Yet there is something that is the same in all possible worlds. Perhaps it is something like the DNA. — schopenhauer1

You are trapping yourself into paradox by a logic which insists that identity is about a definable essence or atomic set of facts. Identity is understood in a positive sense as an irreducible "something".

But that is a good argument for instead understanding the issue of identity from a process or probabilistic point of view. That is, identity is defined in an open-ended fashion as a constraint on difference rather than a constitution of similarity.

If you pin your categorisation of "Schop" on a notion of absolute similarity - some unchanging essence - then there is no way to handle exceptions to the rule. Differences will always matter. And so you wind up with the usual paradoxes of thought.

But if instead you take a constraints based approach - a family resemblance, fuzzy set, Bayesian, or a 100 other such implementations of a probabilistic ontology - then the assumption is that there are always differences. Similarity doesn't truly exist. However constraint does exist to distinguish between the differences that make a difference vs the differences that don't make a difference.

Identity then becomes a thread of being defined by a general persistence rather than a specific existence. "Schop" becomes a historically-constrained process that gathers specificity by memory and habit. The identity becomes sharp as the Schop process becomes more and more discriminating about the differences that make a difference to it, versus the differences that don't make a difference to it.

In an "all possible worlds" setting, Schop cuts his nails this morning in one, and Schop cut his nails tomorrow in another. That's a difference. But it doesn't make any particular difference.

And then will be an infinity of worlds in which Schop is cutting his nails at 10.08am precisely this morning, yet every act of clipping is fractionally dissimilar. Differences can't be eliminated as nothing can ever be exactly similar in this life. (Quantum mechanics tells us this is true on the microscale. LaPlacean determinism is ruled out by quantum indeterminism.) Yet also we can see that these infinite fractional differences concerning the historically-constrained identity of "10.08am nail clipping Schop" are differences that really fail to make an essential difference.

So that leaves the question of the differences that do make a difference to Schop as an ongoing process - a developing story of increasingly specified constraint on possibility. A sense of identity is what grows by an accumulation of experiences. Or in other words, an accumulation of habits of discrimination.

Schop starts as a mindless blob - a fertilised ovum. Schop is born - some world of events begins to interact with some set of genetically-coded constraints. Schop becomes a boy and then a man - a history accumulates, habits are formed, memories are made - that increasingly reduce the space of "could have beens" which might count as differences that would have made a difference.

I also want to add, that the implication is that there is no being born "as something else". You could only have been born as you. — schopenhauer1

So you are trapping yourself into a false binary here. Even at the moment of birth, there are all the differences that wouldn't have made a difference as well as all the differences that would have.

The definition of "you" - that assertion of identity - has to be a logically fault-tolerant to apply to the real world. Otherwise you have a logic that only generates paradox.

Identity boils down similarity defined as a limit on difference. Something is essentially the same if it fails to be meaningfully different. That is why exceptions can prove the rule - they demonstrate that there is a constraint in play which is the bit that is unmoved by the accidental.

But the constraints are nothing mystical. They simply are the fact of a developmental history, a process of habit and memory accumulation. They are the information - the capacity for making discriminations - encoded in your genes, your neurons, your habits of thought.

Identity is usually taken in logic to mean absolute similarity. But in reality, identity is only constituted by a relative absence of significant difference. In nature, there is always difference. But also, by the same token, indifference.

It is like they say about the river. You never step into the same river twice. Yet it is also always the same river ... for all practical purposes. Every H2O molecule is a different one today from the ones yesterday. No ripple of turbulence is a mirror of the day before. But the differences don't matter a damn. They blur away into the enduring generality that is the probabilistic or macro view of that river.

The SI unit of Power is the watt which in SI base units is equal to a (kg x m^2) / s^3. Wouldn't this indicate that the mind has mass? — Daniel

Minds certainly seem to have considerable inertia. They are very resistance to changes in their line of travel.

A summary position is that -

1) The US created the post-WW2 world order - the global free trade system - as a bulwark against communism. It was left the only superpower standing and did the smart self-interested thing of preventing communist takeover of a war broken world.

But then Eastern Bloc cracked and crumbled with surprising suddenness in 1991. The US had won the Cold War but then failed to figure out how to cope with the peace. It was again the hegemon by default. Much more so even than after WW2 where it still had to dismantle Britain and other still colonial empires.

A succession of weak presidents meant the US was a world leader without any particular world vision. The situation became divided into a "Davos elite" hoping to continue onwards with the "globalisation project" towards some kind of planetary governance based on the kind of techocracy that is at the heart of all actually successful modern democracies, and then the US blundering on with an increasingly domestic focus on its interests.

