If there was no First Cause, and no continuation of causation, and no explanation for Ontology, then the world is ultimately causeless & meaningless & irrational & absurd. — Gnomon

My argument is instead the one to be found in Anaximander, Peirce and quantum field theory. The Cosmos exists as the constraint on possibility. It emerges not from fundamental intentionality nor from fundamental mechanistic cause but from the fundamental vagueness of unorganised free potential. An essential state of everythingness that then must start to self-cancel until it becomes reduced to some coherently organised somethingness. A realm of inevitable structure.

Something can’t come from nothing. But also everything not only can be reduced to something, it indeed must do so.

If everything is busy happening, then the opposite of that is trying to happen too. And so the great self-cancellation starts. Everything starts heading towards zero. Nothingness is the ultimate destiny.

But that takes time. And while it is happening, complexities can arise for a time along the way. In short we have the Big Bang universe that is falling into its own heat sink. An explosion of hot possibilities being annihilated, expanded and diluted until all that is left is as close to a true void as is possible.

So reality is emergent. But its trajectory is not from nothing to something but instead from everything to nothing via the passing existence of somethingness.

We might be at the height of what we can mean by intentionality as we are also at the height of what we might mean by classicality and its mechanistic order. But that doesn’t make that state fundamental from the cosmic point of view even if it does seem fundamental to the emergent existence of us - as a passing pattern of nature with a particularly intricate topological order.

I couldn’t follow your question. Are you asking me to successfully define “the good” as something physically real and beyond the collective pragmatic narrative? Or what exactly?

IMHO, that is not sufficient basis to draw that conclusion. — Relativist

Of course. But my point was we still don’t know what actually clipped his ear. Shrapnel seems the likeliest.

So here we have the double thing of the most unlikely close shave - an existential level ambiguity in itself. And then what seems like a quite unnecessary obsfucation over what the object in question was.

We like to treat reality as fundamentally intelligible or legible. And yet in 4K and slo-mo replay, it still ain’t.

It is like the move to refereeing sports by video analysis. In rugby, it turns out that nearly every try scored be perhaps ought to be disallowed as there is always some tiniest infringement to be found. Or at least a tiny infringement that one might as well see either way.

The general point is that truth is pragmatically complex. Do we loosen the grip of the narrative or tighten the definition of the fact. Back to the explanation-description dichotomy. :grin:

They rely on their audience (and perhaps themselves) believing that their end is truth when in fact it is views, or popularity, or drama, or something like that. When the dissimulation gets too far over its skies it becomes noticed that the person is not conveying truth but is instead merely gratifying their own desire for popularity, and at the point the game is up. — Leontiskos

It would be nice if that were true. But I think instead that people get used to living in a reality show. The fact that the dramas are made up becomes neither here nor there. Instead the heightened life becomes what absorbs us into its reality.

In any reality show, you know that the whole thing sits on some weird balance of people acting out plot lines and really also exposing their worst selves.

So reality shows became a huge industry. And conspiracy theory is now moving out of the fringe and into the mainstream. It is becoming corporate and industrial. It is a flourishing economy with a real power grip on society.

Charlie Kirk is an event. And now it becomes this season’s freshest hit. The Epstein show still rolls. But Charlie Kirk could become even splashier if any of the conspiracy analysis is even a little bit true.

Reality shows spawned something real enough in Donald Trump. Conspiracy shows are becoming mainstream franchises now. An even more blurred line. What does that look like when it is the new dominant form of media owned by those with a will to power?

In this way the whole notion of liberalism is founded upon a lie and a falsehood, and it is quite difficult to maintain such a bald lie on a societal and cultural level. — Leontiskos

A good point and I agree. And yet what if all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction? - an argument I have made in this thread, and which plays large in Fukuyama’s account of human political history.

So yes, there are no neutral referees and indeed human nature would make that impossible. But liberalism can still construct its institutions under that collective belief in impartiality. It could at least steer in the direction.

What seems apparent is that social animals are organised by the emergence of dominance-submission hierarchies. It is something that is engineered in at a genetic level.

Humans have a capacity to narrate their worlds and so could create social order at this new “civilised” level. To make that happen, the old dominance-submission games had to be submerged under some form of collective transcendent identity. A narrative about ancestral landscapes, judging gods, or democratic justice. Even the mightiest in the group had to bow their heads before a power that outranked even them.

So this is what all societies have in common. The need for an uber-narrative which secures the identity of the individual. A neutralising force that breaks down the local gang boss and allows a society to scale - to grow large and complex despite the still natural tendency to play dominance-submission games.

So yes. Liberalism is a fiction. A meta narrative of a perfection that can never be achieved. But if it scales, then that already says it is a better meta-narrative than the other brands going around.

Whether human societies should freely scale is a new question that has come into view. But liberalism did win that competition. And so the question is what comes next. Is it so good that it can keep adapting even to the planetary forces it itself has unleashed?

Orwell said a lot in favor of objective truth and the perils of this commonsense notion’s destruction by tyrants—including that he unfrivolously feared its loss in society more than he feared bombs of any kind — javra

Yes. I used to be reassured that governments lied routinely but that also the truth would eventually be declassified. Wait 20 to 40 years and history would get written.

So the question becomes what is history telling us about the nature of truth and objectively so far as it matters in human affairs. The world has found it own pragmatic accomodation that bears perhaps only faint resemblance to what was considered its ideal.

I see a new approach to truth and fact in an analysis of how things have gone for real. We can’t just assume we know what is best for social order even though Orwell felt like he was speaking for something we must defend.

Hence my interest in the new conspiracy theory industry on YouTube. Candace Owen and the like. Is this the new free press with the power to investigate or something compounding the problem, playing into the hands of information autocracy by amplifying the public confusion?

It used to be the case that life lived as truth seemed just commonsense. Now maybe life lived as conspiracy theory is what is and always has been real. Or life lived as a reality show. A juicy topic. Debord in the age of the accelerationist.

Of course, coverups are possible, but possibilities are not evidence. — Relativist

But do we even know what really struck his ear and how the damage healed so fast? Everything was publicly witnessed in 4k and yet what are the facts? This kind of nonsense is a fascinating.

The footage isn’t grainy anymore. And yet public truth only seems to grow more elusive. With photoshop having become AI, where is this going?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I forgot to include the bits where the similarities were stressed. And that was the original point too.

Charles Sanders Peirce and Donald Davidson, despite belonging to different philosophical periods, share striking similarities rooted in their anti-Cartesian pragmatist approaches to truth, meaning, and knowledge. Both philosophers reject the idea of a private, foundational mind and instead situate meaning and belief within a public, intersubjective process of interpretation.

