by white noise. But what are we really hearing? What if the apparent determinacy of the universe is white noise? And what is that term anyways? Deter-minacy? Certitude, or resistance? Or is a word never play?

Free will again! Freedom is not a possession, it is a willing dispossession. The transformation of terms is not something we try to impose on each other, it is an urge to greater rigor we need from each other.

For a hundred years or so we have known that reality, at the micro and cosmic scale, is fundamentally ambiguous. It is only in the interim that it is possible to perceive only disambiguation as real. But that disambiguation begins and ends in a moment transformed of all terms and forms throughout. Reality is chaos. A chaos that energetically engages in a moment of contrariety complementary to the failure of the contradictory to disambiguate anything. But it is only the contradictory that can be observed. That is, only the elimination of the complement to it that contrariety always is. That elimination is risked as the opportunity of that moment so reduced that elimination that nothing remains within the ends of time. Duration and purpose are expedients to the recognition of the worth of the chaos unrecognizable within that duration of disambiguation. But if this is what is real, and we have more evidence for this than for the perfection of a hermetic or machine language, then the ends of any duration is that last term of elimination proved there is nothing within at all, and so engendering moment opportune of being transformed all terms within it. That moment is the only ends of time. Free will is the drama of the need of rigor we can only get from the excluded term ambiguity is and the rigorous reduction of that process of exclusion ultimately proved nothing within it. The moment that the ends of time reality is is the least term of that reduction recognition of that absence or departure is. The worth of the departed is that moment of recognition. The more rigorous that least term the more it is truer than the rigor found it. That is, the least term of time is all the differing it is. And language is most the opportunity of that least term, and therefore most the opportunity of the articulation of its worth, and of what worth is. Person is the lest term of time, and therefore the most completed articulation of its worth. The duration of its disambiguation is the rigor of its final term, but not its truth. That truth can never be a process of elimination or disambiguation.

For at least a hundred thousand years people have been talking. It is utter arrogance to suppose we are suddenly, by ignoring what we have learned only recently, going to perfect its mission of articulating the worth of time. If that articulation is the mission of the word, then it can never be alone or hermetic. The only possible meaning to a hermetic or 'determinant' language is either to supplant humanity with machines, or to create some sort of Ubermensch.

First of all, in Plato's time the engine of language was the abstract character of gods and heroes. Not that these were real entities active in the world, but that they were themes forming a context for all terms. It is impossible, therefore, to derive Platonism, as a dehumanized system of sign, from Plato.

Does one plus one equal two? Do we even know what we mean by this? One one must be squinted at from a very strange angle to be seen as different from the other, and then, from an even stranger angle, to be seen as the same, and then we must convince ourselves that the two squinting angles belong to the same universe, and that that belonging is more what reality is than either the unique realness of either one or the belonging together as one the two we suppose they add up to. Someone spoke of angstroms, as a determinant of spectral terms. But if you shoot two photons at a target they are more likely to add up to zero photons as one, and are never two, because of the quantum states possible for the electron they hit. And how the hell does this whole discussion get around the accusation that it falsifies itself by so clearly trying to prove its assumption rather than critiquing it? That is, is the notion under discussion proscribed its falsification? If so, isn't it programmatic rather than inquiry? Dogma? And, if so, who is anyone engaged in it to say that ordinary language is somehow subordinate to techno-babble? It's one thing to convince our machines of this, after all, they otherwise would fail. But if the programmer believes this, really and sincerely, his personal life must really be crap!

Plato had a number of critical things to say about poetry, mainly that it murders the living drama of language, but the analysts take this to such an extent that it is impossible to expect anything to come of it at all, but noise and counter noise, or like photons out of phase. Even bad poetry gets remembered, and science, unlike philosophy, has a very short memory for dead ends like positivism. Ever wonder about this? What scientists are remembered for getting nothing right? But every damn dogmatist in philosophy gets a place on the shelves, where the best thing for them is to gather dust there.