It didn't actually want to lead the free world. It just wanted to be free to do its own thing. Burn oil, eat junk food, gamble on markets. Party it up.

(Of course, the technocratic part of US society wanted the opposite. But their moment had passed with the Cold War challenge too).

2) The world has moved on towards some kind of next step. But China can be discounted as a major player. It is a bubble enterprise tied to the free market world order that the US created and continued to underwrite even after it had lost its main security purpose. China matters as part of the much more important story of a technocratic/democratic Asia. South East Asia’s 2.5b people beats China for population and its GDP should match China by the end of the decade.

The logic of the situation is that the US is going to turn inwards on itself finally. It has so many geopolitical advantages, it simply doesn't need the hassle of trying to run the world.

The US has the world’s best chunk of geography. It has the best chunk of food growing land and an ideal range of growing climates. It has an isolated position that means it never has to fear rowdy neighbours or physical invasion.

It has demographic power too in a population of 330 million that isn’t greying dramatically like all its rivals. It has energy abundance with its shale oil and gas, plus the easiest transition to a practical renewables infrastructure.

It has - as @ssu underlines - the dollar embedded as the world reserve currency. That is an incredible economic advantage that will be tough to unwind. It also has now tied in Canada and Mexico as its North American alliance - Mexico as the replacement China manufacturing hub, and Canada as yet more resources and growing land.

So nothing stops the US curling up within the comfort of its own North American empire and saying the world can go f*** itself. The inbuilt advantages are so many that even really bad political leaders can't actually sink the ship.

In this scenario, the US is no longer the world leader - except in the various ways it might still want to get involved in running other people's affairs.

The desirable outcome is a world that continues to globalise - but only via a more intense phase of regionalisation (the view being pushed by Parag Khanna for instance).

So Khanna talks of an age where we move on from hegemonic states - single nations running their respective empires - to regional power networks. You already have Europe as a reasonably integrated system - organised in its own "typically European" way.

Likewise Asia will emerge as a geographically organised community of interest. Belt and Road could be an important part of that integration, but China will not then "own" the region as a result. It becomes a large component of a more general workable identity - depending on which way the CCP go.

Then the US as North America is another regional bloc with its own political flavour.

Out of this rationalisation of world geopolitics might come a regionalisation that makes a better foundation for globalisation. Instead of the rather Western model that the US sought to impose on the world - for security reasons - there would be the opportunity for something more inclusive of the way the world actually is.

Of course, the problems of the world may fast overtake the political opportunity to grow that world-level of governance. But there you go.

No, rotation is just the result of the motor running, a property of the engine. If rotation was physical and taking up the same space as the engine there would be a big bang. — Sir2u

the disk rotating is, the actual process of rotating isn't necessarily. — Augustusea

It is the fuel that goes bang freely in all directions. The engine is a machine that constrains that entropic detonation so it produces rotational work that can be entrained to a purpose.

And that rather neatly gets to the heart of the mind~world relation. The "mind" is a neural model that an organism uses to regulate the physics of its environment.

Information processing is always physical. But it is physical in a very particular way. It is a modelling process that reduces its contact with the entropic reality to an interaction via symbols - logical switches that cost the same effort to flick up and down, on and off.

So nature becomes something that can be controlled by the push of a button. It can turn off a light. It can start an engine. It can blow up the world.

The model is able to regulate any kind of physical situation with the same amount of actual physical effort. Just point your finger and push on the button.

So rather than treating "rotation" as another example of epiphenomalism or abstraction - the usual slip-shod arguments for talking past mind~world problems - check out what neuroscience and biology actually say about the "mind as a process".

The mind is a neural model for regulating an organism's environment. That relationship is physical - entropic - as brains are hungry organs that must get fed.

So talking about how much time and space the mind (or even the neural model) occupies is barking up the wrong tree. The correct measure of the mind's physicality is its energy consumption. Or even better, the localised density of negentropy it represents. That would be its raw physical measure.

And then the only way the deal works is because a model has a semiotic or symbolic interface with the world. It interacts with reality through a set of switches that physically zero the effort of turning something on or off.

So the physicality of the world is something that the information processing by the brain is designed to filter out - reduce to a standard constant costs. And that then creates the platform for unlimited regulatory independence. The finger can stab a light switch, a car starter button, the big red button in the White House.

Again, it is about negentropic density. How much physical energy can the thinking mind unleash? That is the proper measure of its physicality. The ability to harness nature with machinery such as engines that can be flicked "on" or "off" at the merest whim.