Intersubjectivity and anti-foundationalism

Both Peirce and Davidson reject Cartesian foundationalism, the idea that knowledge rests on a foundation of indubitable inner experience. Instead, they argue that meaning and thought are public, social phenomena that arise from interaction with others and a shared world.

Peirce's semiotics: Peirce's triadic model of the sign—involving a sign, an object, and an interpretant—is inherently social. A sign's meaning is not fixed in a person's mind but is determined by its interpretation within a community of inquirers. Infinite semiosis, the endless chain of interpretants, prevents any ultimate, private foundation for meaning.

Davidson's triangulation: Davidson's concept of triangulation mirrors this social basis for meaning. Meaning and objective thought are possible only through a three-way interaction: one person, another person, and a shared external object or event. This mutual reaction to a common cause provides the necessary external check for thought and meaning to be determined.

Truth, coherence, and the long run

Both thinkers relate truth to a process of rational inquiry rather than to a static correspondence with reality.

Peirce's "long run": Peirce defined truth as the final, settled opinion that a community of inquirers would reach if they pursued a question long enough. A true belief is one that is "unassailable by doubt" in the infinite long run. This is a pragmatic, fallibilist account, holding that our current beliefs are always subject to revision.

Davidson's coherence: Davidson developed a coherence theory of truth, arguing that coherence provides the test for both truth and the judgment that objective truth-conditions are justified.

For Davidson, we have no independent access to reality outside of our beliefs, but the demand that our beliefs cohere sufficiently guarantees a large measure of truth. Coherence acts as a test for a non-confrontational form of correspondence, where a theory of truth is tied to how a speaker's utterances relate to events in the world.

Yep. On this we agree. — Banno

For funs, I popped the question to AI. I well remember how aggressively dismissive you were of Peirce right from the start. Seems that Peirce's reappearance into public prominence would have indeed caused an issue.

So OK AI! Compare and contrast!...

Determining the "more famous" philosopher between Donald Davidson and Charles Sanders Peirce depends on the context, as each has significantly different but profound legacies. However, within academic philosophy, Charles Sanders Peirce is generally considered the more historically significant and foundational figure.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) is often called "the father of pragmatism" and is recognized as America's first great philosopher. His fame stems from his foundational work across multiple fields, including:

Pragmatism: Peirce originated the philosophical movement of pragmatism, which was later popularized and modified by William James and John Dewey.

Semiotics: He developed a comprehensive theory of signs, or semiotics, that has been highly influential in linguistics, communication, and other fields.

Logic: Peirce made groundbreaking contributions to logic and philosophy of science, including developing concepts of abductive reasoning and second-order quantification, before many of his more famous European counterparts.

Despite this, much of Peirce's work was unpublished or unorganized during his lifetime, and he died in relative obscurity. His wide-ranging influence has been fully recognized only posthumously, as scholars have assembled and studied his papers.

Donald Davidson

Donald Davidson (1917–2003) was a preeminent figure in 20th-century analytic philosophy, most active from the 1960s onward. His fame rests on his influential work in specific areas of philosophy, including:

Philosophy of mind: He introduced the influential theory of "anomalous monism," which states that mental events are identical to physical events but are not governed by strict physical laws.

Philosophy of language: Davidson integrated Alfred Tarski's theory of truth to create a theory of meaning, an approach that was highly influential in the later 20th century.

Action theory: He famously argued that reasons for actions are also the causes of those actions, opposing the prevailing view at the time.

Davidson's influence largely peaked in the 1970s and 1980s, and while his work is still discussed, it is often in relation to specific issues rather than as a singular, dominant school of thought.

Conclusion

In terms of lasting historical impact across a broad range of philosophical traditions and disciplines, C.S. Peirce is the more famous and foundational figure. His ideas in pragmatism, semiotics, and logic laid much of the groundwork for 20th-century thought, though he was not widely celebrated during his own lifetime.

Donald Davidson is extremely important within the 20th-century analytic tradition but is less of a foundational figure spanning the wider history of philosophy.

The interpretive process and meaning holism

Both philosophers developed thought experiments—radical translation for Peirce and radical interpretation for Davidson—to investigate the nature of meaning and the interpretive process itself.
Meaning is a "vector of forces": Both acknowledge that assigning meaning to a speaker's words is not a simple task because it depends on both what the words mean and what the speaker believes. Davidson described this as meaning being a "vector of two forces".

Meaning holism: They share the view that the meaning of a single utterance cannot be determined in isolation. For Peirce, a sign's meaning is embedded in the entire system of signs and its interpretants. For Davidson, a radical interpreter must develop a theory of meaning for a speaker's entire language, inferring the truth conditions of sentences based on observation of behavior and contextual cues.

Explanatory hypothesis and abduction

Both philosophies emphasize the role of hypothesis formation, or abduction, in generating new knowledge.

Peirce's abduction: Peirce introduced abduction as a third mode of inference, distinct from deduction and induction. Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis to account for a surprising observation. This provides the "new ideas" that are then tested through deduction and induction.

Davidson's Principle of Charity: In Davidson's radical interpretation, the interpreter uses the Principle of Charity, which attributes beliefs to a speaker that are mostly true and coherent. This can be seen as a form of abduction. The interpreter creates the best possible "explanatory hypothesis"—a Tarski-style truth theory—for the speaker's behavior, which is then tested against further observations.

Ooh dear. And I believe AI has extra training in being charitable in its replies.

But this was a useful prompt. It reminds me now that anomalous monism was the bugbear. Biosemiotics really killed that one stone dead.

That's part of the problem... the idea is equivocal. — Banno

So the problem is that it speaks to both sides? Curious.

This makes sense, although I hadn’t put it in these terms to myself before. — T Clark

Remember that life is a ratchet. And what better embodies an intent than a ratchet?

I often hear it said that science doesn't progress through cumulative knowledge and understanding, but through paradigm shifts. I don't think it's entirely one or the other and I don't think the 'paradigm shift' paradigm is an accurate picture except at the broadest scales. — Janus

Biologists were equally obsessed over the debate whether evolutionary change was gradual or punctuated. And the best answer is that intermittently is what you get quite randomly. Nothing much happening then all the buses arriving at once.

So paradigm shifts are another such fake controversy. If progress or growth is happening, it is going to be happening freely over all its scales.

Paradigm shifts large and small, swift and slow, will be resulting from a collective habit of inquiry. And intermittency is in fact a statistical measure of this being the case. Paradigm shifts ought to be attracted to a powerlaw distribution if the underlying paradigm shifting process is freely doing its job.

Even apparent patternlessness is a fundamental pattern of nature that maths explains - rather than merely describes. Whatever wombats might otherwise believe.

