That's quite helpful, StreetlightX, thanks.

I think the connection is that the logical empiricism advocated by Russell and Ayer saw all ordinary things as logical constructions (out of sense data). — The Great Whatever

Although he was an empiricist and a phenomenalist, I would hesitate to rank Russell as a logical empiricist himself. It's true that his work on logic and meaning served as a foundation for logical empiricism, but so were the works of Frege and Peano. Whatever the case may be, consider Question's reply immediately above yours. He takes experiences -- i.e. phenomena -- to be emergent properties of some computer simulation (according to the "simulated universe theory"). This idea clashes with the logical empiricist idea that, as you say, the world itself is a logical construction from our phenomena. I think logical empiricists such as Carnap or Hempel would balk at the idea that our experiences are epiphenomena, or emergent properties, arising from of an unknowable underlying reality, which can't itself possibly be constructed on the basis of such experience. That is also something that Kant would reject as unintelligible -- a rejection which logical positivists rightfully inherited from Kant.

On edit: I think the idea of "experience" (or consciousness, or qualia) being some kind of emergent property from underlying physical processes -- an idea popular among some theoretical physicists and 'transhumanist computer-simulationalists', as I would dub them -- may stem from a vehicle/content confusion regarding mental representations. This is a confusion that is promoted by representationalism in the philosophy of mind, and effectively countered by newer externalist or embodied paradigms. Those newer paradigms (newer in analytic philosophy, anyway!) rightfully displace the theoretical concern from inert material representations (which are individuated in accordance with their intrinsic structures) to representational acts, conceived as situated actualisations of animal powers.

I see little connection between the historical tradition of logical positivism and what you call the "simulated universe theory". Logical positivism also has been called logical empiricism. It is concerned with clarifying the language of science while also assuming science to be grounded in experience for the meaningfulness of its claims; whether experience be understood in phenomenalist terms (e.g. sense data) or physicalist terms (e.g. intersubjectively and operationally defined physical magnitudes). This essential reference to experience goes missing in the the idea that our universe could be identified with the representational content of a simulation being run on some super-computer. The experiences logical positivists were talking about were experiences had (or performed) within the empirical universe, not representational states ascribed to it from without, as it were.

Not quite what I wrote, but anyway. I'd be surprised if anyone found anything non-standard, let alone contentious, in anything I wrote. Relativity mandates we take a 4D view of reality, and there is no way of escaping the block. We are space-time worms. We don't have free will. — tom

This seems wrong. The general theory of relativity is not inconsistent with the laws of physics being indeterministic. GR is a deterministic theory of gravitation, but gravitation doesn't govern everything that happens in nature. GR is distinguished from Newtonian gravitation by the specific way in which it specifies the metric of spacetime as a function of the stress-energy tensor (a mathematical entity that specifies the energy and momentum flux and density at each point of spacetime); whereas Newton's theory makes the gravitational field dependent merely on the instantaneous distribution of (invariant) mass. Either theories are deterministic and both are consistent with a 4D block universe depiction. If, however, the laws of physics that govern the evolution of the stress-energy tensor itself (which merely is an input for the determination of the gravitational field in GR) are non deterministic -- as they likely would be from our empirical perspectives if quantum mechanics were right, under some interpretations -- then the 4D depiction of the universe would be invalidated. In that case one would rather have a branching out picture of the universe, with any specific contingent history of the whole universe (i.e. one single "branch") satisfying independently Einstein's field equations. There is thus no inconsistency between GR and physical inteterminism.

In any case on my view physical determinism doesn't entail universal determinism, and the possibility of (mere) physical determinism has little bearing on the philosophical problem of determinism, free will and responsibility.

The difference between the two translations is a bit worrisome to me. I've already found a few passages in the introduction which say entirely different things depending on which version you read. — csalisbury

Could you post a couple of them side by side? I could compare them with the French original and venture an opinion regarding which one, if any, seems to err.

Isn't La voix et le phénomène on Library Genesis? — Marty

Yes it is! Thanks.

If anyone finds a copy of the original French, let me know.

I have much more familiarity with Quine but stand to learn more from Derrida. So, I am leaning toward Derrida.

Frege's On Sense and Reference would be good. I'd also be interested in anything else in a similar vein. — Pneumenon

Evans' The Varieties of Reference, already mentioned, belongs downstream in the same vein; so does David Wiggins' paper The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege's Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula.