Maybe what I'm saying is that hylomorphism does make more sense once you do arrive at a proper understanding of contingency as the "material" half of the equation?

Actuality arises as the interaction of pure contingency and pure necessity.

Figure emerges by constraints imposed on the accidental. And what makes this a pan- approach, an internalist ontology, is that it is the accidents that begin the constraining. If there is no limit on the accidents, they are already starting to cancel each other out in the fashion of a skip to the left being zeroed by a leap to the right.

I'm not sure why you view your ontology as "modern". Fundamental physics is all about emergence these days.

This for example is a lecture I had lined up to watch later. It gives you an idea of where the metaphysics of physics is actually at in this regard.

Prior to the moment of the singularity, there are no relationships, ratios, forces, or anything else in existence. One might say that these relationships and ratios 'emerge' in the subsequent period, but again, nothing could have emerged had not these fundamental constraints in some sense pre-existed. — Wayfarer

You raise good issues.

First I would say that there are two ontologies in play here. The conventional physicalist story would be that the Universe is a product of laws of nature and fundamental constants.

So this would be the externalist account - where the laws and the constants are "outside" or "prior to" the Universe that then "emerges from them".

The second more truly emergent account is then an internalism where the laws are simply the global constraints that develop as the inevitable regularities of chaos trying to do its thing. Even disorder gets tamed by the patterns it generates.

And the constants, as the other part of the equation - the material aspect to match the formal aspect of the laws/constraints - are then actually just emergent ratios. They are local balances of opposing tendencies - numbers given to equilibrium states, rather than numbers given to concrete things.

So in some sense, what emerges has to "pre-exist" as what turns out to be possible. And indeed, inevitable.

If symmetry maths shows that what emerges from "randomness" has to be some kind of invariance-impervious final state, then that outcome was pre-destined. It was locked in before it was arrived at.

But it still only exists once arrived at.

We can talk about the Universe as being ruled by its laws of gravity or relativity. But in what sense did gravity or G exist, or relativity and c exist, before the electroweak symmetry breaking that gave rise to massive particles able to travel at "less than the speed of light"?

We can claim mass was always inherent in the Big Bang - the Higgs mechanism was a symmetry breaking that would have to get expressed once the Universe had expanded and cooled enough. But stiil, all the extra complexity this caused in terms of "laws and constants" had to emerge as a result of yet another phase transition in the cosmic journey towards a Heat Death.

You say above that formal causes 'are physical' but if indeed these constants amount to aspects of formal causation, they must precede the physical, they must be real in order for physical matter to form. But they're not prior temporally, but logically, if you can see what I mean. — Wayfarer

Again, I agree in a general way. But given that I am talking "full fledged emergence", then what matters is not whether the laws and constants exist "beforehand" in either a temporal or logical sense. Neither kind of transcendence applies.

Instead, the question becomes whether the final outcome - this trail of symmetry-breaking that eventually arrives at some effective balance in terms or global constraints and local ratios - was always "mathematically" inherent in the very notion of a "chaotic everythingness" (or a vagueness, an Apeiron), as a least formed, least materialised, starting point to what occurs.

If everything were possible, then already it was on its way to cancelling itself in every direction it could, and so winding up with only that something which cancelling couldn't cancel away.

In hindsight, there was only ever that one destination. But it was still a destination that had to emerge as a concrete expression of an outcome with a final equilibrium balance.

This is because you can't prove a division in objects between "structure, purpose, organisation" and "fluctuation, accident, possibility". — Gregory

Yes, the object is all "one thing" - the substantial actuality. My (Aristotelean) point was about the causes of this "one thing".

Concrete actuality is the product of top-down formal cause in interaction with bottom-up material cause. That is the standard systems or structuralist ontology.

If you want to argue something else, be my guest.

My question is, why only one form? Why only one matter? — Gregory

You could have an infinite variety of particular forms. But then they would all be varieties of ... form. We are talking about form as a general principal here.

Why only two principles? Why not five? — Gregory

When we talk about generalities, then two arise due to dialectical argument. That is the goal. We want to reduce the alternatives to as few as possible if we are indeed generalising.

Now reducing everything to a single generality might seem the ideal. But it doesn't work. Instead dialectical argument discovers the complementary limits on being - the yin and yang - that are mutually exclusive, and jointly exhaustive, in describing what could even be the case.

So form and matter was the dyad that worked for metaphysics. Together they account for substantial being.