He has fallen back from arguing against a substantive position ("explanations are important to science," or something of the like), to arguing against the bogeyman of a "complete" explanation. — Leontiskos

Long ago I noted that this was the “wombat defence”. Retreat into your burrow and turn your arse to the world. Block out all intrusive thoughts,

But AI now tells me that I was too hasty. Or at least why one wouldn’t want to poke their head into his burrow in a hurry. :grin:

Wombats defend themselves by retreating into their burrows and using their tough, heavily reinforced rumps to block the entrance and crush an attacker's head against the tunnel's roof. Their "butt of steel" provides a powerful defense, allowing them to slam a predator with deadly force, making them dangerous even to much larger animals

Yes, pattern recognition is our strength, but it can also lead us astray at times. Just because we see the shape of a puppy in the clouds, doesn't imply there's anything truly dog-like up there. — Relativist

But patterns have to be enduring to mislead us for longer than a few moments. A dog is hard to mistake for anything else as we can recognise it from all sorts of angles in all sorts of contexts.

Which again says something useful about the difference between an explanation and a description.

Einstein didn't work out general relativity by starting with a set of equations and see where they'd lead. He had a hunch, an insight that led him to mathematically connect the dots. — Relativist

Famously his happiest thought on gravity was imagining the weightlessness a man would feel falling of a roof. This led to the equivalence principle - the symmetry between gravity and acceleration. But of course Galileo had already put such a thought half in mind with his observation that a uniformly moving body feels no acceleration. And Einstein had been searching hard to include gravity into special relativity.

So hunches arise only in suitably constrained contexts. We suddenly see things from the right angle, having tried many other angles.

The formulator of, what becomes, a conspiracy theory - may see a pattern. In itself, that's perfectly fine. But errors creep in when he starts to apply confirmation bias, and fails to challenge some of his own assumptions. They stop trying to solve a problem, and begin just rationalizing their hunch. The problem accelerates when other like-minded people embrace it, and contribute to the rationalization, and praise each others' brilliance. The process is quite different from past, brilliant insights that have proved so fruitful. It's a corruption. — Relativist

I’m watching this happen in real time after Charlie Kirk’s shooting. And the process is not so simple.

The problem is that we do live in a world where everyone is telling self-interested stories. Governments - even when their intentions are good - will edit the facts to make them palatable for public consumption. Any citizen who starts to dig into the facts as they are presented will always seem to find more and more that does not fit the narrative.

The question remains as to whether that structure is in the world or in the description. — Banno

What difference does it make to instead say the question remains as to whether that structure is in the world or in the explanation?

But there's a difference in our methodological dispositions that may be irreconcilable. ... I think complete explanations are completely wrong. — Banno

Again, your choice of terminology bakes in your conclusions.

Would my holism be concerned with completeness or the all-encompassing? Do I really yearn to list every detail. Make a complete description. Or do I instead want the ground of a most general explanation – in terms of constraining whatever pragmatic task is at hand. Don't I say I seek the dichotomy as that which is the logically encompassing – mutually exclusive AND jointly exhaustive?

So make your excuses and go. All you have proved to your own satisfaction is something I never really said. Not even close. :up:

The hypothesis of alien landings is not an inference to the best explanation of all available facts. — Relativist

What seems to be missing from this discussion is that life can be full of accidents. So abduction has to be the kind inference that is filtering the events of the world in that light. Not all facts might be salient in a causal sense although accidental facts can occasion equal surprise.

Abduction thus would speak to this tricky thing of making smart judgements. What you are looking for are the clues to a causal explanation. Some logic that lies behind a pattern of events. The thing that brains are indeed evolved to do. And so why abduction seems such a psychological process and not really one that can be described as a formal method. It just how we can get started on the public and formal part, which is the deduction of consequences and inductive confirmation of the hypothesis we chose to throw out there in public.

So what we are inferring is that we can see through a haze of accidental particulars to the simple generality of some grounding causal constraint. Not every fact that seems surprising need also be salient. The salient facts give themselves away by starting to assemble into some kind of constraining pattern. The kind of general process that could have generated these particular facts in a non-accidental way.

Our brains are thankfully just rather good at such pattern processing. They are evolved to separate signal from noise.

To talk about abduction is just to highlight the fact that we do start out with some natural ability to find reasons in nature. We can perceive its structure. We can generalise its order.

And then we can get on with the business of constructing theories and running the tests. The epistemic technology that we socially construct to create that Peircean community of pragmatic inquiry.

Isn't describing things in terms of symmetry still describing them? — Banno

Bigger and bigger descriptions. Still descriptions. Awesome descriptions. — Banno

I'll accept that, if you will accept that the explanation is no more than a more usable description. — Banno

You can see the pattern here. When confronted by what seems like a dichotomy - description versus explanation - you feel a need to reduce it rather than understand its systems logic. You want to collapse a pincer movement to the simplicity of a monism. One thing has to be made the ground and the other shown to be merely derivative of that.

But dichotomies have a holistic logic. They identify complementary limits. They speak to the unity of opposites. Two things cut against each other.

So if we must divide things as descriptions vs explanations, I would point how they make sense as the complementary limits on inquiry and you would find every way to insist that only one could be the true ground.

And that is what I was pointing out in reminding that Peircean reasoning secures itself by going strongly in two complementary directions. Towards first deducing the logical consequences of some abductive leap towards an explanation, and then doing the other thing of seeking inductive confirmation of those worked-out consequences. So framing a theory – a model of the causes – and then doing the experiment. Generating predictions of observables. Measurements that are publicly understood within some communuity of inquiry as suitable evidence of a claim.

So far as the causation vs correlation debate goes, it should be plain that this Peircean method both accepts the Humean limits on knowledge and also challenges them. The whole business is proudly sociological. Truth arises within a community of inquiry.

Even what could count for correlations is subjective in the sense the rules for measuring need that common agreement. The principle of fallibilism arises quite naturally as hypotheses only get inductive level confirmation. We can jump in with our belief to get the ball rolling, but we bear in mind that we are only constraining our scope to doubt it. Reasonable levels of belief are all we can hope for in the end.

But then on the other hand there is the working out of the deductive consequences of some line of thought. Science is not just mere descriptions of the world when it has moved on to the structuralism of framing mathematical strength theories.

So you started bringing up the laws of nature. And in physics, these are solidly grounded on the mathematics of symmetry. Noether is just one example. The whole of relativity and quantum theory are rooted in explorations of symmetry principles and how they must shape the world in ways which have no other alternative. It is the same as when Plato talked about the five Platonic solids. Their existence are not a sociological fact or a descriptive fact. There just is no damn choice about it under the constraints of symmetry. We can be of sure of that as we can be of anything.