As I said above, the analog is not at all anything like a 'thing-in-itself'. It is eminently knowable in the most trivial of ways; it's just that unlike 'digital knowledge' which is denotative and representational, analog knowledge deals with relationships. — StreetlightX

I agree with this, but the same can be said of substances as they are conceived within a pluralistic ontology. Empirically knowable substances also essentially involve relationships. We must meet the substances that populate the universe midway, in Karen Barad's words.

So the idea that the analog is a kind of noumenal 'in itself' is wrong. — StreetlightX

Your example is good but we are miscommunicating. On my view, neither process nor substance are noumenal. Both are empirical and, qua pure concepts, they are co-eval. It just becomes impossible to know or think of anything empirical that instantiates one of them when we seek to make one of them *the* fundamental constituent of "nature". It is only when one attempts such a reduction that the possibility for knowledge becomes unintelligible and that the basis of reduction (either substance or pure process) retreats into the noumenal. Intelligible ontologies must be pluralistic.

Incidentally, when StreetlightX cited arguments to the effect that analog quantities don't make room for the concept of negation, I immediately thought of Aristotle's square of opposition as source of a counterargument. There may not be any such thing as the contrary of a determinate quality (some shade of grey, say) as it exists along a continuous spectrum of shades of grey. But there always will be negation, viewed as an unitary logical connectives. Any determinate shade of grey, as predicated of something (some part of a pure process, say) that exhibits this shade, may not have a contrary (as black and white are each other's contraries) but it always has a contradictory: "...not of this shade".

If you can make a distinction between discrete elements in a system, then you're dealing with a digital system. If you can't, you're dealing with an analog system. This isn't to say that one can't talk about differences in analog systems, only that with analog systems, you're dealing with differences or ordinality (position, order, magnitude) rather than cardinality (number of). — StreetlightX

Here is the rub. (My argument here is influenced by similar consideration advanced by Michel Bitbol in some papers on the philosophy of physics, which I may seek to locate if needed). Whenever you are predicating some lawful and re-identifiable continuous quality of a system, this presupposes an ability to identify it as a system of a specific sort, or as a well defined instrumental set-up. This set-up, as a whole, and what defines it as a setup of this sort, is basically a substance. You can't conceive of it outside of a substance ontology. Interestingly enough, Bitbol himself purports to be arguing against substance ontologies, but his real target is a crude essentialism (or objectionable "metaphysical realism" as Putnam would label it) that doesn't make room for the constitutive role of concepts.

On edit: Similar arguments, it seems to me, sustain the core thesis of Karen Barad's book Meeting the Universe Halfway, which I saw you were rereading currently.

Pure process ontologies, it seems to me, have been developed mainly as a retreat from what was perceived as troublesome essentialist implications of traditional substance ontologies. On my view, though, the idea of "nature" being made up of pure processes, or raw activity, independently of the operations the intellect, which subsumes appearances under discrete concepts, is as unintelligible as is the idea of pure essences that would be individuated as they are in themselves independently of the operations of the intellect, which sort them out from underlying material processes. The objectionable idea of the thing-in-itself is present in both of those ontologies, since both of them are reductionistic and enforce a conceptually impoverished metaphysics that can only countenance either discrete substances, or continuous processes, but not both.

Substance ontologies can and must make room for activity (Aristotle's concept of energeia) being predicated of substances both as actualization of their characteristic powers and as enabling the background conditions of their existence (as characterizing underlying processes and boundary conditions). I don't see how an ontology of pure (merely "analog") processes can account for the possibility of empirical knowledge about anything. Kant's arguments regarding criteria for distinguishing objective succession from objective simultaneity, developed in The Analogies of Experience (in the CPR), seem to preclude the possibility of so much as objectively predicating analog qualities of elements of nature (however continuous), without also postulating substances a priori.

Recently, David Wiggins has argued for a richer fundamental ontology that makes room for both substances and process at an equally basic level in his paper Activity, Process, Continuant, Substance, Organism, Philosophy, 91, 2, 2016.