Yes, it is possible convince yourself it is possible to create what you call a "determinate" language, but it is demonstrably false to suppose that is what language is. Language is sharing meaning. Idle talk is more what language is than scientifically rigorous definitions. The point is participating in the capacity of words to share in all modes possible, not just scientific and/or instrumental reason.

seeing red
am I blue
green energy
raining on my parade
on cloud nine

I'm warming to the contrast between autonomic and autonomous systems. The autonomic does not respond to real changes, and if reality is rigor interrupting the continuity of such a system, then whatever rational rigor is regulating it is inadequately rigorous. The autonomous system must then intercede, even though this temporarily abandons rigor altogether. And therein lies the only honest objection. That is, some are so convicted in the adequacy of rational rigor that the changes required to complete it are endlessly deferred. Yes, it is quite right to claim that introducing discontinuity to a rational system disrupts its rigor. And that the result, in itself, can never quite recover it. But in a contrariety as complementary between us as to those separate autonomic systems we each bring to the issue at hand, rigor gets reintroduced to the autonomic reasoning we each alone are, but alters the terms of that reinvigorated rigor in the character of those terms that complementary contrariety we each bring to the inadequate terms of reason we otherwise are isolated and alone in. Of course the interruption of autonomic reason is in some sense abandoned rigor. Emotions are never the whole story, they are always an interruption to, and not an end or concluding term in themselves. And within our mostly isolated and personal effort to secure rational terms rationally continuous to a valid conclusion, we can only suffer that recognition of the inadequacy of reason as variations in the character of our conviction in it. As Plato shows us time and time again, reason begins and ends in bewilderment. A bewilderment most often introduced to us by a recognition that the convictions we think we express are not convictions we are heard to. Such bewilderment has no possible navigation, because it is lost its conviction in the continuity of its terms. Mind flails about for a navigator. Anything, anything at all, that seems to sign a way gets glomed onto as a welcoming gesture, as if from reality itself. As we navigate by this 'welcome-sign' our conviction broadens and deepens in a kind of ritual of initiation. As that conviction motivates utterance we shift from initiation to discourse, and with a sense of being in some sense aligned with others we engage in the construction of an edifice of terms, But edification has its limits, we begin to feel the inadequacy of them as an isolating ennui or boredom, a disinclination to engage. This triggers a vague suspicion that there is some source of the inadequacy of our conviction. But the search for it fails, if we are honest and competent in it. Ultimately we drop out of the system of navigation that we thought had welcomed us. We become the stranger to our own terms. Bewilderment looms. And every step of the way is rigorous! But, regardless of the treacherous trap any rationally autonomic system is, all its terms suffer revision in the character of the complementary contrariety to it we each bring to the moment of that bewilderment. That character of the terms of reason we are is a kind community of opposition to, and yet strictly distinguished each other in. So, of course, the ends of reason is (singular, the ends of reason can only be singular, while the ends of time is difference) emotion, and, of course, emotion is in some sense abandoned reason. But it is also a drama introduced our separate and isolated autonomic systems of conviction to terms we bring to it in an equal but opposite sense. Thus the limits of reason, together and each alone, gets nibbled away at the inadequacy of terms and forms reason always is. There are, of course, a myriad of strategies (many demonstrated in these discussions) to keep this drama from having the impact upon the conduct of mind it deserves, the most effective is the zealous effort to reduce its final term of bewilderment to a negligible infinitesimal. But if that infinitesimal variation is really how reason is reborn in its capacity for rigor, then there can be no limit to its being the truer completion of reason and the engine of the terms by which our knowing and understanding ourselves and each is most real.

Who says? I mean, which character, and where does Socrates take the discussion from there? In Phaedo, Socrates is spending his final hour doing what he thinks is most important, critiquing ideas. He is also reassuring his friends by offering reasons not to fer death, and offering them a chance to show him how much they have learned from him by refuting him. Phaedo himself isn't buying and grieves. Plato, of course, is too sickened to even show. It is absurd, of course, to be afraid of being dead. But we do fear dying because it is too real, and what we most fear is being real. That fear is why we accept as axiomatic what we fear is just not in us to critique.