Which is to say, still not absolutely sure. Just as we can't be absolutely sure that when we read numbers off dials, well maybe we were a bit squiffy at the time. But as a community of inquiry, physics seems to know what it is doing. It has a ground both for its causal speculations and its correlational practices. It goes in both these directions strongly and so sets up the best available pincer movement with which to pin down a pragmatic description of physical reality.

So all the debate about the sociology of science is one thing. Of course science is sociological.

But what is going wrong here is your thesis that "everything is description, so nothing can be explanation". That sounds logical to the reductionist. But a holist can see why that is a big fail.

When you look at science, you find that it drives towards the two complementary limits of inquiry. Causal accounts and observational confirmation. Two things that must be connected by the third thing of their feedback impact on each other. Each direction must directly inform the other. Explanation must inform our descriptions and description inform our explanations.

So we can claim to know about causality once we have models framed at the level of mathematical structure. Possibility is itself limited by symmetry. And by producing the correlative evidence, we likewise limit the possibilities from the other angle of the inductive confirmation. Between the two, we can arrive at beliefs that are far from merely sociological.

Further, is the mooted "natural law" an explanation of what happens, or just a description - "for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction" sets out what happens; does it explain what happens? — Banno

A very odd take. Laws appeal to symmetries. So they are grounded in mathematical logic.

The third law seems a good example where no one would much think it describes the world as ordinarily experienced. But once we grasp the principles of Galilean relativity, then we could frame things in this way.

So sure, we might only observe correlations and not causes. But then the maths of symmetry have an unarguable logic. We can’t just make that shit up for sociological reasons. We have deep metaphysical principles that explain how the world is exactly the way it is.

Following the symmetries is how metaphysics and then natural science got so good at causal accounts of the world. So good that dramatic failures of correlation became required for folk to re-examine their mathematical arguments.

There were pretty good reasons to expect supersymmetry to show up once our particle colliders got into Higgs energy territory. But that now looks a busted dream.

This doesn’t mean we then should junk symmetry as the foundation of causal explanations. But it does suggest that some wrong assumptions got built in somewhere along the line. We need to find some further subtlety of the maths that we’ve been missing. This is what particle physics in particular has been doing the past 100 years.

Correlations might tell you about observable events. But symmetries tell you about the logical structure of Being. The necessary causes of there being events to be observed, even when those events are essentially probabilistic and so more on the inductive side of the fence.

More recent developments in Philosophy show us how experience and custom are themselves grounded in the community in which we live. — Banno

Like wow. Who woulda thunk? Speaking here for the anthropological and psychological science that provided the evidence that might have disturbed the dogmatic slumbers of philosophy.

Abduction is worse. The SEP notes that Peirce’s conception of abduction shifts over his long career, making it hard to pin down a coherent, stable doctrine. — Banno

Yep. Peirce's account of abduction goes right off the rails where he turns spiritualist on the issue. His il lume naturale, or the natural human instinct for making correct guesses. It is like his writings on agapism, or the cosmological principle of creative growth through love.

So Peirce – as a philosopher and scientist – can be pinged on exactly these grounds of being embedded in some rather over-powering sociological context. The social pressure to conform his views to the religiosity and transcendentalism of his place and time was immense. It cost him his career at Harvard. It paid him to lean into it when he was dirt poor and living off Christian charity in rural obscurity.

Peirce is a good example of how the most penetrating mind is also caught in the web of whatever is its very particular social context. And his account of abduction breaks down exactly because he is being forced towards explanations that are plainly not natural to the way he started out in his argument.

What is certain is that abduction is no improvement on induction, and certainly cannot overcome Hume's objections. — Banno

So you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that sociology is both important and then not important in how the method of pragmatic reason was formulated.

Again, perhaps you don't even understand Peirce's tripartite cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Or maybe – for sociological reasons – you give your distorted reading that favours the metaphysical prejudices of some other time and place.

But whatever. Scholars of pragmatism have no problem separating the logic of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation from the sudden lurch towards religiosity once Peirce reached the issue of how humans in practice get good at striking upon clever hypotheses.

If that fact needs its own explanation, then others here are already stating the obvious that some pragmatic paradigm always exists as a launch point. And the departure can be either an extension or a rejection of that paradigm would say. It is another sociological fact of science that often its most creative minds have crossed over from some other discipline and so have the advantage of some other paradigm.

We don't have to believe that abduction is about divine inspiration. A proper sociological understanding of science – or maths, or philosophy – can show how novelty is generated by quite everyday habits of thought. Even art school sets out to train its students to hone their vision by the application of a pragmatic process of invention.

So yes, everything humans do has a socially constructed context. But who would you turn to get real answers about the reality of that in the end? Probably not a logician or philosopher. At least not unless they had studied the available social and psychological science.

What these examples show is not just that abduction is sometimes mistaken, but that it leads to a lack of progress, and that other, wildly differing background assumptions are instead needed to progress our understanding. — Banno

What bollocks. Abduction starts the game of pragmatic reasoning as you have to have a belief to doubt. All abduction is saying is that we can pick up this game from some generally sensible point. We don't start naked but already can call on some kind of useful paradigm.

Abduction is followed by the deduction of general consequences and the inductive confirmation that comes as the observational evidence piles up. Or doesn't. If we find the original paradigm wanting, we become receptive to the alternatives. Some new better basis of abduction is sought.

The point I would press here is again that what makes science work is not a series of logical rules, but a group of sociological rules. It's not a special type of logic - induction or abduction - that makes science effective, but the open interplay between scientists. — Banno

Why did you omit mention of deduction I wonder? And if everything is sociology, then how is any type of logic special?

What makes Peircean pragmatism special is that it identifies an epistemic method with a structure that combines logic into a generalised process of inquiry. It is logic put to proper work and not some noodling branch of maths. Set theory for beginners.

Then the obvious...

theories were not created for sociological reasons but because of a restriction that phenomena and physical referential problems impose on the formulation of theories. — JuanZu

The sociology is constrained by the reality. And that is pretty much the whole bleeding point of having an epistemic method. To dig ourselves out of the hole of subjectivity in some fashion where we don't also lose sight of our socially-constructed self-hood.

Pragmatism just sets up the usual thing of being a semiotic organism at a more abstracted level. We learn to speak in terms of equations and observables.

We see how folk operate at their everyday level of sociological belief construction and feel, well, things could be more rigorously done than that. And after the wheels of the scientific approach get moving, the sociology finds itself having to react to the rapid advances in pragmatic knowledge that follows.

Mostly trying to put the problem child in its place. Telling it that is nothing so special after all. Because beauty, truth, god, mind, values, faith, perfection. Or postmodernism, relativism, diversity and other forms of sociological blah, blah, blah.