Also, just in case anyone would be interested, regarding the recent state of the debate regarding necessity and philosophy of language, E. J. Lowe (while commenting on Soames' Reference and Description: The Case Against Two-Dimensionalism) has this to say:

"What I am objecting to, at bottom, is a presumption that seems to be shared by both the anti-descriptivists and their neo-descriptivist opponents: namely, that philosophically interesting modal and essentialist theses in metaphysics can be extracted from a combination of semantic theory and empirical science. Because they differ radically regarding semantic theory, the rival camps have very different views as to the ground and character of such modal and essentialist theses and as to how our knowledge of them is attained. What neither camp seems to be prepared to acknowledge is that questions concerning modal truths and modal knowledge cannot be decided by appeal to semantic theory and empirical science, since these are not questions to do with either the workings of language or scientific facts. This is why I am deeply suspicious of the idea that a resolution of the descriptivist/anti-descriptivist debate, if it is ever achieved, will have any genuine bearing whatever on substantive issues in metaphysics. Serious metaphysicians and philosophers of science, I suggest, would do well to ignore the debate as an in-house dispute between philosophers of language and simply get on with their own business in their own way."

Lowe's full piece, followed by Soames' reply, appeared in Philosophical Books, 2007, 48,1

I would also like to stress that, although the necessary a posteriori status of propositions expressed with the help of the "actually..." operator may merely be a quirk of a formal meta-language (two-dimensional semantics), that is not so for the same status possessed by the sorts of statements Kripke focused on: statement exemplifying essential properties of natural kinds, or the necessity of identity. That propositions such as those are necessary a posteriory was a genuine philosophical insights, in my view.

Also insightful are the worries Soames raises against the validity of Kripke's demonstration of the aposteriority of such necessary statements (in chapter 15, volume 2 of his Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, see especially note 15.) But what it is that Soames' valid criticism highlights, in my view, is the limitation of the idea (tacitly relied on by both Kripke and Soames) that what utterances express (and what the objects of propositional attitudes such as beliefs are) are Russellian rather than Fregean propositions. Such an approach makes it hard to fathom that one can think of a particular under a Fregean mode of presentation, or sense (Sinn), that isn't equivalent to a definite description. The view of singular Fregean senses as being essentially object involving has been developed by Gareth Evans in his book The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell in his paper De Re Senses. Hilary Putnam, who, like Kripke, has been a target of Evans' constructive criticism had written a harsh review of Evans' book, initially, and then eventually came to gain an appreciation of its profound significance.

AP started out examining fake languages with the hope that something would be learned in the process.. — Mongrel

Is "AP" analytic philosophy? Yes, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke and many other philosophers have devoted much energy studying formal and ideal languages. The paybacks have been tremendous although, for sure, many lines of inquiry have led to dead ends and/or have spawned degenerative research programs. All one can do is try to sort out the philosophical wheat from the chaff. I am fond of David Wiggins' methodological dictum that whenever one uses some technical or semi-technical term in order to make a substantive philosophical point, one ought to check one's own sanity through trying to convey the same point in plain English (or whatever ordinary language one speaks). Many of my favorite philosophers belong to quietist or broadly OLP traditions (i.e. ordinary language philosophy) and hence I'd be the first one to complain about the overuse of formal methods in analytic philosophy. But such tools, however overused they may be in some quarters, can still be indispensable to enforcing rigor, when needed, and can provide insight through the disentanglement of formerly conflated ideas.

Anyway.. "Actually, the capital of France is Paris."

We agree the above statement is necessarily true and aposteriori? — Mongrel

Let us denote "AS" the sentence "Actually, the capital of France is Paris."

Agreed, if by "the above statement" you mean to refer to the proposition P1 expressed while uttering this sentence ("AS") in the actual world, then, indeed, this proposition P1 is necessarily true. Our being in the actual world (in which Paris happens to be, contingently, the capital of France) provides a context of utterance such that the sentence "AS" can be used to express a necessarily true proposition. The proposition P1 therefore is true at all possible worlds.

Be aware, however, that in possible worlds in which Paris isn't the capital of France, the very same sentence "AS" -- "Actually, the capital of France is Paris." -- can be used to express a proposition P2 that is necessarily false (assuming that ordinary English is also in use in that possible world, or else a suitable translation of the sentence "AS" can be used). Hence, a fortiori, the proposition P2 thus expressed in such a world is false at the actual world! We must thus evaluate, empirically, whether or not Paris is the capital of France in order to know whether the proposition expressed by us with the use of "AS" is necessarily true or necessarily false.

