My view is that only existents have essential natures. — Andrew M
Why would that imply an eternal existence? — Andrew M
I notice that this specific issue seems to mark a point of departure for Aquinas from Aristotle. — Andrew M
In my view, part of the essential nature of a lion is that it lives in the world that we inhabit, whereas a unicorn is a merely a fictional creature represented in books and pictures. So for someone to mistakenly talk about lions as if they were fictional entities would be for them to entirely misconceive the essential nature of lions. — Andrew M
You might say that being consists in the act of being, and so it is ontologically distinct from the totality of beings in that sense. But I think of beings as acts of being, so being would equally be the totality of acts of being, that is one great act of being, and again there would be no ontological distinction. — Janus
I still cannot see how you think being unaffected does not imply being indifferent. "Being good and loving" would seem to be meaningless without action, and action implies response, and response just is being affected. — Janus
The potential that the first actualizer has to create other substances would be actualized by the first actualizer itself. — Andrew M
God is still natural; in fact God is nature, but he is not nature as we enciounter it via the senses. — Janus
That's true because according to that story God cannot be radically separate form creation. He must be affected by his creation or else he is utterly indifferent. — Janus
Which often amounts to what Thomas Nagel described as ‘the fear of religion’ in his essay ‘Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion’. — Wayfarer
As I asked Wayfarer earlier, how does considering God to be transcendent and supernatural (meaning radically separate and independent) help with explaining its role in creating and/or sustaining the world? — Janus
This view produces the problem of interaction which plagued the Cartesian picture. On the other hand an immanent (indwelling and natural) ideas about God's causal efficacy are easier to understand and elaborate, while remaining in the province of philosophy and metaphysics rather than science. — Janus
I'm curious as to how both of you think that what Aaron says here would differ from what naturalism allows. Or to put it another why I wonder whether both of you agree that naturalism would not allow mathematical objects to exist "as a nexus of relations etc...". I would also like to hear exactly why Wayfarer thinks that, and why Aaron does, if he does. Also I would like to know whether you think this applies to all possible forms of naturalism, or only to specific forms. — Janus
Agreed. So I reject the idea that the first actualizer has potential for its own existence which is why I've said that it necessarily exists. However it doesn't follow that it doesn't have potentials for the existence of other substances. — Andrew M
Basically it's not clear to me how anything else could come into existence if there weren't potential for them to exist in the first actualizer. — Andrew M
Now, where does that exist? Plainly, it exists nowhere - but it is nevertheless real. — Wayfarer
Aquinas allows for substantial existence which is not a composite of potency and act. This is obvious in the case of God. — Metaphysician Undercover
So this doesn't make sense at all, to say that form plays the role of potency, because it is an obvious inconsistency. — Metaphysician Undercover
Although there is no composition of matter and form in an angel, yet there is act and potentiality. [...] Hence the nature itself is related to its own existence as potentiality to act. Therefore if there be no matter, and supposing that the form itself subsists without matter, there nevertheless still remains the relation of the form to its very existence, as of potentiality to act. — Aquinas
When you say 'created by the human mind', that is modernist thinking - nearly every modern philosopher would agree with you. But the classical A-T (Aristotelian-Thomist) understanding is completely different. I don't think those philosophers would agree at all that the human mind 'creates' any such thing as a form; it receives sensations, and apprehends the form, which is an 'intelligible object'. — Wayfarer
What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person' — Wayfarer
Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
1. The mind is complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
3. These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.
These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science. — SEP
What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person'. — Wayfarer
I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences. — Wayfarer
Perhaps an important distinction lies hidden here. Recalling Sellars' distinction between "sensing particulars" and "sensing facts", I might deny the claim that I can see my own impressions, but affirm the claim that I observe (the fact) that I have current impressions. Accordingly, we might say I observe the impressions, or say at least that I make observational judgments about the impressions, without "sensing" them. — Cabbage Farmer
Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:
If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;
Therefore, there are impressions in me. — Cabbage Farmer
In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning. — Cabbage Farmer
We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression. — Cabbage Farmer
I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only. — Cabbage Farmer
It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.
I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining. — Cabbage Farmer
Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table. — Cabbage Farmer
Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation". — Cabbage Farmer
But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it. — Cabbage Farmer
Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming. — Cabbage Farmer
What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple. — Cabbage Farmer
Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction. — Cabbage Farmer
The rational agent is doing the “moving”, and for the purpose of avoiding full accountability for the “is” claim.Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.” — Cabbage Farmer
The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.
I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.
We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.
And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems. — Cabbage Farmer
I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.
Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion. — Cabbage Farmer
The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world. — Cabbage Farmer
I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.
The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver. — Cabbage Farmer
One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.
By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances. — Cabbage Farmer
That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it. — Cabbage Farmer
It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world. — Cabbage Farmer
Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)? — Cabbage Farmer
In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.
A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.
None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow. — Cabbage Farmer
I do not think that it is correct to exclude Aristotle from substance dualism. In his Categories he clearly defines primary and secondary substance, primary substance being material substance, and secondary substance formal. Material substance he implies, substantiates, or grounds, the logical system. But in his metaphysics, when he seeks to substantiate being itself, he turns to formal substance. — MU
Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean? — Cabbage Farmer
The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that the concept of
looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green,
presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves
the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- which, in
turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one
wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it. — Sellars
Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt? — Cabbage Farmer
There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.
However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking. — Cabbage Farmer
This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. — Cabbage Farmer
How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.
If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.
Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.
Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.
I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation. — Cabbage Farmer
There is, in all experience, that element which we are aware that we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. As a first approximation, we may designate it as "the sensuous."
[…]
At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. […] what I refer to as "the given" in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.
[…]
The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasized by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive.
[…]
While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such , because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways. — Lewis
I can apprehend this thing (given) as pen or rubber or cylinder, but I cannot, by taking thought, discover it as paper or soft or cubical. — Lewis
Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay? — Cabbage Farmer
I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.
So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories.... — Cabbage Farmer
I cannot admit that impressions have the character of observable facts. What I observe are things, not impressions. I see tables, and houses, and thermometers, and trees, and men, and the sun, and many other things in the sphere of crude physical objects; but I have never seen my impression of these things […] I do not say I doubt the existence of my impressions. I believe that there are impressions, but I have never sensed them. When I consider the question in an unprejudiced manner I find that I infer the existence of my impressions. — Reichenbach
To explain this difference, I introduce the distinction between the physical thing and my impression of that thing. I say that usually there are both physical things and impressions within me but that sometimes there are impressions only […] we need this assumption to explain that in the case of the confused world one of the two worlds, the external world, is dropped. The distinction between the world of things and the world of impressions or representation is therefore the result of epistemological reflection. — Reichenbach
Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them. — Reichenbach
We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child. — Reichenbach
Thanks. I'm afraid it's a clumsy, discursive way of working through a text. But it's my favorite way of traversing the hermeneutic circle. — Cabbage Farmer
When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum. — Price
I take this to mean that while it is a fact that the sense-content was sensed (in sensing act x and/or by senser y), this does not imply that the senser gained any knowledge about the sense content. If you like, it's a fact in-itself, but not (necessarily) a fact for anyone (any knower.) — csalisbury
With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations? — Terrapin
Also, I'm curious if you'd say that Sellars is claiming that propositions are perceived in some sense. Or would he agree that "seeing <a proposition>" is a very loose, metaphorical way of speaking--that is, we're not literally seeing a proposition? — Terrapin
What's the difference when we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality? — Terrapin Station