People generally love to attempt to simplify interpersonal interactions like that; as if people were mere things, objects, that can (and should) be shoved around. — baker

But the larger reason for this is that a rationally structured world is based on the logic of counterfactuality. An intelligent system is based on being a pattern of switching. Action must be focused in a way that it is either aiming in the one direction or its exact other. Either definitely doing something, or definitely not. And from that digital counterfactuality can arise the complexity of a whole that knows what it is doing, where it is going, behaving holistically as more than the sum of its parts.

So organismic order is a hierarchy of dichotomous switches all the way down, from top to bottom. The enforced simplicity of either doing the one thing or the other.

The body is either in a generally anabolic state or catabolic state. Either accumulating energy stores under the general coordination of the hormone insulin, or spending that energy under the coordination of the hormone glucagon. The pancreas is the organ flipping that general switch.

Likewise the body's general emotional state – its visceral state – is either tilted towards the sympathetic or parasympathetic pole. Towards fight or flight, or towards rest and digest.

Just as you don't want to be trying to both store and spend energy at the same time, you don't want to be both gearing for action and gearing for relaxation at the same time. Evolution just naturally makes sense of things by finding the organising dichotomies that give you two exactly contrasting system goals, so that you can then divide your life either going in the one direction or its other. A clear cut choice can get made. And when the context changes, you can rebalance the system by going back the opposite way again.

Cognition is the same story. We get aroused or we get relaxed. We get keyed up and attentive, or we mooch along on automatic pilot. We become either alert and wary or we get very concentrated and task focused. We are designed by natural logic to be able to go in two opposite or complementary directions in any facet of life where being in a generally coordinated state of being matters.

Systems never do just the one thing. They are always critically poised between doing quite opposite things. It is only by clearly being able to go in a direction that it is also possible to clearly be doing the inverse of that – and so reverse things back in a way that overall winds up being a state of suitable balance.

That is the basic circuit logic of an organic system. Of course complication can be layered on complication. If you have a fight-flight switching centre, you can add a freeze command on top. You have then a choice of running at a threat, running away from a threat, or freezing in immobility in the hope that the threat simply fails to notice you. Rather than reacting instantly and reflexively, you can also reflexively force yourself to take the other path of not reacting until the nature of the threat becomes more clear.

Anyway, this is the general principle that organises life and mind as intelligent structure. As systems with a clarity of action and so a maximal capacity for learning and adapting to the challenges of existing. If you are doing one thing, then you can't be doing the other. So you are definitely maxxing out what you are doing in terms of what you are not doing. You can be doing what the occasion definitely demands that you should rather than piddling about doing neither the one thing nor the other.

This same dichotomising logic applies at the level of the human social organism. Society has to be structured by a strong counterfactuality. Everything has to be reduced to the clarity of behavioural switches that then give that society is complex emergent order. Every part of the social system is functionally focused on the choice that is doing what is right in one context, as doing the other is what is right in another context.

Social order before language – the natural social order of chickens, wolves, chimps, cows – is based on dominance~submission behaviours. A pecking order. Social animals evolve a clarity about whether the lead or follow. And this can be fairly rigid, or as flexible and in the moment, as the overall circumstances demand. A larger brain can cope with more complexity layered on its simpler responses.

Humans then have language as a new medium to regulate and coordinate social behaviour. We become tremendously complex and plastic in the way that we are organised. But still, broadly the metaphysical logic of the dichotomy shows through. Behaviour is intelligent to the degree it is sharply switchable between two precisely contrasting or counterfactual states.

So a social scientist notes that the broadest dichotomy determining human behaviour is competition~cooperation. We have to switch our mindset between these two poles of social direction in ways that are – in that moment at least – pretty clear to all concerned. There are social contexts in which both poles of behaviour are recognised as "being the right thing for this occasion".

This need for switchability has only become more pronounced as human society has become more socially complex and collectively intelligent.

In a foraging tribe, individuals are mostly going along with the tribe. Acting at the level of families doing family things just like they have been doing for generations. But when we build up to a modern technological and civilised lifestyle, we really need individuals who operate with personal decisiveness in that new environment. They must demonstrate to us that they are causal agents with complete independence – their own freewill and conscience – so that we know they are either in the mind to either do that thing we want, or they are not.

This is all rather frustrating to have to deal with. But that is the structural logic of an intelligent system. Out of clarity of doing that thing, and not the opposite thing, you can build up a system that is able to – at the level of a unified balancing act – doing the general something which is what the social order itself desires as an appropriate response to the demands of the world as it seems at that general collective moment.

For choice to scale, you have to construct choice at the level of a system's smallest parts. It is the logic of dichotomies all the way down the hierarchy. So at the bottom of any hierarchical or systems order, you discover that all its parts are indeed shaped as switches. A counterfactual choice to be made.

Another frequent application of single-cause thinking is when one person tries to get another person to do something and assumes that one single command or push should be enough (and that if it isn't it means that the other person is "obstinate", "rebellious", or "stupid"). — baker

So yes. We are always having to look for that switch to flip in the direction we want. If I feel you are not cooperating, I have to assume you are competing. And I have to use words that are socially effective in getting you to switch your mindset in the diametrically opposed direction.

Of course, when one person accuses another person of being obstinate, rebellious or stupid, it often doesn't go so well. It rather confirms them in their current setting.

To the degree we can instead simply assert social hierarchy dominance over them, then perhaps they might meekly submit. That prelinguistic social circuitry still exists underneath all the more civilising linguistic layers.

But it is hard as just a single individual to speak as the voice of the social collective view – the one that can rightfully demand cooperation rather than competition. To throw the switch the way you want it, you have to construct things so that the other person feels they are being called out by a whole jury of their peers. And that requires more linguistic artistry. You have to say, look I understand, but everyone is going to see and hear about the way you are behaving. I'm trying to protect you against that generalised opprobrium. Mate, you're going to get cancelled by everyone that matters.

My point is that intrapersonal relations do have a general structural logic. And while it may seem that we are always just looking for the little buttons to push, the levers to pull, to be effective in achieving what we want, we have to step back and see the situation as the social system that it is.

The causality is complex even if it is all built on the relative simplicity of the dichotomous logic of the counterfactual switch. We want others to have a simple on/off button. But the switch we really have to flip is that hugely complex one of society's global balancing act that is the general choice between competing and cooperating – something we need to flip the switch on even at the level of warring and trading nations.

Although we can revert to dominance and submission games. That does also work even if it subverts the more civilised approach we have tried to construct through language and rationality.

Rather than blame, I would more likely say responsibility or accountability. As you note that’s in relation to causality as it applies to human action. I intended to avoid all the complications associated with that by limiting the discussion to non-intentional causality. — T Clark

Hah. But my argument would be that the mechanical notion of causality only arises within the context of intentional being. As Hoffmann shows, life begins at the point that a mechanical logic starts to get imposed on warm and wet entropic world.