But all of this just is a quirk of the actuality operator as interpreted in two-dimensional semantics. It has nothing to do with the essentialness (or lack thereof) for France to have Paris as its capital, or for Paris to be France's capital. The latter rather has to do with the socio/historical/conceptual roots of the concepts of cities, nations and capitals.

You actually have to use the actually operator to turn a contingent truth into a necessary one. — Mongrel

Yes, under the interpretation that Soames proposes, under Kaplan's 2D semantic framework, that is indeed the case. But one must be careful about what proposition is thereby taken to be necessarily true. First, notice that 'Actually...' is a sentential operator that operates on a complete sentence suitable as to expresses different propositions in a variety of context/situation pairs (where the context of utterance determines the references of the indexicals such as to determine the proposition expressed, and hence its truth conditions, and the situation refers to the state of the possible world relevant to the evaluation of the truth of this proposition. On Soames' proposed intepretation, 'Actually...' is a semantic device stating explicitly that the evaluation of the embedded sentence must take place at the actual world. Hence, if the sentence S is evaluated as true at the actual world (which we may find out a posteriori, through empirical investigation) then it is thereby necessarily true that 'actually S'. In that case, 'actually S' is not taken to be synonymous with the bare sentence 'S'. But neither one of them refers to distinct objects across possible worlds.

(2) To say that a thing is identical to itself [in the absence of some sort of context] is nonsensical. — StreetlightX

Why not simply say that it is known a priori to be necessarily true and hence uninformative? What makes it known to be necessarily true, though, is a function of the meanings (Fregean references) of the words used to make the claim. Hence, even if it is "nonsensical", it is not thereby meaningless; it is, after all, truth-evaluable.

Although I have been mainly agreeing with TGW against StreetlightX, there may be a sense in which I agree with StreetlightX's Wittgensteinian point about the essential relationality of identity statements. On the neo-Fregean account of truth and meaning that I am working with (following Evans and McDowell) facts of the world are true Fregean propositions rather than true Russellian propositions.

Hence the proposition expressed by "Hesperus is Phosphorus", say, where the two names have different Fregean senses, does *not* express the same proposition (and hence doesn't make the same empirical claim) as does the sentence "Hesperus is Hesperus", even though both sentences express the same Russellian proposition.

It is, however, a somewhat contentious Wittgensteinian point that the latter assertion is nonsense. For sure, it doesn't have much of a use in ordinary language; and likewise for the utterances of Moore-paradoxical statements, which can nevertheless express meaningful and true propositions, and likewise for a variety of truisms that Wittgenstein notoriously thought nonsensical for one to assert or claim knowledge of.

Fair point. I should have said something to learn identity is to at least learn a fact about linguistic use, etc. In any case, the point is to resolve identity into a context, to show that identity is never brute, but always relational. — StreetlightX

I am not entirely sure about that last point. Regarding the first, linguistic use need not be at issue. Lois Lane may have seen a man flying in the sky, later seen a man in her office, not know their names at all, and yet wondered whether she saw the same man twice. In that case, even though her two episodes of demonstrative reference (in thought) could have been (unbeknownst to her) correlated with the extent linguistic uses of "Superman" and "Clark Kent", or could have served to anchor new linguistic uses -- if, e.g. she would report upon her encounters using made up pseudonyms -- what she wonders about is if the man whom she encountered on one occasion is the man whom she encountered on another occasion.

Regarding the metaphysical issues that you believe to be contentious (regarding substances), I don't think we can make the economy of them since there can't be so much as a thinkable singular Fregean sense (i.e. demonstrative reference to an empirical particular) *or* a well defined naming practice if one is agnostic regarding the persistence through qualitative/material change of individuals encountered in experience at different occasions. (This is, incidentally, the topic of Kant's Analogies of Experience, brilliantly discussed by Sebastian Rödl, in connection with the metaphysics of substance, in his Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect, HUP, 2012)