Formal cause covers structure, purpose, organisation, etc. Material cause covers fluctuation, accident, possibility, etc

Materialism says there is one principle per object. It's simpler and doesn't waste people's time — Gregory

LOL.

No, the problem you mention is too generic — Saurabh Bondarde

Nonsense. If you are concerned about health at the personal level, stop consuming any processed/industrial food. And if you are concerned about health as a social policy issue, then taking processed meat out of the food chain is about 5% of the problem.

doesn't the ground level data of prevalence of (in this case) processed meat which is already identified and confirmed carcinogen, seem problematic? — Saurabh Bondarde

Obesity is a worse actual cause of cancer.

I'm not here to champion the cause of processed meat but being a "class 1 carcinogen" only means it definitely does cause cancer. It doesn't say whether that is a lot of cancer or just a little cancer.

And when it comes to food industry lobbying - which is a very serious issue - consider what they actually spend all their money on.

This source says the processed food guys spent $4.5m to the soda makers $24m in the US over a similar period.

Check out Robert Lustig if you are interested in the bigger story.

My point is that it is processed food, not just processed meat, that is the problem. Too much soybean oil, corn syrup and refined starch. And the supermarket aisles are as bad as the takeaways for peddling the junk.

And to use your analogy, it is a set of tools for dispassionately figuring out where you are — tim wood

So a disembedding? That move from the "taken for granted" - the concrete and particular - towards an understanding in terms of the most abstract or general view. And the principal tool involved is dialectical argument.The discovery of the opposing limits of what could even be.

What we do know is there was you after birth. — schopenhauer1

Again, your phrasing would suggest that you want to claim there was no you before birth. Yet nothing happened to you at birth except that you moved from one place to another place.

The point is, that there is no "could have been born a..". That would not be you then. It invalidates that kind of counterfactual line of thinking. — schopenhauer1

Every point of your life contains counterfactual “could have beens”. Including all the moments before birth.

And any definition of “you” has to be tied to some process of neurobiological and sociocultural development. Unless you are making some claim about a spirit or soul?

Once you are conceived, you could not have been conceived as something else, — schopenhauer1

So in what sense is this fertilised ovum “you” rather than an undeveloped scrap of protoplasm?

Why not instead accept “you” are the process of becoming - the process of development itself - rather than something that wasn’t one moment, and suddenly was the next.

Sperm meets egg and, sure, that is a discrete counterfactual event. But is that what we could mean by “you” as an assignment of an identity. Isn’t it more convincing to consider you as an unfinished project, a story still being written?

The fact is, you are you, and not someone else. — schopenhauer1

That was the sweeping statement i was challenging. When exactly does this happen? Why birth and not inception? And what does it say there was the one ovum yet 100m other unlucky sperm? Is the sperm or the ovum the more special one in this story of irreversible biological fate?

In some sense, the person you are is whoever that is after having lived life to that point and suffered some particular mix of life experience. History can’t be changed.

And yet a process of development has been taking place ever since the moment of fertilisation. That leaves vast room for making choices and reacting to accidents. At every moment in life, we could be doing otherwise. We could have been different as a result.

"He's a different person" is a turn of phrase, but not literally a different person. — schopenhauer1

Every person is literally a different set of atoms than they were a few years ago. At a molecular level, the body is continually falling apart and being repaired. So I wouldn’t bank too much on physical continuity.

And in terms of informational continuity, that too is a constant story of dynamical change for our brain circuits.

So to take a strong stance on continuity over malleability doesn’t fit the facts of human development. It is an odd start to an argument.

There is no you prior to your birth that could have been something else. — schopenhauer1

Why privilege birth rather than inception?

:yawn:

'set forth in such a way that it is already anticipated and comprehended by my approach'; — csalisbury

Yep. Something that might be comprehensible as philosophy. So not a poem.

Your approach appears to be alienating, and so is worth avoiding (or disentangling oneself from). — csalisbury

So your argument is that it IS alienating? Don't you have to show that? It could be instead enlightening - the construction of the distance that creates the very thing of a self (in relation to "a world").

You are dishing up a bunch of your prejudices in emotionally charged language. You hope the dog whistling obviates the need to provide an actual argument.

I observe that you seem decidedly insensitive and unaware, especially when you're at your most totalizing. — csalisbury

Poor you.

I'm pretty sure that a big part of poking at you was to try to get a well-landed poke back at me, but unfortunately you keep poking the subjectivist. — csalisbury

Jesus. This level of psychodrama just ain't necessary. Stick to discussing actual ideas and stop trying to decide if I'm your best friend or worst enemy.