So this is the irony. We are driven to thinking of Nature in terms of buttons and levers, or switches and ratchets, because that is how intentionality can become a thing.

Nature is its own thing – still a system, but a physical one ruled by centralising tendencies rather than deliberate intentions. And life and mind then introduce mechanical form – a structure of counterfactual switching – so as to build up its own semiotic brand of complexification.

Life and mind are what set up Nature as a new cause and effect tale. Flipping an informational switch can be the actual efficient cause of a resulting physical effect. Reach for the light button and that is the definite reason something happened.

Nature sort of vaguely has a causal structure in this fashion. A single falling grain of sand can be blamed for the avalanche that followed on the critically poised sloping side of a sand hill.

But add models to nature and a rigid counterfactual logic can be imposed on the pattern of material events. We go from the analog to the digital. Causality itself changes state from the materially real to the mathematically ideal.

There is a continuity in terms of the systems view of causality, but also that great stonking discontinuity in the topological organisation of that causality. And it is the notion of mechanical causality – the logic of the counterfactual switching mechanism – that both bridges and divides these two worlds. It is the switch that implements what Howard Pattee dubbed the epistemic cut on which life and mind depend. The epistemic cut that separates the informational model from the entropic world.

Pattee is the constraints guy, by the way. He made the distinction between holonomic and non-holonomic constraints. Or the constraints that entropic nature just has, and the constraints that informational models can construct and add to regulate that world in a mechanical fashion.

If you want to expand your causal vocabulary, Pattee has done a lot in that area.

No. My mindset is based on my understanding of how the word causality is generally understood by people who don’t recognize the limitations of the concept associated with complex systems. — T Clark

But in the OP you also said…

When I go back to what I wrote about the chain of causality, one thing that jumps out to me is that constraints—events that prevent future events—have a bigger effect on what happens in the world then causes—events that result in future events. — T Clark

…so naturally I thought that was the direction you might explore. The systems perspective. Causality as so much more than cause and effect. The story of just efficient cause.

I’m not familiar with that. I only turned to Collingwood when he confirms my prejudices. — T Clark

:grin:

I agree with all this, although, as I’ve said many times in this thread, I don’t think it makes sense to call this causality. — T Clark

That seems odd on what is supposed to be a philosophy board. Again, you introduced constraints as a better approach in the OP. Was the thread meant to tread no further in that direction? :chin:

Ahem… — T Clark

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments, e.g. electrons in a physics experiment. It works for certain everyday events at human scale, e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. It is a much less useful explanation for most phenomena. My claim is that there are only a limited number of situations where it has Collingwood’s logical efficacy. — T Clark

Which bit are you disagreeing about? Reduction to efficient cause is a mindset based on certain metaphysical presuppositions. You say the logical efficacy of that epistemic approach is limited. And then you conclude this seems to be the end of the matter as what more could be done?

My suggestion was to get back to the metaphysics as it was first envisaged in Greek discourse. The larger model that Aristotle in particular provided. The theory of causality as it has since been worked out in the mathematical structures described by the systems science tradition.

And didn't Collingwood offer his own update on Hegelian dialectics – one that boils down to the unity of opposites – as well as being an epistemic idealist?

So he seemed to be going in the right direction on the epistemic issues. He just didn't then apply the same holism to physical causality as he did to the structure of thought and human history. He didn't spot how the logic was fundamentally the same – rooted in symmetries and their breaking.

We can't – in Kantian fashion – know the truth of our metaphysical presuppositions directly. They are after all logical arguments if they have any rigour worth the name. But we sure as heck can test our metaphysical models in terms of how they fare. And mechanical causality both has to presuppose so much and soon runs out of road once it passes mere complication and tries to move on to tackling self-referential complexity.

Complexity is different as it speaks to emergence, self-organisation and topological order. A theory of the Universe has to be able to model the emergence of space, time and energy as its three major ingredients. And why shouldn't physics and cosmology have that ambition?

Quantum Uncertainty does place limits on some traditional universal assumptions underlying the "mechanistic mindset". But those squishy lower-level limits don't seem to have much efficacy on the macro scale. So, we continue to depend on the "pragmatic usefulness" of our causal models for designing machines. — Gnomon

But biology in fact depends on the mechanical harnessing of quantum causes. An enzyme is a clamp to lock organic molecules into positions where quantum tunnelling can then overcome energy barriers and bind them chemically.

So the nanoscale is the semi-classical realm of physics. And life exists by sitting just on the classical side of that and tapping into quantum uncertainty to beat the classical odds that constrain chemical equilibria.

Life and mind don't emerge from quantum foundations. But they do dip back into the quantum realm so as to build their own little classical paradise in the midst of the thermal battering that is trying to build any organic structure at the nanoscale of flying H2O molecules that is a room temperature droplet of water.

So biology is mastery over both quantum and classical forms of uncertainty. It is a molecular machinery that lives right on the edge of chaos where the physics is at its most volatile. But that radical instability is then turned into the energy that a genome can harness with a set of cunning plans.

As long as we keep those acausal animals penned-up on the quantum scale, we seem to be safe from the anarchy of Chaos. — Gnomon

A book well worth reading is Peter Hoffmann's Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos.

Classical chaos and quantum uncertainty are what life and mind harness so as to exist. Information can extract work from entropy gradients. And the wilder the ride, the greater the return when you eventually learn how to tame it.

There is a reason life and mind have continued to evolve in the direction of looking for the most dangerous and volatile ways to eke out a living. Modern human society rather proves the point.

Living on the edge is fine. So long as you are sufficiently in charge of the causal structure extracting the energy to do work. So long as the damn thing doesn't suddenly blow up in your face.

Is it the top-down logical or intentional efficacy that the OP was arguing against? — Gnomon

Not sure what your question is. But if we are talking about the epistemic issue of the pragmatic usefulness of our causal models of the world, then understanding the Cosmos to be run by the dichotomy of chance and necessity is how we can then insert our own semiotic intentionality into the scheme of things.

We can’t change the laws of physics or the structure of maths. But we can have the aim of constraining chance by constructing constraints on natural processes and so harnessing their flows to our ends.

It is this cosmology that inspires us to straitjacket nature in a mechanised order. Fence the sheep, channel the water, explode gasoline in a system of pistons and cranks.

So the OP was about the limits of the efficacy of the mechanistic mindset. The complaint was that because it seemed a severely limited view of Nature in practice, one might as well give up on the very idea of believing in “causality”.

My argument was that the world does have its own actual causal order. And understanding that would inform us as to how to get the most out of a mechanical mindset while also getting the benefits of a more organic view of Nature as it is in itself. One that includes even life and mind as part of this cosmic order as the source of a semiotic level of constraints over the shape of the world.