No, no, it's not that people don't assert identity. Of course they do, they do so all the time. But the question isn't about assertion it's about ontology, as it were. As I understand it, to say that 'Mr. Jones is Alan' is to learn a fact about language-use: upon knowing this, I know that Mr. Jones might respond to the call 'Alan!' as he would to the call 'Mr. Jones'. Or that documents which refer to Mr. Jones or Adam actually refer to the same person, and so on. In all cases, there is some kind of parameter by which to make sense of the identity of Mr. Jones and Alan. Or put differently, the identity Mr. Jones = Alan does not 'stand alone', it is always identity 'with respect to.. x,y,z'. And the function of names is ostensibly for identification in social settings, bureaucratic identification, etc. — StreetlightX

When the same individual is denoted by two names that have two distinct Fregean senses, then, upon learning that they are identical, what is learned by a language user who was acquainted with this individual under those two distinct modes of presentation isn't merely a fact about language. As Kripke has shown, in a clear sense, the fact about language is contingent but the identity statement that has been learned about is necessary. (Kripke, though, thought that he was arguing against a Fregean conception of proper names. Gareth Evans has shown that Kripke's observations are consistent with a Fregean account of singular senses, understood non-descriptively.)

For instance Lois Lane may be acquainted both with Superman and with Clark Kent, and know them respectively as "Superman" and as "Clark Kent". When she eventually learns that Clark Kent is Superman she doesn't merely learn a fact about linguistic use -- (although, as TGW hinted, she could learn this fact inferentially through learning another fact about linguistic use). She rather learns the fact that Superman and Clark Kent are the same individual, a fact that no alternative (i.e. counterfactual) conventions of linguistic use could have negated.

This is one issue. Another issue that has been raised in the recent exchanges in this thread is the identity that a material object (i.e. a "substance", or "spatiotemporal continuant") retains with itself through material and/or qualitative change, through time. This issue is related to the first since an object can be encountered at two different times under two different modes of presentation (i.e. while being thought about under the two different Fregean senses of "A" and "B" successively, such that the numerical identity of their denotata may come under question). What settles the question of the identity of A with B are the criteria of persistance and individuation for object of this sort, and the spatiotemporal carrer(s) of the relevant object(s): both things that may be matters of empirical investigation. This also goes beyond the mere discovery of contingent linguistic conventions.

As far as equality being invoked with respect to some quality, do you mean things like 'the same statue' versus 'the same lump of clay'? If so, you might be interested in Gupta relative identity. — The Great Whatever

Peter Geach's thesis of relative identity makes trouble for Leibniz's law of indiscernibility of identicals. Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependency of identity -- expounded in his Sameness of Substance Renewed -- seems to me to incorporate the main insights of relative identity while saving Leibniz's law. (I wasn't aware that Gupta also had defended a thesis of relative identity so I am unsure how Wiggins' arguments against Geach apply to Gupta.)

I had been away from the PF for a month and when I returned yesterday, I found it to be in the final stages of rigor mortis! It had a sad lonely appearance of a forum in decline. — John Kernan

Yes, the old PF seems to have been suffering from bugs and lack of maintenance lately. But the "PF" mentioned in the title of this thread is this forum rather than the old one. It is arguably doing better now than it was when the OP was posted.

A very good paper discussing the phenomenology of dreams from an embodied and cognitive science perspective is Andy Clark's The Twisted Matrix: Dream, Simulation or Hybrid? (See download link at upper left of page)

Thanks for posting Soames' commentary, Mongrel. And thanks to Soames for commenting!

On first pass I'm inclined to dismiss it as professional solipsism of the type that aging academics always have when they see the new generation interested in something besides what they're interested in. John Searle has recently started making similar comments. — The Great Whatever

Yes. This may also be related to what Wittgenstein has identified as the "loss of problems".

"Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems". Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial." Zettel 456

Is it just me who thinks that being intrinsically interesting means pretty much that something need not be useful in a utilitarian sense? — Πετροκότσυφας

That's quite right. The most valuable things are the least useful. Useful things possess mainly derivative value. So, when I am asked about the usefulness of philosophy, I usually respond that it's useless, which is why it's so valuable (as are much of theoretical science, literature, music, personal relationships, etc.)