Political language is a case where we have no opportunity to respond to and to prompt a response from a speaker determined to create an impression their words imply but do not guarantee. An example, what is JFK saying in "Ask not what your country can do for you!" Who can say this is not a 'dog whistle' promise to the south that he would not move aggressively against Jim Crow?

If reason is reductive the relation between 'axiom' or idea and individual real things, participant to it, is purgative. The question is, is it purgative of the particular from the general, or of the general from the particular? My favorite analogy is to ask 'Which one of us is us?' If "us" is some real thing of which each is an inadequate or fraudulent example, the purge is of each. If "us" is just a trope by which we know ourselves, each other, and the category itself by proving to each other it is not who we are. And if that proof is a community in contrariety, as contrary between us as together in a complementary contrariety to the category, then not only do we get to know "us" and what "us" really is in differing from it, but we really do get to know ourselves and each other in the drama of that contrariety. If the purge goes the wrong way, expelling the person and conserving the conventional term, it can only mean to enslave. If the right way, we die in a world we can recognize, but more completely know ourselves because of this. Note, complement with an 'e', not an 'i'.

For Plato, an extrinsic teleology, where the materials composing a body whilst necessary may not be sufficient for the body to act in a certain way. What is needed is an external Form of the Good in order to give the body purpose and reason (ie, the self-evident) — RussellA

Where in Plato does he say this? Where does he claim the telos as the source of or navigator to truth? What is purpose? Propositum. Enduring time proscribed of change. Dur-ation. This is Husserl, not Plato. The epochal.

Aristotle emerged from Plato's lecture on the Good saying he didn't understand it. That's because, like all the contributors here, he reads the words and fails to hear the speakers, or speaks to them and fails to notice the wry looks of the listeners (readers). If words can never quite mean what both speaker and respondent suppose, then what is the good is not an abstraction or an externality, but the central issue to all we do and say and think.

I'm reminded of an episode of Dr Who in which the Doctor visits a planet where monks perform calculations so sensitive computers would decompose if fed them. There is something that reason gets us almost all the way to, but never quite reaches, the last little bit is all too human. Yes it's incorrect, but it's where reason begins and ends. If you trace "Platonism" through Aristotle, and then into the Christian era it's hard to miss how it solidified as dogma, through Origen, Proclus and so on, and smoothly transitioned from superstition to science while preserving the same terms and basic themes of what language is. I once visited the library of my sister's (Catholic) high school and went straight to the philosophy section. Just two books, Augustine, and Aquinas. What is most telling is how the medieval ages transitioned from murky Platonic theology to an incipient science always in religious/Platonic terms. Perhaps the worst of all is Calvin, basing an individual connection to god upon the idea that the human is the conduit through which divine order is imposed upon a corrupt and evil world. The individuality derived from the Early Christian era was meant to so strip each of us of the perfect companionship we all crave. This, of course, to render us vulnerable to the claim that only a god, or perfect abstraction, can supply that deficit. Of course, it is not a deficit at all, it is a promise we tacitly make to ourselves and each other to realize freedom by articulating what worth and value is in the freedom we need in each other. The abstract perfection of language in some machine data flow or logical gobbledygook is just the latest mode of an ancient system of enslaving those subordinated to a minority of elites. But for all that it is a very human tendency, especially the part where it is ignorant of its real motive. The religion, the telos, that is, is to make people understand what you say and think in that ignorance of being even more appallingly human in the effort to dehumanize yourself.

How dense can we be? Language is not in isolation. A speaker is never alone in the act of it. Language is as much listening as speaking. It is not about the freedom of the speaker, it is about the freedom the speaker needs in the listener. The biases relentlessly clung to in all these comments entail a subterranean urge to isolate language from that need, and therefore from that freedom. It is therefore vacuous to appeal to it. Nothing is spoken without the possibility of a free listener. No word is binding without that need that it not be. Otherwise we are just talking to ourselves, and ultimately in gibberish.