Bodies and brains exist by imposing a mechanical logic on the processes of the world. A system of switches and levers which starts down at the molecular nanoscale of enzymes and all the other molecular machinery that regulates the chemistry and structure on which intelligent life is based.

So biology inserts intentionality into the world ruled by chance and necessity at the level of chemical reactions. Information regulates entropy. Flows get directed. Reactions are turned on and turned off by a genetically encoded machinery.

The mechanical mindset is pretty effective as it is how life and mind can arise in the first place. And the irony is that it is the Cosmos that has the purer organic logic. It is a system of self-organising flows that exists by evolving at the level of its own laws and the material freedoms that arise due to these laws becoming firmly fixed in place.

So nothing about metaphysics is quite as it first seems. Life and mind are the further thing of a mechanistic causality that arises within the organicism of a Cosmos that truely has to evolve its own self-making balance.

Consciousness is just what it is like to be in this kind of mechanised modelling relation with a world - a model of the world as it would seem to be from the point of view of us as a knot of intentionality within it, looking to further constrain its flows by applying our mechanising mindset wherever we find it possible.

How does this relate to the sign, the object, and the interpretant. — T Clark

As ontology to epistemology. A two for one deal. You have the sign relation as an account of how an organism models its world. And then you have this psychologised logic to account for how the world itself could self-organise as a pansemiotic rational process.

So behind it all is a universal triadic logic. But then that is applied to two quite different kinds of self-organising worlds. A cosmos and a mind. A Universe that is its own self-interpretive process, and an organism as what can live in that world by an actual system of sign.

If you want the more ontological story of systems causality, you have to look to Peirce’s writings on the dichotomy of tychism and synechism for instance.

The same triadic relation was worked out at all its levels from phenomenology to logic. But the lines between things could be blurry because of that.

Tendencies are something that are created during the development of a process. Whereas teleology is the end that is found at the beginning of the process, even before the process begins. In my opinion, they are two very different things. — JuanZu

I hear you. But quantum physics does raise the issue of retrocausality as part of its holism. In some restricted sense, the future does act backwards on the past. Entanglement applies in time as well as space.

So that – along with the principle of least action – puts tendencies and purposes on some kind of connected spectrum. Finality is in play at some level that needs to be accounted for. So I wouldn't want to get into the psychological habit of leaving it out.

A small difference in the physicalist sense, but a potentially major one in the metaphysical sense.

To me, teleology seems like a mystery to be clarified. For me, it has to be related to subjective time, which is different from the extensive time of physics. — JuanZu

Well that seems no mystery at all from the point of view of the biosemiotician. An organism is in a modelling relation with its world. So of course it is in the business of thinking ahead and getting organised by anticipating what is to come.

Consciousness is intentional as modelling is about predicting what can be expected to happen so as to have some say in the matter. We can't wait to react to the world after it happens as mostly that would be too late to change things. But we can prevent the future happening if we act ahead of the moment.

It takes 120-200 milliseconds to even react to the world at the level of reflexive habit. To hear the starters pistol in a race, or to see which way the ball bounced after the tennis serve got struck.

Then it takes more like 500 milliseconds to form a fully attentive and comprehended understanding of whatever surprising or unexpected thing just happened half a second ago. If we couldn't get ourselves set up ahead of time with our psychological modelling, we couldn't even exist in the world as functional beings. So being purposeful is where it all starts. Having some set of intentions. And then picking up the pieces after the predictions go wrong.

Just the same as biological evolution. Except this is the evolution of a world model over lifetimes of learning right down to the last thought you could have had before the disaster struck.

Genetic variability is blind, and mutations can be of any kind. — JuanZu

Evolvability itself evolves, Organisms can tune the rate of their variability. Some genes are far more conserved than others.

And then selection acts at the population level of gene pools and their allele frequencies.

So yes, mutations might be blind. But even that is purposeful in that the blindness and the mutation are constrained by the fact that organisms have already established the 99% they have in common with members of their gene pool and the kinds of gene complexes they might want to most expose in the next round of life’s lottery.

Apart from Dawkins, not many biologists are zealots about life being a matter of blind chance. Indeed, life became complex because it could turn evolution into a game of making good genetic predictions with the right amount of mistakes to also keep on learning about the world.

The genes offer the environment a suitable range of options to choose from. Then tailors the gene pool to track any changes in this customer preference.

Or at least there is another causal narrative to offer beyond Dawkin’s blind watchmaker.

I have no problem with the idea of constraint as long as we eliminate teleology. — JuanZu

Sure. But the system’s approach can deal in grades of teleology. Minds can form purposes, bodies can shape functions and then the physical realm can have its tendencies. Its directions everywhere wants to go, its states that are its global statistical attractors.

After all, physics can’t get by without its principle of least action. So constraints shape physical tendencies. Nothing too metaphysically alarming about that? And the other thing of neurobiological purpose can then be understood as a well developed and highly evolved version of a mere statistical tendency.

A tendency is thus a state of the very least constraint. Yet least action is still a principle that physics finds essential when accounting for why something would happen the way it does.

Causation without Intent is what we call Accident. — Gnomon

I would suggest that what we call an accident is the opposite of what we call a necessity. So the more fundamental dichotomy is chance and necessity. Or what in the systems view is the top down constraints and the bottom up degrees of freedom.

In the most general metaphysical sense, you have the global finality that imposes a structure of necessitation on the occurrence of events. Some set of constraints that limit the probabilities. But then the corollary of that is that what isn’t forbidden is free to happen. From the physical perspective, that is what becomes the accidental. The degrees of freedom. The actions that are chance happenings so far as the global finality is concerned. The kind of differences that make no difference as far as the system’s most general purposes are concerned.

Then within this most general physical view, we can start to talk of life and mind as intentional or dispositional systems. Systems in an encoded of informational modelling relation with their world.

So a mind is in a highly intentional state to the degree it is organised to eliminate all the kinds of accidents that it feels would matter. The differences that would make a difference.

Accidents can still happen. We may fluff the tennis shot. But then we can go work on our shot and seek to minimise future such errors.

So intention is the kind of global state of constraint that an intelligent system can form. It has a brain to set things up in a way that more or less ensures a ball is at least going to try to clear a net and land in a court.

The opposite of an intent is then a mistake. An error. Something that by definition is meaningful as we would want to correct our habits the next time around.

The Earth doesn’t have any reason to care if the cliff side crumbles. That is just an accident. The laws of thermodynamics are in fact being respected by this sudden act of erosion. It is necessary only that the statistics average out for the laws to be upheld.

But the architect needs to care if his buildings show tendencies to crumble in ways not intended. He will have to do more work on ensuring this cannot happen in future.