Thanks for your well thought answer Pierre. I have really only one question regarding what you wrote:the current view of science is that everything real is either matter/ energy or some function of matter/energy. So, if the matter/energy is necessarily combined in the ways it has been (of course with local variations due to asymmetries) to make up the elements, and determinism is really the case, then every single thing and event would then seem to be radically necessary. Of course, if determinism is not the case and causality is ontologically and/or metaphysically, and not merely epistemically, probabilistic then the way everything is would still be necessary, but only within certain parameters. — John

That's a good question; or rather a good challenge to my view. I think what's required for the validity of the inference you are trying to make, from (1) the putative ultimate necessity of the laws that govern the behavior of 'matter', to (2) universal determinism (modulo quantum indeterminacy) is some thesis regarding the (alleged) supervenience of higher level properties over low level physical ('material') properties. Supervenience has been used by some analytic philosophers (such as Jaegwon Kim) -- who strive to "naturalize" metaphysics and the philosophy of mind -- in order to salvage physicalism from the failure of nomological reductionism. I think this appeal to supervenience fails (see John Haugeland's two papers on supervenience reprinted in his Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, and also Davis Wiggins' comment on supervenience in Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism) but I must give more thought to this issue in order to relate it more closely to the topic of ultimate necessity/contingency that we were discussing. I'll come back to it when I can.

I think Dennett is right about 90% of the published literature in Anglo-American philosophy: that it has a significance comparable the study of the higher order truths of Schmess. And no, it doesn't matter at all. It's just Sturgeon's law and it applies to everything.

Nobody needs to read 100% of what's published, or even need to sample it evenhandedly. But there needs to a broad scope of interests being pursued, and a range of talents being allowed to thrive, in any intellectual or research community, so that promising lines of inquiries aren't foreclosed just because old beards like Dennett have convinced themselves that it's just more boring and pointless Schmess... even if 90% of the time he'd be right about it. Also, how can he judge that no variety of Schmess inquiry can be interesting or valuable just because it won't lead to a cure for cancer?

"No soup for you!"

--The Soup Nazi

The logic that seems to govern the formation of the elements, and the combination of elements to form compounds, seems to be very strictly invariant. Can we conceive any systematic way in which reality might have been totally different, with a whole range of totally different elements, and hence compounds? — John

You may very well be right. The Standard Model of particle physics accounts for the 12 fermions (and the force mediating bosons) that make up the stuff that we can see in the universe. But those particles may have supersymmetric partners that differ from them in mass and that we haven't (yet) observed. Can they make up atoms, life forms, etc.? We don't know. Whatever the case may be, my point is philosophical, or conceptual, rather than empirical/speculative. If the "fundamental" laws of physics preclude the 12 elementary fermions that we know of from having unseen supersymmetric partners, or those partners making up interesting (or living) bits of stuff, that would be a contingent fact from the point of view articulated in the Standard Model. Is there a fundamental model that describes "reality" at a more fundamental level than the Standard Model does, and such that the laws that it articulates are necessary in some absolute fashion?

If this were the case, that would still not matter much, from my point of view, because such a model would not really describe "reality" in its entirety, but rather physical matter. There is more to reality than the matter that makes us (and our surroundings) up. What makes things the sorts of things that they are isn't just their material constituents but also their relationships to other things and the surrounding constraints that govern those relational properties. So, unless one is a crude reductionist, there isn't a fundamental level of description of "reality" such that the constitutive laws at this level might be necessary, absolutely.

In regard to db's and PN's belief in "radical contingency" would this mean that whether anything exists at all is also radically contingent? In any case nothing is not really nothing, right? It is not the complete absence we usually try to imagine, but rather the absence of anything we could know about; even though we try to grasp it by referring to it as "quantum foam" or whatever.

I don't very much like the label "radical contingency", myself. I would prefer "relative contingency". From some level of description, some laws can be seem as necessary, and from another level, be seen as contingent. This relativity is similar (and closely related) to the relativity that attends to Aristotle's distinction of matter and form. The wooden plank is (part of) the matter of the house, but the wooden plank also has matter and form on its own. Matter and form are formal concepts, so there need not be a fundamental level of pure matter, or "fundamental" laws governing it.

Personally I think that the only necessary constraint is the complete lack of necessary constraints, i.e. radical contingency, and an evolution of systems-within-constraints allows the emergence of stability. — darthbarracuda

This is close to my view also. There is no God's eye view, or view from nowhere, from which general statements of natural necessity can be disclosed as being, indeed, necessary; and, even if there were such a point of view, it would be unintelligible to us. The only rules of metaphysical necessity (such as the "laws of nature" that are disclosed through the practices of empirical natural sciences, or the contingent social rules that constitue social institutions and human artifacts) merely reflect the outside constraints from which within-the-system necessities (e.g. the essential properties of the objects that are constituted within those specific domains) arise. This doesn't prevent the rules (or "laws") themselves from being contingent at a higher level, as, for instance, the laws of physics known to us empirically might be, as resulting, maybe, from the breaking of symmetries within early-universe state-superpositions (through the process quantum cosmologists refer to as "decoherence".)