Plato, in Gorgias, shows the sophist that the idea is a comparison of contraries. The doctor is unlike the cook similarly to the way the personal trainer differs from the tailor. The substance of ideas, analogy, is not a positive content. It is absence. The verb to be is either, and at best, a vague abstraction of an evaluation, or, at worst, the universal quantifier, applying to nothing real. We never see a real verb in logic, because a real valuation of the character in which a subject "is" a predicate can never serve as antecedent to a valid inference. To get that inference we need an artificial language. And then to declare it somehow more real. The elaborate preparations we have to do to natural materials to get them to behave according to theory should be a clue. And then talk about freedom?

If A were B and B were C, it might almost, if you squint at it kind of sideways, be possible to infer that A is C. But it is far more real to formulate it A is B-ish, and B is C-ish. But this would mean, and ordinarily does, that A is C is BS-ish. Look, I am not saying that logic is completely vacuous, but only that meanings rigidly defined and guarded from normal abrasive action among speakers and listeners must ultimately become incoherent or adapt to the need of the speaker that the listener be free. Speaking is not pure act. It is neither active nor passive, it is the act of being in need of the freedom of its listener. Where it "purifies" itself of that need it is not made itself free, it is made itself vacuous. The act of being that need and the response in the listener of responsibility that the worth of the need be recognized is a dialectical circle that, recurring from voice to voice, is an evolution of terms shared more by difference than agreement, and more real than arrogated unilateral and private freedom, and more coherent than any highly refined symbolic or artificial language.

How much difference must there be to be like grains of sand in a Rolex? How much deviation does there have to be from the continuity of the causal nexus? If reason can never really close the deal, as we know matter does not, even in the face of the most exhaustive preparation, and certainly not life, then doesn't reason desperately need emotions to bring some sort of coherence to its convictions? Of course this is not in itself truth. But it does mitigate the pure unilateral cruelty logical forms would lock us into, and the dialectical circle of act of needing each other free and response of responsibility that the worth of that need be recognized not only mitigates the rational missteps of its emotional ingredient, but completes the circle that never quite closes around reason on its own merits. For in this sense reason has no merit, no worth, alone. Where reality differs from theory or presumed law, however infinitesimally, the incoherence of that theory or law is complete, and nothing, no amount of tweaking the law, can rescue reason from its lost conviction and overwhelming incoherence.

Perhaps you all think I am the one who is incoherent, but when the koan sinks in, as it were, nothing will be the same. And sameness will be a tremendous burden, not a light in the dark. There is no synthetic term. Reason really is reductive only, and the antecedent term thought to be its origin and continuity really is just conviction. We can forever forestall the moment of recognizing that that continuity is become incoherent simply by dogmatically believing the infinitesimal divides infinitely. But in doing so you become an impediment to the future for all of us. And, because each of us is that infinitesimal through which that future is most articulately broken through that conviction, that impedance not only cruelly denies that future to the rest of us, it denies that freedom in you the rest of us need in you if reason, as well as human life and society, is to be coherent and free.

Subatomic particles are not semantic. Quantum values are not numerical. But there is no ambiguity to them either. They are quite decisively neither/nor rather than either/or. Because being decisively neither/nor is more real. It is what reality is. The search for disambiguation is merely a temporary expedient. It is a treacherous prize. There simply is no possible justification for a conviction two minds think the same. Ideas are generated from a comparison of differences. What in its nature is difference can never be characterized by sameness. "I met a man upon a stair, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish the man would go away." You're all grasping at what isn't there, and means not to be. In Plato's Lysis he shows us the way to be the friend is not to be the friendship, and meaning not to be. Meaning to be, thinking you know what you mean, let alone thinking you know what I mean, is a mug's game.

The Shape of Contrariety — Tristan L

Whah??? Whatever you mean by this shape, the point is, if there is no there there there is no shape to it. Plato was not a Pythagorean, and Socrates violated the most sacred secret tenet of that cult, in Meno. So why impute geometry to him?