So again, we have the one most general model of causality that applies to Nature as a whole. And then we have the subset view which is tailored to explaining life and mind. Overall, Nature is a balance of chance and necessity. Semiotic systems are then a pragmatic balance of their intentions and outcomes. Accidents can become errors to be avoided. A further dimension of purpose and meaning arises as the world is now being organised - or at least some tiny part of it - by a sense of personal agency. An organism that is acting with a constraining point of view,

I wonder if what we call ‘laws of nature’ are our codified ways of structuring reality, not independent features of the universe. — Tom Storm

Both things can be true. We do impose our epistemology on Nature. We are creating a narrative. But also Nature is there to be spoken about. We can hope to tell a story that is pragmatically useful. It will relate us to the world in a relationship that works.

Extinction is an effect of the asteroid striking the Earth. However, it is not the constraint of a possibility. For that possibility would make us think of a world where that possibility exists. — JuanZu

So what is natural selection but a constraint on genetic variety? Biology relies on its evolvability as its primary cause. It creates the possibilities that the world then prunes to shape.

At the level of fundamental physics quantum states are also being thermally decohered. The second law is the general constraint on what exists. And the quantum says even Nature starts by generating a variety of possibilities that a global classical context then prunes to shape.

Reality can’t seem to escape this causal pattern.

Peircean triads. Is it the degrees of freedom below, the constraints above, and the resulting phenomena? — T Clark

That’s it. Between the downward constraints and the bottom up construction, the reality that emerges inbetween as the dynamical balance.

This is the general model of systems causality. Form constrains and matter constructs. A single cell is the membrane enclosing a busy chemistry. A body is a skin enclosing a busy community of cells.

Many other consequences follow. But this is the guts of it.

Although I'm not a ecologist, that's what I'm trying to do here. — T Clark

Yep. And so the issue is whether to give up on causality as it seems to run into the sand after just a few steps up in complication, or instead start developing theories that deal with complexity directly.

I think you were distracted away from a quite valid point. — Banno

:lol: :lol: :lol:

From what I've observed, most people don't recognize the irreducibly complex reality you describe. — T Clark

Yes. This is a point very specific to Peircean semiotics and hierarchy theory. But a relational view of reality is already more irreducibly complex than an atomistic one.

One thing can stand alone, however you have to have two things to relate. And then three things to have a hierarchical relation. The story that is a dichotomisation towards limits plus the spectrum of all the mixed states to be found inbetween.

If you have black and white as two complementary extremes, you must also have all the shades of grey which a black and white mixes. And that makes for a triadic story of complexity. This is a simplistic example. But you can see how it makes threeness the irreducible basis of a world with complex relations. You’ve got to break possibility apart in a way it then can relate over all its scales of being.

Apply that logic then to all the dichotomies that Greek metaphysics left as it legacy. Chance-necessity, part-whole, discrete-continuous, integrate-differentiate, matter-form, one-many, and the rest. The Universe formed as a unity of opposites. The irreducible thing of two opposites and their relational unity.

Your complex and nuanced understanding of causality is not how most people understand it. We civil engineers don't work with machinery, we go out into nature and treat it as machinery. — T Clark

Well the crowd I mixed with were mainly ecologists and biologists.

When you're dealing with such a complex system, why do you need the idea of causality? Of course reality can be described using the language of cause, but why do it? — T Clark

How could you - as an ecologist - even argue with someone who only thinks as a mechanist. If it is their actual causal model of reality where the issue lies, you have to be able to argue at the level of a different brand of causality.

A scientist is giving causal explanations just as the basis of what they do. What is an explanation if not an account of a structure of reasons?

Triple dare? But you haven’t moved on from tautology. Love is love. Good is good. Unity of being is … well, unity I guess. And the being thereof.

A pretty thin metaphysics.

To you apathy, for one example, mild liking as another, are equivalent to hate? — javra

Now you are just making babbling noises.

Though it was quite apparent that your problem was with love. It is to the latter that your replied to me, — javra

But never a topic I raised. And now you don’t want to have to provide an answer. Curious.

But I think this is beginning to touch on the nerve that might have been struck in you to elicit all those emotively hurt feelings, or so it seems — javra

Wishful thinking. I don’t see atheism as a term of abuse. Rather the opposite. But for you, metaphysics seems to be the sound of one hand clapping. Broken at base.

Now, just so it said, I won't apologize for implying that love is good. — javra

And I am saying that if this is going to be a useful distinction – one that has dichotomistic rigour – you need to be able to tell me "as opposed to what?". How can I know what you think love is if you won't tell me what it isn't.

Is not-love = hate? Well hate seems make the world spin pretty fast too. If I am to agree with "love is not a wrong", you do seem to understand that a rational argument requires this dialectical framing. But you should also see that you are again jumping your categories.

If what is not a wrong is a right, then what is the actual wrong that makes love a right? If your answer is hate, then why would it even exist in a world where love is supposedly universal and all there is? I mean the math just doesn't add, does it?

Whereas my kind of dichotomies – which are complementary and not antagonistic – say fine. If love is the unity, what are the opposites it usefully combines.

And in social science, that would be competition and cooperation. Two forms of the good that go together splendidly. The basis of rational and civilised human social and economic order.

Or if an ethologist was invited to join the discussion, we might add in dominance and submission – the way social animals achieve fruitful order in their pride, troop, herd and flock structures.

Is it that the good can only be obtained via a balance between the good and the bad (to not bring in evil)? — javra

I thought you were talking about love. Why the sudden change of topic?

Does good and bad seem to make more sense if we are speaking generally about Nature as a whole? Does speaking of Nature as "universal love" make one loses grip on that straight face? Do we want to want to put our most extreme claims of transcendental being back in its bottle a while? Safer to move what's most fragile out of the way.

And to repeat what I have now had to say way to often, any dichotomy that I supported would be that thing which is a pair of complementary limits, not a pair of antagonistic ones. It is worth balancing two varieties of what is "good". And your metaphysical task is to be able to make that make sense.

One doesn't want to be evenly balance between good and evil, or even love and hate for that matter.

If we are talking the natural structure of pragmatic social order, this is why competition and cooperation work so well together. Each supplies something good and healthy that the other lacks. That is why they combine make the world feel complete. Give it a rounded shape if you like.

But keep spluttering away in suppressed fury. Love! LOVE!!! I tell you.

Or what you can only assert ever more vigourously in lieu of any credible argument.

I simply point out the lack of any argument in your post. Not even any poetry as some kind of evidence. Just some mutterings about sex as rape and praise for Peirce's worst idea.

you apparently caused some pique — Banno

And here is Banjo to join the mean girls with his usual constipated approach to insult. Ohh sir, sir! Well apparently. And to some degree. But surely, surely. Oooh sir!