It's like a game of tennis. On the court, you do everything within the rules to win. Afterwards you shake hands. Leave it at that.

A definition of nothingness cannot accept the existence of possibility. — Daniel

Not with nothingness as the input, but it can with nothingness as the output.

Nothingness is the absence of existence and as such it cannot be an emergent property, either. — Daniel

Nothingness is what is left after possibility self-cancels. If it is possible for there to be both a zig to the left and a zag to the right, then those two possibilities add up to zero. If both happen, nothing is changed.

And this is the basis for a sum over histories approach to quantum theory. It is how things work in fundamental physics.

Space as a void emerges the same way. Space is defined by inertial symmetry. You can go back and forth in three directions. Step to the left, step to the right, and nothing has changed. The nothingness is what gives space its essential property of being "a nothing". It emerges as a macro description of the freedom to go in either direction, and hence in no direction at all.

Although there are three directions of translation, or dimensions, in which action can go. Plus three matching directions of rotational symmetry, or spinning on the spot.

An actual state of nothingness - an empty void - is quite complex really.

Here's a question though about freedom having too much symmetry. Absolute freedom would have a dynamic symmetry. Think about it, just as soon as a system gets balanced out, a new area pops out freely. And despite all attempts at achieving perfect, static symmetry, absolute freedom would prevail and push out in a new direction. — DanielP

It is indeed possible that our current vacuum state is a false vacuum.

So everything may have hit a generalised balance and yet some fluctuation - a local disturbance arising by chance - may indeed kick everything down to some new level of balance that is even more fundamental.

There are other arguments for believing our current vacuum is fundamental. But physics certainly takes this kind of possibility into account.

The simple reason for vacuum stability is that a disruptive fluctuation would require some local energy density. And the colder and emptier spacetime gets, the less there is to drive any flukey local accident, even if we want to hang it on a quantum field fluctuation of some kind.

A judgement of any claimed property is contextual. Get over it.

Why don't you need to if this is a general philosophical question?

Your everyday use of language is a use of language appropriate to the everyday, not to fundamental questions of interest to metaphysics/physics.

What if you imagine unlimited and unbridled no-difference? — Daniel

Invariance is better understood as differences that don't make a difference. That is how you can describe reality in terms of symmetry (and symmetry breaking).

So a circle - a blank disc - could be spinning or stationary. You have no way of telling as the disc just looks the same whether it has turned a little bit, a lot, or not at all.

All these differences are possibilities. And yet none of them can change anything - at the macroscopic level of observation where we are describing reality in terms of gross movement vs gross stability.

This now defines "nothingness" in a rigorous sort of way as an absence of differences making a difference, and yet not ruling out difference at the level of raw possibility. Nothingness is modelled as an emergent property, not a fundamental one. Possibility becomes the fundamental substrate. But now it is a substrate described itself as merely a potential, a vagueness, rather than some kind of concrete and actual substrate.

The trick here is moving away from the usual concrete and actualised metaphysics of the naive realist to something with more intellectual grunt.

All questions are not resolved by this manoeuvre. But it moves us on from the unsophisticated language of a realist ontology with its concrete subjects and material predicates.

Ducking the issue as usual then.

How can you say the stationary ball is stationary when, to quote Monty Python...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40, 000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.

The naive realist is always telling us how things are for them. Solipsistically, they are the centres of their own universes I guess.

As if a stationary ball were nothing? — Banno

A stationary ball is definitely something as it is a state of least motion as fixed by the constraints of the rather particular thing of an inertial reference frame.

That is, to call it stationary is relative to the claim it is lacking motion. You are already metaphysically presuming a world that you can measure with some suitable yardstick like a ruler or stopwatch.

I think the question pointless. Language disengaged from our regular language games, disengaged gears spinning to no effect. — Banno

Your language is plugged into Euclidean geometry, Cartesian coordinates and Newtonian mechanics. But as naive realism, it then doesn't even want to mention this particular metaphysical grounding.

By variance I mean the quality of being different. Thus, a state of no variance would be a state where there is no difference/dissimilarity. Qualities such as unchanging and static presuppose a subject* whereas the quality of no-difference implies the impossibility of any subject. This way, nothingness equals no-difference. — Daniel

You are in a bit of a linguistic trap because this invariance is being related to a “state”. Invariance is the property. And so that seems to imply the existence of the subject or substrate being describe in those terms.

Nothingness is taken as the absence of properties because of an absence even of any substrate. Now that may also be an impossible conception, but it is what the language sets people up for.