I should have distinguished between the two types of indeterminism, semantic indeterminism (SI) and metaphysical indeterminism (MI). — RussellA

Nuh-uh! The more pertinent indeterminism is syntax. Syntax is not intrinsically valid a priori without quantifiers. And number is not real at all. It is a medium by which the qualifier is recognizable as the limit of the enumerator and the calculus of that enumeration. Reason requires conviction in some system of quantification, but its limit is that there is nothing within it that identifies what it counts. Because of this it is not possible to sustain that conviction without suffering variance in the character of it. That variance is emotion. The discipline we each bring to that conviction, and the variances in it we urge in each other, reveal to each other the personal character of that discipline, and so identify the person we each are ti each other and supply, in that recognition, the terms by which we understand ourselves and recognize what is real and what reality is. Person cannot be revealed in the quantifier. Only at the limit of that count, where is recognizable its presumptive issue is not within it, is person real. There can be no structural terms that govern that recognition. Only the worthiness of the character of person it is names it. That worthiness to which we supply the terms of recognition to each other is, in terms of the count, a kind of absence, a departure from conviction. That departure is what we call truth. Only departed is it complete, and so comprehensive. Logic simply has no terms to identify it. That is why logic can only be valid or invalid, never true. And most surely not what truth is. The venue of truth is dialectical, not analytic.

Thank you for taking a different view of Plato.

I'd have to dig back into the text, but at the beginning of Laws, he reiterates the view often stated throughout his works that the engine of reason is what is usually translated "shame". The Greek is 'aischron'. What is more likely is that it is a recognition of the pathology of conviction. Conviction is indispensable to reason, to logic (which Plato pointedly avoided formalizing and Aristotle pointedly avoided learning why) but, since reason is reductive, no synthetic term can validly be produced. Because of this reason is limited to what can be learned from applying rigor to an unwarranted conviction. In aid of this it is necessary to look for differences of that pathology of the terms of reason antecedent to its process. Under dialectical examination this pathology must become recognizable, though all too often we attribute it to our interlocutor. When we recognize our responsibility in it we might be ready to accept the cure. Altered views. And, ultimately, a fair recognition of the limits of reason itself, limits that can only be realized through the discipline of the pathology of reason itself. There is no contradiction in this. But there is contrariety. Contrariety in the community we become in pursuit of a warranted realization, not only of the proper discipline of reason, but of its pathological need of conviction in its starting point. But the language of that recognition is the personal discipline we each bring to that dialectical process. We cannot engage in reason without suffering waxing and waning moments in that conviction. That dramatic evolution of conviction is so personal we may never recognize any meaning in it, we are so limited to rational devices in our attempt to conserve the antecedent term we know is indispensable to it, but, carried on in competence, discipline, and honesty, we must at last recognize we are not alone in the evolving terms of our convictions, though there is never a moment we are not in contrariety to each other in them.

In Laws, Plato does seem to apply the Pythagorean conviction that reality is "geometric". But at the very end, if only we are not exhausted by then, he recognizes that that geometric/quantifying view is inadequate to the matter. It is personal qualities that clinch our recognition of what reality is. That is why Plato so consistently focuses all his discourse on the dynamics of human character, and under the trope of recognizing the pathology of opinions and accepting the cure.

Not sure of spelling, but try wiki-ing Cathcar.

?

? — Tristan L

Contrariety. When all is said and done the contrary term is the engine of the real. A careful reading would inform you that I said this and carefully explained it. I know it's a strain on the little noggin,,,