Hence, I tend to think that the very same normative rule, or "law of nature", that can be viewed as a posteriori necessary from within some specific domain of scientific inquiry (or within some socially instituted region of the human world) -- as this rule governs the behaviors or norms of the relevant objects and determines what is essential to them -- can also be viewed as contingent a priori from without the system (i.e. from the place where the external constraints are seen as sustaining the existence of the system), or from the point of view of the people who freely institute the social practices.

Indeed. I am talking about the relationship of necessity though. That the actuality/necessity of P (Paris exists as the capital of France) does not preclude the possibility of Paris being (or not being) the capital. The possible worlds (possibility) are true no matter what is necessary (actual). — TheWillowOfDarkness

That doesn't make any sense. You are not using "necessary", or "possible world" in the same way any one else uses those terms. "Necessary" doesn't mean "actual", and, yes, the necessity of some proposition P does preclude the possibility of not-P. You are letting talk of possible worlds confuse you. Also, possible worlds aren't true or false. Possible worlds aren't propositions. A possible world just is a way the world could possibly be (or have been). Paris being the capital of France (during some specified time interval) isn't a possible world, but rather is part of the specification of a possible world. Possible worlds, or the possibilities that are part of their specifications, can't be true of false anymore than a carrot can be true or false. Propositions are true or false; objects aren't.

The issue with the standard modal approach is not in confusing possibility with actuality, it is in confusing actuality with possibility. The necessity of actual state is treated as if it is only possible. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It's not a mistake of modal logic (or of "the standard modal approach", whatever that is) to resist the slide from actuality to necessity. Not everything that is actual is necessary. Hence the actuality of P doesn't preclude the possibility of not-P. If you deny this then you can't begin to make sense of the contingent/necessary distinction as applied to the states material objects are in at specific times, say. Every accidental property that an object contingently manifests at a time becomes an essential property for this object to have at that time. This makes nonsense of the idea of unactualized powers.

I didn't say that forms expressed in actuality were not also a possible world. I merely said that possibility does not equal actuality. Any possible world is, by definition, possible. This includes one with expression of the things in the actual world. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, that's not what you had said. You had said that "Possibility is, by definition, not an actual state." That's a bit like saying that mammals are, by definition, not elephants. And then walking it back: "...I merely said that being a mammal doesn't equal being an elephant." Sure, no contest. Actuality entails possibility, but possibility doesn't entail actuality.

And I'm pretty sure you misunderstand my position — Mongrel

I am not going to understand your position any better if you are unwilling to clarify it. You've expressed your view thus: "Any statement about actuality that is true is necessarily true." There are no contingent facts, on your view, it would seem. The only contemporary philosopher I can think of who has endorsed a view that comes anything close to this is Timothy Williamson, but his thesis is restricted to the predicate of existence. He has argued that anything that actually exists exists necessarily. But things that exist can still have some of their properties contingently, on his view.

Possibility is, by definition, not an actual state. — TheWillowOfDarkness

No, not as used by logicians and analytic philosophers. It's a basic axiom of modal logic that what is actual is, a fortiori, possible. It's not even a connotation of the term as used in ordinary language that something that's said to be possible isn't actual. If you ask me if it's possible that I may have left my keys in the car, and I reply that it is indeed possible, I am certainly not implying that it isn't actual -- that it is merely an unactualized possibility -- but rather that it might me the case.

This is where your fascination with jargon is letting you down. Determinism is a concept that predates analytic philosophy. And yes.. it most certainly can be the thesis that every actuality happens necessarily. — Mongrel

Have it your way then. "Determinism" in your sense is equivalent to necessitarianism, or to actualism in M. R. Arers's sense. It is a contentious metaphysical doctrine that I dont know any living analytic philosophers to be endorsing. I wonder what your ground might be for endorsing it, if it isn't the mistake in modal logic that I have highlighted.