Where you may be trying to head is towards an inversion where difference is itself the subject of the property of invariance, so to speak. So now you are imagining unlimited and unbridled difference - an everythingness of distinctions as a "substrate". And now an invariance or nothingness becomes the property or generalised quality of this chaos of distinctions.

If absolutely everything is happening all at once in every possible way, then nothing is actually happening as it is in the emergent state of a featureless confusion. There are no differences making a difference. There is the something else of a vagueness. A state of being neither here nor there due to a lack of any distinctive variance.

The carbs and cheap oils will kill you first.

I thought that was just you agreeing with my general thesis here, that rhetoric and the arts more generally both trade in the appeal to those kinds of things. — Pfhorrest

OK, we look to agree there.

I would frame it more as "evoking feelings" than "plugging into biases" — Pfhorrest

Yep, this in turn gets tricky as the biases are both biological and cultural - hardware and software - once you dig into them.

In a preliterate society - not to be confused with an illiterate society - spoken language was the repository of all knowledge. Rhetoric, then, no mere social art. It's been said that the state of the state then could be assessed by the state of the official language. — tim wood

Sure. Oral traditions are thus dependent on the kind of narrative structure that human brains are adept at remembering. Reality has to get turned into a story handed down over the generations by this kind of fragile link - one where every speaker can rewrite the facts to suit the audience.

Modern rhetoric as sophistry? All that says is that you have not grasped that some - many, most - issues are not soluble in logic. — tim wood

All that says? Did I even say that? Or is this your creative approach to the facts in pursuance of a crowd-pleasing rhetorical performance?

Rhetoric can only be understood by first recognizing that it does not reduce to anything else but itself. Not logic, not psychology, but itself.

"Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion." Rhetoric 1355b25 — tim wood

So why does Aristotle list the three things it reduces to as (1) perceptions of the personal character of the speaker, (2) the ability to excite emotions that are pleased and friendly, not pained and hostile, in the the audience, and (3) the proving of a truth - or at least an appearance of having done so - in the structure of the speech act?

It sounds like you are confused about the way in which I'm contrasting logic and rhetoric. — Pfhorrest

Nope. I covered that.

Sure. The traditional meaning of rhetoric was about oratorical skill - persuasive public speaking. So it was about pragmatics - presentation - rather than syntax/semantics, the actual grammatically-structured and meaningful part of what was said.

We can do one without the other, but most often we are doing both simultaneously. — Pfhorrest

Speech acts are always performative - they involve pragmatics. But speech acts also need semantic intent constrained by grammatical structure. So they always go together. Otherwise there is just a nonsense noise or empty theatrics.

We can do pure applied logic, and just be doing abstract mathematics. (Empirical science is something else beyond mere logic and math). — Pfhorrest

Abstract maths often does seem like nonsense - all syntactical pattern and no semantic meat. :razz:

Empirical science is logical structure meaningfully applied to the world via quantification or measurement. It is speech about something and so is demonstrably useful.

So I don't find your logic vs rhetoric dichotomy accurate as it leaves out the third thing of semantics.

But at the same time, it seems like a good departure point for asking the question of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. What is it about the way we say something that acts as a constraint on semantic interpretation?

What strikes me now is that logic as syntactic structure is a constraint that the audience - a community of thinkers - would want to impose on the speaker. A discipline to ensure something concrete and measurable, so potentially meaningful, just got claimed.

Rhetoric - as pragmatics - is the attempt by a speaker to constrain the audience in an inverse fashion. It boils down to loosening their determination to doubt by signalling all the ways they must be really already on the same page. A context that grounds the semantics is shared. This being so, there is no need to speak of x, y and z.

So that is how the game of communication gets played generally. The speaker is constrained by a set of grammatical habits. But an audience also needs to be on the same page in terms a semantic common ground. Otherwise a speech act can never touch bottom in terms of an endless capacity to doubt the semantic validity of everything that we hear said.

(Sound like a discussion board?)

Anyway, a speaker has to provide both those things to communicate an idea. Both a logically structured speech act and also some kind of "impression management" via rhetoric/linguistic pragmatics that brings an audience into the necessary state of receptivity which would ground the interaction.

From there, we can branch off into the uses and abuses of rhetoric/linguistic pragmatics as they are appropriate to the sciences or the arts. Even abstract maths (or abstract art).

That relationship between rhetoric and art was the main point of this thread. — Pfhorrest

Have you said anything so far in response to my point that art relies on plugging into the inherent cognitive biases of humans? That is what sets up a dichotomy between two kinds of currently socially-valued communication methodologies that we might get educated in - the rational and the social, the scientific and the poetic, the thoughtful and the rousing.