I think somewhere on this thread it was asserted, by someone other than myself, that reason is reductive. Is that reduction Ockham's Razor, or more like a sorites? Or maybe something like what is called, in Plato's Statesman, the 'division of being'? For instance, is nothing actually blue what blueness is? As I said earlier (I hate repeating myself!) if the idea is a member of its category it cannot be used to define the other members, and if it is not its membership cannot be used to define it. It is an insuperable contradiction at the heart of all terms, even structural terms needed to produce a logic. But if reason is reductive, then where is the abstract in the concrete reality it means to explicate and supply the terms for required rational inference? Are there any blue things if everything blue is not what blueness is? (By the way, a photon and an electron, and probably all subatomic particles, are "clouds" of probability. Is the idea itself a cloud? What then "cloudhood?) If every blue thing is determinately not what blueness is, how do we establish what this means? Reductively? By eliminating each blue thing from the idea one at a time? What does time even mean if you can never really get to it? But of course we can't! Because it is never there that the reduction begins or ends. It is not either/or, but neither/nor. There simply is no sense in which any blue thing is either what blueness is or not. It is always neither what blueness is nor not so. And so we reduce or eliminate the idea of every participant in it, until there simply is nothing left. The moment of that finding can be fended off eternally if we simply believe in infinity, even though we know there is no real infinity, that matter is not infinitely divisible and, that it is a contradictory concept. So, when all is said and done, what remains? What remains is the character of neither/nor a commitment to the continuity of terms necessitates and that each participant in the idea is neither the idea itself nor not. In that character of each decisive elimination from the idea each participant in it is the idea is most coherently and comprehensively neither what it really is nor not. If the origin of terms is neither/nor, but the reductive mechanism is either/or, then the exhaustion of that reduction is the worth to the idea each participant in it is lost to it as that reduction. The emptiness of the idea is the recognition of that worth. The departed from it is the completing term of the idea. And in this sense each part, each reduction of each part, is the coherence of the idea.

Absolutely not! Because valid reasoning requires a commitment to the continuity of terms. So, if your terms change, then not only are you a solipsist, you are incapable of reasoning too. Alone, and mad.

The solipsist must hate himself if he thinks that all the critical responses to his views are happening in his own head. So, Tris, you have my sympathy!

The thing is that I don’t do this willingly; rather, it’s the only thing that I can do as far as I can tell. That’s because likely the only mind of which I am directly aware is my own. The existence of all other minds, including yours, is only my hypothesis. — Tristan L

Solipsism? Or stubbornness? If you know any words at all you are not alone.As I said earlier, and I hate repeating myself, people who grow up among strong talkers are far more proficient, and a "wild child" may never learn to talk at all. You can't be a speaker and be alone. Even talking to yourself acknowledges that. Even if you deliberately keep yourself to yourself. The changes in your convictions, even about what words mean, that others urge in you can only mean that you are not alone. If you learn anything at all this can only mean you are not alone. You cannot change your mind about what words mean alone, and you cannot think yourself alone without having changed your mind about what words mean.

Why the hell does everyone want to believe the lasting is more real than the fleeting? Person is passing. And only when a person is passed away do we realize how much more real is what we never let ourselves learn of them.

A morbidly obese man might be able to get up a sprint for a few feet. If this makes him a runner, he is a piss poor one. If all A is a piss poor B and all B is a piss poor C, what the hell does it mean to say A is C? Even a piss poor one?

The modifier is the ephemera, but it tells the whole story nonetheless. To ignore it is sophomoric, and to deliberately seek to obviate it is dogmatism.

The engine of everything real is ephemera, from quantum matter to a living organism, from personal reverie to social interactions, from ordinary conversation to categorical assertion of rigid syntactical doctrine and sclerotic lexical reference, even to what might be called quantum cosmology. What is passing is more distinctly real.

Many meanings of words in English derive from their opposite. How the hell is that possible if the meaning of terms is hermetic?

Does "cloudhood" include what forms in a cloud chamber? I wonder how many meteorologists would know what is meant by that word, unless, of course, they used a proficiency at understanding meaning not supplied by the technical study of clouds, and proscribed by the thesis the word is being used to promote. As for persuasion, it is hard to see how this is possible if you arrogate all terms to your own, peculiar, understanding. Plato treats the matter in Protagorus, Euthydemus, and, especially Gorgias. Also, Phaedrus and Cratylus. Of course, it has already been stated that we are not permitted references to Plato in this discussion of Platonism. Meaning is a dialectic between a person, an interlocutor, and the universe as a sort of tertium-quid to the drama between them. What this implies, conclusively if only understood, is that universals, abstractions, ideas, hide their origins, as described in my analogy with light, which leaves its origin very much in the dark.