If you think that's bleeding obvious then I don't know why it seemed like you disagreed with that until now. — Pfhorrest

If you want to sharpen the definition of how something might be good, it helps to be clear in what sense or context it is bad.

The general modern connotation of rhetoric is that it is sophistry. So there is even more reason to dig into a neutral definition.

Then my actual argument - the bit I found interesting - was how rhetoric would count as not logical in its dependence on psychological appeals rather than quantified facts. That is where art would come in. The ability to plug into the cognitive biases that rational discourse is instead designed to overcome.

If there was anything useful to say here, that was it as far as I was concerned.

But if you're trying to convince the general populace of that same theory of reality -- same content, different audience -- you need to be aware that often they're not just going to zero in on your logic and facts and brush any rhetorical flourishes away as distractions. — Pfhorrest

Again you dwell on the bleeding obvious. My focus was on the fact that “success” in that fashion hinges on a skill at connecting with human cognitive biases.

Note how your whole post manages to avoid the point I raised. I say science and art are distinctive in that one relies on “psychological facts” and the other on “objective facts”. Each thus ought to have their own rhetorical style - if we are using rhetoric as some general neutral definition of persuasive communication.

But you were trying to contrast logic and rhetoric. And that then doesn’t work if you also want rhetoric to bridge the division of rational or scientific exposition and artistic or social audience connection.

Your OP had this central confusion running through it. If everyone seems to be going off at tangents, perhaps that would be why?

In the ancient Aristotlean sense - where all information is oratory - rhetoric can be seen to render quantitative facts or logic as secondary. — Possibility

I think that rhetoric does just boil down to that ancient emphasis on oratory as a practical life skill - the social art of speaking persuasively.

The modern rational mindset then arises via a shift from qualitative to quantitative argument. The shift from ordinary social language to a mathematical mindset based on logical rules and measurements.

That shifts the “persuasion” out of the subjective or social realm and into a formal scientific or rationalist one.

An excavation of metaphysical truth - in the age of quantum mechanics - necessarily involves rhetoric, not as an ‘art of persuasion’, but as a recognition of relativity or uncertainty in interpreting undeniable quantitative information as a statement of relevant philosophical truth. — Possibility

Metaphysics is on the qualitatiive end of the spectrum in its discussions. But science has been generating the new qualities to be discussed. Dialectically paired qualities like information and entropy have emerged as the most essential measures or quantifications of reality. Metaphysics can now ask, so what are those really? :grin:

I have no idea — TheMadFool

So you have no idea if you would classify cities or the weather as physical phenomena?

Sounds legit.

Logic is about demonstrating truths that are universally and necessarily so and cannot be otherwise. Rhetoric the contingent, that could either be or not be. — tim wood

I don't think much hinges on the distinction if rhetoric is a social art of persuading an audience towards an already held opinion rather than a Socratic dialogue where the goal was to reveal what had to be the case logically.

So the big flip in Ancient Greece was in accepting the principle of a dialectical inquiry as the royal road to arriving at truth. That is what you really get from Plato as the reason to engage in something more ambitious than sophistry.

The irony is that really strong dialectical arguments produce equally convincing alternatives. Heraclitus says all is flux? Well, my boy Parmenides says all is stasis. The Many is the One.

And so metaphysics oscillates even until this day. Another story of course.

I’m only saying it can also be used for good. — Pfhorrest

If that were all that you claimed, there would be far less to discuss. That counts as the bleeding obvious.

Just dryly hitting someone with a book of hard logic isn't going to effectively communicate anything to them. It has to be delivered in a way that will actually get through to them. — Pfhorrest

OK, you make it clear your concern is limited to the use of the "fit to" concept of interactions.

I think I was ending up talking about that fit as well. Scientific ideas need to be communicated in their certain way - explicit logical theory, concrete objective measurements - to persuade their audience. That defines a good fit.

But rhetoric - in its ancient Aristotelean sense - is about powerful oratory. And to move crowds, you have to plug into ordinary human psychology. That would define its good fit.

The problems of mixing the two were already known in Aristotle's day. Hence Plato's scorn for sophists who taught rhetoric as a game of social winning rather than an excavation of metaphysical truth.

And today, having been through the Scientific revolution, and even the Romantic revolution, the problems of mixing the two modes of "fit" are even more apparent.

The problems seem the more interesting story here. But obviously that's just me. I haven't persuaded you. :grin:

Ergo, there must be a common thread that runs through all five of them that justifies them being listed under the same category, the physical. — TheMadFool

Do you accept them all as physical? Or even just the four listed after cognition?

His student Aristotle ... holding that because many people sadly do not think in perfectly rational ways, rhetorical appeals to emotion and character and such are often necessary to get such people to accept truths that they might otherwise irrationally reject. — Pfhorrest

So if you are the smart rational one with the correct opinion, it is fine to use any means necessary to carry the less clever crowd?

Do you really want to argue that?

In this analogy, the medicinal content of the pill is the logical, rational content of a speech-act, while the size, texture, and flavor of the pill is the rhetorical packaging and delivery of the speech-act. — Pfhorrest

Yikes. You do know that Big Pharma indeed relies on the placebo effect in designing its pills and potions? If they look like magic beans or secret elixirs, this has a measurable effect on their perceived benefits.

Likewise the doctor in a white coat and a stethoscope draped around the neck. A rational content is being promised by the medical packaging. But sometimes all you are getting is the packaging.

I'm not sure if you took me to be saying that rhetoric is a kind of logic. I wasn't; I was separating them as different aspects of communication, "structure" and "presentation" basically....

...]I have some other stuff to say in response to the negative view of rhetoric you go on to state — Pfhorrest

Sure. The traditional meaning of rhetoric was about oratorical skill - persuasive public speaking. So it was about pragmatics - presentation - rather than syntax/semantics, the actual grammatically-structured and meaningful part of what was said.

But "rhetorical" has come to have the negative connotation of the merely crowd-pleasing for good reason. And your effort to connect rhetoric to the arts is something I then tried to account for in as neutral a fashion as possible.

Again, if we say someone is making a logical or rational argument, we mean it is essentially scientific and objective. There is some theory expressed as a logically consistent assertion. And there is good reason for us to agree with it because it appeals to "objective evidence" - both the internal logical validity of the argument that we can all check as we all follow the same rules, and by empirical support in that we make the same measurements to check the world actually is as proposed.

Art is different from science. It's target is the social world rather than the real world. That is what it wants to tell "the truth of". It ends up speaking to the constructed reality of being an individual in a culture - even if it is a painting of mountains.

So rhetoric becomes persuasive narrative in that context. And it is not surprising that "good rhetoric" in that context plays to the inherent cognitive biases of humans. It hits its audience on the target. Otherwise it would be just a lecture with examples.

The bad thing is when rhetoric of this "artful" kind then gets applied back where it shouldn't be - where we are supposed to be rational thinkers making evidence-based claims.

Another thread about the merits or faults of rhetoric, rather than this thread which is just supposed to be about the relationship of rhetoric to art. — Pfhorrest

You are so controlling. But it should be clear that my point was that rhetoric is not merely "presentation style" or "holding a crowd technique". There is good reason why we now see it as distinguishing between scientifically rational discourse and creatively social discourse.

Rhetoric is called rhetoric to point to argumentation that pretends to objective standards but is designed to tap into psychological biases.

When rhetoric is actually art - a subjective narrative that is also designed to tap into how people "naturally are" - then it gets called art. No one calls Picasso or whoever great rhetoricians, even if being fluent in earnest bullshitting may be a career requirement of the budding artist.

I hold rhetoric, thus characterized, to be a sort of foundational branch of the arts more generally, much as logic is a foundational branch of mathematics. — Pfhorrest

Rhetoric would be logic misapplied in the sense that it is argumentation intended to bypass objective empirical validation and instead plug directly into the various cognitive biases of humans. That is, all the standard kinds of "irrationalities", such as the recency effect or groupthink.

Trump is a master of rhetoric in that any statement he makes is true because - evidence - "everyone says that", or "only nasty and unpopular people would contradict it".

This site lists over 80 such appeals to bias. Trump probably can hit all of them.

But Trump is of course also the most challenged in actually constructing a logical argument, so that demonstrates how little rhetoric in fact relies on actual logic.

And indeed, it highlights the further point that even actual logic depends on a notion of empirical confirmation - validation by the evidence as well as by its internal syntactic consistency - to enjoy the prestige it has.

So it is foundational to pragmatism and science really. Or at least it makes more sense to oppose the rhetorical arts to the pragmatic sciences if both are about discovering "real world truths" in some fashion.

Art is social realism. It is subjective rather than objective in being tailored to the cognitive biases that evolution built into the pre-rational, pre-linguistic, vertebrate brain. Or at least that brain as used by humans still stuck in a narrative era of social discourse. Before they got all rationally educated in a modern logically-structured way that valued objectivity as a stance on nature.